Prezi

For my final scrapbook item, I decided to go back and try Prezi.  Prezi is web-based presentation software that operates on the premise that presentations should not be a slide show.  Instead, they should be maps of interrelated ideas and concepts.  The focus of the presentation shifts from concept to concept.

The product itself is easy enough to use, once one gets the gist of it.  There is a key from which one can select the tool that they want to use at the moment: write, insert, frame, path, color, and show. When one is in "write" mode, double-clicking anywhere on the screen opens a text box.  A single click on a text box opens a circle from which one can size, move, and rotate objects.  One can create a page with the relative importance of an item determined by its size.  Clicking on an object allows one to drill down to the finest detail.  One can insert images and video (from the web).  One can also embed flash video into a slide; however, at that point Prezi assumes a certain level of technical expertise.  I made the following simple presentation:





One subscribes to Prezi and all presentation creation occurs on the web. There are several different account types; however, there is a free (somewhat limited) general subscription and a slightly better free educational subscription.

The completed presentation "lives" on the web, and, by default, all presentations are shared unless one subscribes to a higher account.  Prezi presentations can also be downloaded.   This seems like another example of "Cloud" computing. Where all resources and software exist on a server.

Ready-Made Content

In the growing spirit of collaboration, more and more content is available on the web through various sources.  In looking for ready-made content, I turned to two sources, You Tube and iTunes University.

Since I do not teach courses, but workshops, I selected a video that I would consider including in an online workshop regarding the difference between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. The You Tube video, “Digital Natives” is subtitled, “The world is changing, students have changed, is education changing?” It addresses how today’s students are different from us. It incorporates photos of classrooms at various levels from the 1950’s/1960’s. Then explains though text and images how today’s students learn.





The purpose for using a video like this would be to focus faculty on what a “Digital Native” is. The instructions that I would give to my "students" would be to pay attention to how the video defines digital natives and to pay attention to some of the images used in the video and whether these accurately define today’s teacher’s learning experiences. I would use this in an online workshop as a lead-in for a discussion on the differences between digital natives and immigrants, and whether or not it is important to understand and incorporate their technological tools.

It took over an hour to find this video for a couple of reasons. First of all, before selecting a video, one needs to review several. Secondly, there are many excellent videos that were ruled out simply because they are very popular and there is a good chance that everyone has probably already seen them. When one is selecting a video, they want the content to feel fresh.  Finally, as pointed out in "YouTube Better at Funny Cat Videos Than Educational Content, Professors Say" (Jeff Young, The Chronicle of Higher Education - Wired Campus),  "videos made by students as class projects, perhaps because those videos attracted more comments than professionally made ones"  are found by video search engines. It is, therefore, more difficult to find truly Education Video unless one goes to the You Tube Education site.

Turning to iTunes University for a podcast, I selected "People's Interaction with Facebook". This is part of a series created by Applachian State University for "Social Media and Technology". The podcasts in this series are written and performed by students who are relating facts and their perspectives on the impact of Social Media and Technology in their lives and in education.

This could be used as auxilary information for faculty who want to better understand the role that the Internet and Facebook play in the lives of their students. Faculty would be able to listen to these podcasts in an effort to better help their students in navigating the internet and using social media tools. Unlike YouTube, where the content is actually run on the host site without additional software, iTunes U is in iTunes. Users need to have iTunes installed on their computer in order to access the podcasts. Once they reach the iTunes site, they have the option of downloading the podcast to their playlist, subscribe to the entire series which would then be downloaded to their playlist, or double-click on the one podcast to listen to it without downloading anything.
 
Not wanting to go to iTunes U for the podcast, it took forever to find something that I wanted to use. . My goal was to try some of the other podcast directories to find something suitable; however, I could not find anything that seemed interesting enough or relevant. In addition, some of the sites would not open, others did not have a "play" feature on the site and required one to download the mp3 file to play it. Since I do not have access to a server for this course, it would have been impossible for me to download it and link to it.  Finally, I turned to iTunes U. Although there was still a need to review several podcasts before selecting one that seemed relevant, it was considerably quicker to find something appropriate once in iTunes U than when surfing the net.

