Well, I just looked back at all my posts and I must say that this has been somewhat different than I had imagined. For one thing, I actually kind of liked the blogging, contrary to what I initially thought (guess I have a big mouth), although the glitches in trying to comment have been frustrating. Even though I have used a number of these tools before, I think I did my part by investigating the ones I hadn't tried, too. This was a lot to squeeze into 3 months; I just started this in mid-January, although I guess others began in the fall. So I got a late start, but I'm happy that I made it all the way through. I think the best way to summarize is to say which tools I found most and least useful. So here goes.
Prezi was definitely very useful; I have been using it for a couple of years now and will probably continue to do so. Indeed, I ran out of time to convert a PowerPoint to Prezi for my class yesterday and had to use the old PowerPoint and really hated its limitations after using Prezi. It really does help to jazz up your visuals and tell your narrative in a somewhat different fashion.
Blogging was great; I'm thinking about figuring out how to use Blogger in a class next year. I would definitely like to continue with this.
Regarding productivity tools, I LOVE Drop Box and will be using that, I'm sure, for some time to come. With this and with Prezi, I am moving slowly but surely into the "cloud." It's great to be able to access your stuff from any computer.
I'm more reluctant to do social media, but I did introduce my students to Pinterest the other day and they took to it immediately. Of course, they are social media users, unlike me! So I think that their Pinterest board projects for the Material Culture course are going to turn out well. I created another board on Material Culture; I thought that might be a way to keep some links to images to show in classes. As I get more into it, I may find other uses. I find it disconcerting, however, that people comment on your pins and such; I just am not a social media person, I guess.
I am less enthusiastic about Diigo (which never did get back to me on my application for an educator account, by the way), although I can see some potential for it. I'm not sure how much I'll use it. I am much less enthusiastic about the Google Reader, especially since they are discontinuing it, but maybe I'll try another one. I don't know, because I find it daunting when I go on there and there are hundreds of unread stories. I end up just marking them all as read, which defeats the purpose, I suppose!
As for my last three, photo sharing, audio/visual, and collaborative spaces, I had some difficulties with those but I also cleared some hurdles. I figured out (with help from TOEP, but NOT from the Google instructions) how to embed my photo slideshow from Picasa and my Youtube video. That felt like a HUGE accomplishment! I can see some possibilities for doing small embedded slide shows for class materials, perhaps. I do use Youtube a lot in my classes, as it is easy to embed the videos in Prezi. I am not too sure whether I will make use of the collaborative tools, but I am rather intrigued by VoiceThread and will think about how I might use it. I also want to explore Jing or some such tool to record short screencasts about how to do certain formatting things, and perhaps how to do research as well. I could see that as a useful tool. I would like to explore the journaling tool, Penzu, for use in my consumer culture class, too.
On the whole, this has been a valuable experience. Not surprisingly, I have had trouble with some tools and have liked others. I have learned about a few that I think will become very much a part of my teaching in the future. I have spent a lot of time on this, and if I had a suggestion for future iterations of TOEP, it would be to be more realistic about the time commitment for this project. I seem to recall reading that one could spend 15 minutes to a couple hours each week; even for the ones where I had experience I spent a lot more than 15 minutes! And I would also emphasize that it should be done over a year rather than half a semester! But the reason I did this was to force myself to explore these tools, and it certainly did get me to do that. So I am happy I did it and thankful to those of you who put it all together!
Friday, April 5, 2013
Other Tools
After looking through the various options, I chose one of those on the top 100 to discuss and will also discuss another one that wasn't on the lists but that I have been using. I looked at Penzu, which caught my eye because it was an online journaling tool. I'm a big journaler on my travels, but I also have my students do journals in one of my classes. I examined this, and it seems to include more than just journaling (assignments, class management stuff), but it looks like it would be something I could use for this journal assignment. It has an education option, which might be useful. I like that using the class option, I could comment on their journals, and I think it's cool that the journals look like paper and you can have 'cursive' writing (even though we now have some students who cannot read this, sadly). So I may explore and use this next year when I teach this class again. If you want to explore it, click on the Penzu above.
I also think Wordle is cool, the ability to create a word cloud of a text. There seem to be some other vehicles for doing this as well. I was thinking I could maybe use this with students--have them make a Wordle of their paper to figure out the key themes and terms.
The tool that I have been using is Lulu, an online self-publisher. There are any number of these, as I found when I was doing research last fall. I was teaching a senior seminar on local history, and I had the brilliant idea of collecting and publishing the students' essays in a book, which we could then give to our community partners (the local museums and libraries where they did their research). The students, being history geeks, were insanely excited about publishing a book. After reading some reviews, it seemed that Lulu was the best option. To make a long story short, I had all the students send me their final essays to compile into the book (I'd have made them do the work, but there just isn't enough time in the semester!). Lulu provides a template, and you just put everything in a Word document in the same size (in our case 5.5 x 8), then upload it to the template, use their cover "wizard" to make a cover, and voila, a book is coming your way (once you pay for it). Of course, nothing is ever that easy, but what made this difficult was not Lulu but my students' lack of formatting knowledge and uniformity. I found out in doing this that almost all of them did not know how to do hanging indent for their bibliographies and had just used returns and indents to achieve their hanging indent. Needless to say, when I put their essays into a smaller format, this did NOT work out. So I had to manually delete all the indents and returns and change them to actual hanging indents. And let's not even get into the student who had used Pages, which did NOT convert well at all! But after a lot of playing with the formatting, I finally was able to upload a pretty decent looking version into the template, make a cover, and order copies. Our wonderful dean agreed to pay for this venture into student publishing, and it was quite cheap (the books ended up costing just over $7). I ordered them on Tuesday and by Thursday I had received a notice that they had shipped. So the world of on-demand publishing is quite quick. I'd say this is really changing publishing (and have read some stuff to this effect). It certainly works nicely for a class project, and the local historical institutions will be happy to have a nice-looking copy of the research the students did (as will the students and their families, of course). I tried to embed a preview but Blogger wouldn't accept the HTML, so here is a link to the book preview: Lulu book preview.
