PBWorks Camp & cool things to embed in your pages

Some of you may remember that last summer I went to camp — PBWorks Camp that is.  Well, this year, I went back to be a mentor.  This past Tuesday I had the pleasure of presenting to massive number of teachers, library media specialists, university faculty and staff, and others who are part of PBWorks Camp 2010!  It was a super fast and fun webinar.  I tried to focus on some cool and fun stuff you might want to embed into your web pages and blogs. One of the things I wanted to bring home to folks as they begin embedding media and using others’ works more is to be respectful of copyright.  This means to attribute the media where appropriate, following the appropriate linking and referencing such as with Creative Commons.

You can see the whole list of things we discussed here: http://bit.ly/pbworkswebinar

Some of the tools I mentioned were:

• Flick Creative Commons
• Morgue File
• Veezle
• Bubbl.us
• Wordle
• Jing
• iSpring free
• Poll Daddy

I had a blast!  The campers were so gracious in their appreciation, too.  So thank you all for the appreciation!!

HootCourse- twitter for online and face to face courses

As I mentioned about a month ago, along with experimenting with mobile learning in my course this summer, I also decided to test out HootCourse.  HootCourse is a Twitter tool that allows you to create courses, invite students, and automatically adds a hashtag for your course.  Like other Twitter tools, it performs a search based on the hashtag and keeps those tweets inside “your course.” In my testing, I was able to post inside HootCourse successfully, and I was able to post inside Tweetdeck and Twitterific if I added my course’s hashtag. Over at the “Free Technology for Teachers” blog, Thomas, one of the developers for HootCourse, explains in the comments a little more about the public v. private versions of HootCourse.

You can see in the screen shots below, that my course hashtag was #idt7064.  Hootcourse automatically added this.  I had to add this inside Tweetdeck (on my desktop) and Twitterific (on my iPod Touch and iPad).  Because Hootcourse is automatically adding the hashtag, it goes ahead and subtracts the number of characters in your hashtag from your 140-limit for Twitter.

I really liked being able to retweet posts and share these with my students directly from Tweetdeck and Twitterific.  In addition to being able to tweet inside HootCourse, you can also write longer posts — beyond the 140-word-limit — and these will post to a blog.  With only a small amount of difficulty and a quick email out to support, I was able to connect my HootCourse account to my own Wordpress (Viral-Notebook) instead of the suggested Wordpress.com account.  (I also found out from the tech support that this feature had been enabled by one of the developers, but the other didn’t know it. ) So, longer posts can go into my blog and then tweeted.  In Derek Bruff’s blog you can see where he did just this (and explains a number of features too), and this is a test post that I used as well.  I found that I didn’t use this feature very much for my online course that I was teaching.  But, I’m interested to figure out whether I might do this in a standard 15-week course with a little more forethought and planning.

The last feature that I’m interested in trying out connects nicely to Dr. Rankin’s Twitter experiment in her large class.  This is a classroom version of Twitter for face-to-face discussions.  In essence, it’s creating a backchannel for your classroom.  You can see from the screenshot below that HootCourse sort of strips down everything and makes the posts large so you could project these during a lecture of classroom discussion.  I didn’t use this feature in my online course, but I’m interested in trying this with some face-t0-face courses to see how it might work.

There are a number of folks testing out HootCourse right now, but I haven’t seen many reviews or posts of actual implementations.  So, I hope some folks come out with those.  Are you using HootCourse?  How’s it going?  Are you doing it online or face-t0-face or both?

Earth Day’s coming. Reduce. Reuse. Re-font?

I have to admit, coming from a printing background, I am pretty sensitive to hype when it comes to Earth Day and environmentalism.  In fact, my wife has made me even more sensitive.  Recently, her new coming Allkidscrafts.com has had me brainstorming and testing recycling crafts for about a month now.  Two recent articles, though, bring together my printing background and my technology interests together.

The first article is from Dinesh Ramde at the Associated Press and considers whether changing the font will in fact save you money by reducing ink costs.  Ramde cites out two other sources.  Printer.com conducted research with different fonts and how much ink they use.  Their results?  The top five fonts with least ink usage were:

1. Century Gothic
2. Ecofont
3. Times Roman
4. Calibri
5. Verdana

It’s important to mention that Arial came in at number six, though. Ramde went on to consider a biology professor at University of Wisconsin, Green Bay’s idea to save money.  Dr. Matthew Dornbush got the idea of recommending a font switch for the default in the university’s email systems.  Back to Printer.com’s research, Century Gothic, a sans serif font like Arial and Helvetica, used approximately 30% left ink than Arial.