This overall experience probably illustrates why one can be pursuaded to create their own content rather than try to find suitable content.  While there are videos and podcasts that may provide excellent content, it may not always be worth the time it takes to find them.

Blogging

Obviously, my blog url is http://mtztechtools.blogspot.com/. 

Having already created a departmental blog and a personal blog, I created a new blog at Blogger for this "Scrapbook". I also tried creating an internet binder at http://livebinders.com/; however, found it a little unwieldy.  Livebinder seems more a site for someone who can plan out their content; a blog allows one to be more spontaneous.

It is incredibly easy to create a new blog at this site. If one has a Google account, they only need to login with their Google user id; if one does not have a Google account, they can create one within a few minutes. Having previously setup a blog in Blogger and also in Wordpress, I knew more or less what to expect. Blogger's setup has changed since I originally created a new blog, so there was a little bit of a learning curve.

When one creates the blog, Blogger automatically goes into a design phase where one can select the basic design for the blog, the images that will be used in the header, the layout of the page, and additional gadgets that the user may want to include on the page. The design phase has many more options than it did before. The one feature that has not changed in Blogger is that it is not always easy to navigate the various design/layout pages or to get back to the same design page twice.  In some ways it operates like a poorly designed web site, certain paths lead to dead ends and the only way out seems to be to log out and log back in.  However, Blogger also provides an easy interface where one can write their thoughts, embed video, pictures, etc.

Other than for a scrapbook, a blog can be used to communicate information about new products, post PowerPoints and Reference Notes for previously given presentations; embed interesting educational You Tube videos dealing with topics that could be of interest to the faculty that I support; and connect to my Twitter account. The advantage that a blog has over a forum site within Blackboard, for example, is that faculty can subscribe to the blog via RSS and do not need to login to get information; instead the information can be pushed out to them.

A blog can be a communication tool through the comments area.  Individuals can comment on a posting, receive a response to a comment, etc.

Twitter

Over a year ago, I created a Twitter account; but, after a few days, it seemed too difficult to find something to post with enough frequency to make it worthwhile to be "followed". When we began to use Twitter as a part of this course, I found that it was an interesting experience, and thought that Twitter could be used as one tool in an arsenol of tools.

However, since then, I believe that I have become a Twitter convert!  The account, http://twitter.com/mtzicher makes it easy to broadcast information and web links to one's followers (students, colleagues, etc.).  Its 140 character limit forces brevity; and makes posting information quick and easy.  Most articles and blogs have a built-in widget that allows them to be shared using Twitter.  All one needs to do is login, add a little description, and press the "Tweet" button!

By following others, one can add to their own tweets.  While the followed tweets are only immediately available to the person who "owns" the twitter account, they can be retweeted to all of their followers.  Applying this techniques makes it incredibly easy to have enough content to satisfy most followers.

Survey Monkey

For this assignment, I created a survey using Survey Monkey and can be found at:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/53NMBSF

I created a survey because, not teaching credit courses, this is typically the type of assessment information that I need. I selected Survey Monkey because this is a product that is used by the Research Department at the college, and I wanted a better understanding of the tool and the types of questions that can be asked.

There are three account options:

• Basic account - Free account that allows one to create 10 question surveys
• Pro account - for $19.95/mo all the same features as the Basic account, plus a limitless number of questions per survey, skip-logic, expert templates, and the ability to download results to Excel and PDF
• Unlimited plan - for an additional $16.67/mo, the plan includes all the Basic and Pro account features with unlimited questions and unlimited responses

The learning curve to use this product to create a very simple survey is fairly short. Like most web-based products, Survey Monkey provides a tour of the product from its home page; however, this tour does not contain the kind of tutorial that a product like Jing, for example, had.  It is easy to select a question type and try it to see how it works and whether or not it will produce the type of question that one wants. However, it appears that to do anything a little more complex requires an upgrade to the "pro" version of the product. Even certain features of accessible question types are available only if one has the pro version.  This was somewhat frustrating, because even in the mini-survey that was created, it would have been nice to include branching logic.

The most difficult part of creating this assessment was not using the tool; but trying to create good questions that would result in meaningful information. With a career spent primarily in industries where quantitative data was collected and analysed, trying to find questions that would result in meaningful qualitative data is significantly more difficult.

Jing

"Jing is free software that adds visuals to your online conversations."  That is the tag line for Jing on its website: http://www.jingproject.com/.  With Jing, one can capture a screen, record a five-minute or less narrated screencast, and publish the resulting video through e-mail, instant messenger, or even Jing's own free sharing site - screencast.com.  The free software creates an .swf file that is instantly accessible.

One can also subscribe (cloud computing?) to Jing Pro for $14.95/year. The Pro edition will also produce mpeg-4 video suitable for sharing on You Tube. The product is easy to use and comes with some great videos to get the user started.

Like with any presentation product, one should spend a few minutes before creating the video to plan, jot down some notes, and practice the screencast and narration before actually creating the screencast.  It is possible to pause the screencast, restart, or cancel. The screencast that I created demonstrated how to set release criteria in Blackboard CE8.  To view the video, click on the following link: Setting Release Criteria.  This proved to be so much fun that I later created another demonstration on how to incorporate a RSS feed on the home page in a Blackboard CE8 course.

Jing is a terrific product that I strongly recommend to anyone who is planning to create video content for their online course.

Diigo

Diigo is a site that allows the user to add annotated links to web pages, articles, journals, .pdfs, etc. This is an excellent product for anyone who is conducting research for a paper or project.  It is also a great site to bookmark those urls that one sees and then wants to explore at a later time.  The great advantage with Diigo, is that the links to these resources are available anywhere there is internet access.  The url for my personal Diigo library is: http://www.diigo.com/user/mzicher.

Some of its key features include the tags and the diiglet toolbar. The diiglet tool bar can be bookmarked and allows the user to annotate text within a web page article, add sticky notes, etc. The annotations then appear on the Diigo page as text boxes following the name and url for the document.  In addition, Diigo has it's own tool bar; however, there seems to be issues with the feature.  Several individuals who tried to install this toolbar began to have problems with their computers and needed to uninstall the product.

One can also create a group page within Diigo where multiple users can share and annotate links. This would be an excellent resource for students involved in a group project during the research phase of the project.

Like many Web 2.0 products, one can select other Diigo sites to follow, have friends, and chat with other Diigo users online.

Skype

After this week, I'm a Skype believer! Skype is an free internet calling product that allows one to conference in up to 25 users at once (per the help system). 

It is relatively easy to set up a Skype account, create a unique name, fill in the expected informational fields, and create a password. There is a profile page where one can add a "Mood" message, video, picture, etc. Once in Skype, I added our instructor as a contact. She had provided us with her Skype name; but there is a lookup feature in Skype where one can find people by Skype name, real name, or e-mail address. After adding a contact, they must confirm the contact, as in Facebook.

A conference call was started by selecting the group and clicking on the "Call" button.  One can choose to have an audio or video conference.   It is also possible to add people to a call once the call has been started. One of our participants had downloaded the Skype app to her iPhone and participated this way. Skype will also allow one to call landlines or cell phones; however, there is a small charge per minute for those calls (the iPhone with app was treated as a computer...no charge).

Skype has a chat feature which is active within the call. Skype allows screen sharing while in a call; this was something that we didn't try, but I would certainly like to attempt. The call quality was excellent. 

This is a free product that will allow for synchronous communication within an online course.  It gives one the ability to actually talk with students, set up virtual office hours, and study sessions.

The world of synchronous communication

This week provided an opportunity to look at different synchronous communication products.  Originally, I was interested in exploring dimdim. I had looked a little at this product about 3 months ago. It was also free, supported audio as well as video, desktop sharing, etc. However, looking at a couple of reviews this evening, it appears that the open source, free version is not being maintained. dimdim is now promoting another version of the product, dimdim pro. While competitively priced when compared to products like Elluminate and GoToMeeting, there is still a hefty cost involved. Also, going to the dimdim site and looking at the features of the open source product; it's not very clear about how many users are supported in a single conference. In one place it states that up to 5 users can be conferenced, in another place it states that 20 users can be conferenced.

This will require further review.