Seems pretty cut and dry?  Make the switch, right?  Not so fast, a very smart Diane Blohowiak, the coordinator of information technology use support at University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, noted that Century Gothic is wider than Arial and Times Roman for that matter.  I call it a “fat font” or a “phat font.”  (You decide.)  You can see that one of the hallmarks of Century Gothic is that its letter Os are perfect circles, as are the Cs and Gs.  This will certainly cause the type in this font to take up more space and probably use more paper.  (By the way, Arial and Helvetica both have the perfect-circle-Os, too, but the space between letters is smaller.)  Eek!  Ramde reported that Blohowiak said,

Research suggests that ink comprises the main cost of a printout, but the environmental costs of paper are probably higher.

The university is going ahead with the switch, though.

What do you think?  Are you willing to make the switch?  Think it will use more paper?

Publishing has changed … or not so much?

Last week, I spoke with students at Clemson University in their graphic communications program about HTML and CSS, content management systems, and how to combine mediums for publishing.  Yesterday, in one of my feeds this video was brought to my attention.  It’s incredibly clever. Apparently, the video was created by Penguin Group for a sales conference and it sort of exploded from there, as mentioned in at paidcontent.org.  At Penguin Group’s blog, though, they explain the inspiration, idea, treatment, and development process, following “The Lost Generation” video.

Disclaimer:  This video was produced by publishers PenguinGroup USA and DK in the UK.

I encourage you to watch the whole thing.  Don’t stop half-way through.  If you do you’ll be disappointed. This video is very thought-provoking and it’s in the vein of Michael Wesch’s viral The Machine is Us/Using Us.  I can see this video as a sort of mantra or battle cry for publishing as printers and publishers consider digital technologies and the individuals that rely on them.

So, take this video with awe and a grain of wisdom for recognizing it as a small piece of propaganda, too. Enjoy!  Hey, but let me know what you think about the video.  Leave your comments below.  I’d love to heard from you guys!

GC 310: A printer’s primer to HTML & CSS

Today, I get the great pleasure to present to my alma mater at Clemson University.  I have been asked by my good friend Nancy Leininger to present to her graphic communications class about HTML, CSS, content management, and how these apply to printing technologies.  We’ll be using Adobe Connect today, so I’m excited to see how it works as well.  I’m hoping to get Connect for our campus and our Masters degree online.  Below are the slides for this presentations, housed at Slideshare.

Of course, if you have any questions about the slides or the content or if you have a comment about what you see, please drop me a line in the comment section below.

Technology to Support Your Research

Since I’ve been uploading quite a few presentations this semester from my Developing Interactive Learning Environments and project management course, I’ve also decided to upload a few others to Slideshare.net that I’ve given and created recently.  This is a little slow going, because I am attempting to be critical and meticulous to copyrights, as well as respectful of ideas and images, giving credit where appropriate.  I’m also systematically adding my Creative Commons licensing to each of the slide decks.

Last fall, I was invited to present to Dr. Sally Blake’s graduate student seminar about using technology to support your research.  So, I’m including those slides below.  These slides are organized into the phases of research:

1. awareness of a field of endeavor
2. literature searches and reviews
3. citation management
4. data collection
5. data analysis
6. dissemination

Just a sample of the technologies that are mentioned include journal table of contents updates, Delicious, diigo, LinkedIn, Mendeley, EndNote, RefWorks, SPSS, Google Docs Forms, SurveyMonkey, Nvivo, and Atlas.ti.  Here are the slides:

Let me know if you have questions or suggestions for other technologies that I can include in the future, particularly ones that you use.

Visiting Union and Doin’ Some Googlin’

Today, I get to spend the day at Union University with Dr. Anna Clifford’s classes. Anna is always so generous and invites me to come visit with her students and share a little of my knowledge with them. For the past few times, we’ve been concentrating on Google Docs. But I think I’m going to throw in a little Wordle this time, too.

Below are the links and resources we’ll be using from my Resource Wiki hosted at PBWorks.

1. Using Google Docs word processor
2. Using Google Docs presentations
3. Using Google Docs spreadsheet
4. Creating forms and quizzes with Google Docs forms

And hopefully, we’ll have time to do a little Wordle, too, to see how we might use Wordle during class.

Trusting your school with the technology may become the issue

Big Brother is watching … only it’s your vice principal.  If you thought that getting technology into schools was the primary issue or even getting teachers to integrate was bigger.  This might change your mind.  By way of Mashable, I heard about this story:

BoingBoing reports that a recent case filing in Robbins vs. Lower Merion School District, a Pennsylvania school, is a class action suit on behalf of students with school-issued laptops whose webcams have been used to watch the students and their families at home.

It was discovered that the laptops issued by the high school contained software allowing administrators to covertly activate the on-board webcam. The plaintiff, Blake J. Robbins, was disciplined by the school for “improper behavior in his home.” The evidence of said impropriety was brought forth by the school vice principal, who displayed a photo of Robbins taken by the laptop’s webcam.

This was also reported on HLN this morning as well.  The level of weird and creepy in this is enough to require a shower.  This is oddly reminiscent of an episode of Criminal Minds minus the serial killer, FBI, and quirky characters.  Who knows?  Maybe we’ll see the quirky characters unfold in this story?  But I don’t believe we’ll like them as much as Garcia, Hotch, and Reid.

5 questions for Tungle

Recently, I started testing out Tungle, a calendaring system that syncs, schedules meetings, and allows others to schedule a meeting within your calendar.  Tungle had some questions for me to consider, so I thought I’d blog about them and my experience.

1. What made you decide to start Tungling?

I was looking for a calendaring system that would sync on my Mac with Entourage and Exchange, and I really like the ability to schedule meetings.  Scheduling meetings is a great option for my students, where I can say, “These are the times I have open.  You pick what works for you.”  Hat tip to Profhacker blog for the info.

2. What’s one thing we do better than any other productivity app out there?

Definitely, Tungle seems to do the syncing with Entourage and Exchange and publish it to the Web.

3. What’s one thing we could do to create a better experience for you?

I would like to be able to publish my calendar privately.  This is where I don’t necessarily want my calendar of availability published openly on the web, but I would like to publish it with a passcode that I could provide to my students or another colleague to view my calendar and schedule a meeting.

4. Do you refer Tungle.me to others?  If yes, why?

I haven’t yet; I’m still testing Tungle out.  But I’m starting to like it, and I’m blogging about it.

5. What would you Google to find an app like Tungle.me?

I’d be searching for “schedule a meeting” or “sync calendar entourage exchange.”

So, there you go.  In the past, I’ve been using MeetingWizard to schedule meetings.  But Tungle is an app that offers some integration with my existing workflow…and that’s always better.

Image from http://blog.tungle.com/.a/6a00e54efda71188330120a888d337970b-320wi

3 predictions I agree with and 3 I don’t … and why

A new year is upon us and thus we should take time to examine some of the potential changes that the year 2010 will bring. Examining potential changes is important because technology is in a constant state of change and so are the lives of those involved with instructional technology. Although this blog post will not attempt to take on all the predicted changes in instructional technology for the year 2010, this post will examine three 2010 predictions I agree with and three that I do not.

I Agree With….

At the beginning of this year, staff members and contributors to eLearn Magazine each described some of their predictions for the year 2010. The first prediction that I agreed with was from Stephen Downes who predicts that the demand for online learning will increase from both the private sector and traditional institutions. I agree with this prediction because the current economic crisis and job situation will compel citizens to take on new positions and roles, requiring them to learn new knowledge and skills. I also agree with Mark Notess’ assessment that higher education institutions will make greater movements towards open source solutions. I agree with Mr. Notess because the economy is forcing many higher education institutions to cut costs wherever they can and because open source options are becoming more accepted and understood by the technological community. Finally, I agree with Jim Hendler’s prediction that the technology gap between students and teachers will continue to expand and widen. I agree with Mr. Hendler because student’s technological exposure and experience continues to grow while many teachers technology learning remains stagnant or does not increase at the rate in which new technologies are developed.

I Don’t Agree With…

From the same eLearn Magazine article, I do not agree with Roger Schank’s prediction that mobile e-learning will go away. I believe that as mobile technologies increase, so will opportunities to learn from mobile devices. I believe that just-in-time learning will become a major form of e-learning on mobile devices. I also do not agree with Hend S. Al-Khalifa’s prediction that portable devices like Smart phones and Nintendo DS systems will make their way into traditional classrooms. I do believe that learning opportunities will increase on devices like these; however, to be implemented into the classroom there would need to be more teachers willing to teach using these devices. I do not think that many teachers are ready to make this leap yet. The final prediction I do not agree with comes from Ignatia Webs. I do not agree with the prediction that pedagogy will overtake technologies role as front and center of innovative learning. I believe that pedagogy should become the primary focus of innovative learning, however technology still offers so much motivation and interest that technology will remain in its central role.

Guest blogger: Jeremy Larson is a 7^th and 8^th grade American History teacher at Grace- St. Luke’s Episcopal School in Memphis, TN. He received his Bachelors degree in Elementary Education (K-8) at St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud, MN. While at SCSU, Jeremy also received specialties in Instructional Technology and Social Studies Education. Jeremy is currently working towards his Masters degree in Instructional Design and Technology at the University of Memphis. He is interested in K-12 technology integration and helping school districts bring technology into the classroom.

Image courtesy of iLounge at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ipodlounger/4310067280/