I would definitely recommend Lulu to colleagues, with some caveats that you must have very strict guidelines for student submissions for this type of project. Uniformity of formatting is necessary! I haven't really used Penzu yet, so I don't know if I can recommend it, but it looks like it could be a good tool.
I also think Wordle is cool, the ability to create a word cloud of a text. There seem to be some other vehicles for doing this as well. I was thinking I could maybe use this with students--have them make a Wordle of their paper to figure out the key themes and terms.
The tool that I have been using is Lulu, an online self-publisher. There are any number of these, as I found when I was doing research last fall. I was teaching a senior seminar on local history, and I had the brilliant idea of collecting and publishing the students' essays in a book, which we could then give to our community partners (the local museums and libraries where they did their research). The students, being history geeks, were insanely excited about publishing a book. After reading some reviews, it seemed that Lulu was the best option. To make a long story short, I had all the students send me their final essays to compile into the book (I'd have made them do the work, but there just isn't enough time in the semester!). Lulu provides a template, and you just put everything in a Word document in the same size (in our case 5.5 x 8), then upload it to the template, use their cover "wizard" to make a cover, and voila, a book is coming your way (once you pay for it). Of course, nothing is ever that easy, but what made this difficult was not Lulu but my students' lack of formatting knowledge and uniformity. I found out in doing this that almost all of them did not know how to do hanging indent for their bibliographies and had just used returns and indents to achieve their hanging indent. Needless to say, when I put their essays into a smaller format, this did NOT work out. So I had to manually delete all the indents and returns and change them to actual hanging indents. And let's not even get into the student who had used Pages, which did NOT convert well at all! But after a lot of playing with the formatting, I finally was able to upload a pretty decent looking version into the template, make a cover, and order copies. Our wonderful dean agreed to pay for this venture into student publishing, and it was quite cheap (the books ended up costing just over $7). I ordered them on Tuesday and by Thursday I had received a notice that they had shipped. So the world of on-demand publishing is quite quick. I'd say this is really changing publishing (and have read some stuff to this effect). It certainly works nicely for a class project, and the local historical institutions will be happy to have a nice-looking copy of the research the students did (as will the students and their families, of course). I tried to embed a preview but Blogger wouldn't accept the HTML, so here is a link to the book preview: Lulu book preview.
I would definitely recommend Lulu to colleagues, with some caveats that you must have very strict guidelines for student submissions for this type of project. Uniformity of formatting is necessary! I haven't really used Penzu yet, so I don't know if I can recommend it, but it looks like it could be a good tool.
Collaborative Spaces
I took a quick look at both ooVoo and Google Hangouts and didn't see what I would use them for, although perhaps if I was teaching online the video call/conference thing might be useful. I could certainly see using these in a social setting to chat with friends or relatives, especially far flung ones. I could see them possibly being useful for conferences or meetings as well.
I spent more time looking at VoiceThread. I looked at the History of Women in Art example and found it an interesting way to hold a discussion. I liked the ability to "draw" on the image while commenting, and I liked the option of either talking or writing one's response. I could see this being great for online courses, but maybe even for a traditional classroom based course. I've tried using discussion forum in Angel with my students, but they don't seem to engage much with each other. Of course, in this format they didn't either, for that matter. But to have the students comment and then listen to/read all the comments would be a cool assignment. It would seem to work particularly well for analyzing a visual source such as the paintings in the example. When I went on the VoiceThread site, I liked that it could be used with your campus course management system. But it sounded like the campus would have to have a license, and so far as I know Fredonia does not. But I'd be interested in testing this if we had access.
I spent more time looking at VoiceThread. I looked at the History of Women in Art example and found it an interesting way to hold a discussion. I liked the ability to "draw" on the image while commenting, and I liked the option of either talking or writing one's response. I could see this being great for online courses, but maybe even for a traditional classroom based course. I've tried using discussion forum in Angel with my students, but they don't seem to engage much with each other. Of course, in this format they didn't either, for that matter. But to have the students comment and then listen to/read all the comments would be a cool assignment. It would seem to work particularly well for analyzing a visual source such as the paintings in the example. When I went on the VoiceThread site, I liked that it could be used with your campus course management system. But it sounded like the campus would have to have a license, and so far as I know Fredonia does not. But I'd be interested in testing this if we had access.
Audio/Video
I have friends who have used podcasts but have never tried doing it myself. It seems a bit daunting to me, frankly. I looked at the material, found the video on podcasting from New Zealand to be amusing, but do not see myself doing this in the near future. I had not looked at Vimeo before, and found it rather interesting source of videos, but I'm not sure how it differs from YouTube really. I also looked at Jing. I could see that this would be useful in terms of showing students how to do certain things. Indeed, having just discovered that my senior honors students didn't know how to do hanging indent on Word, I can see that being able to record a little screencast of me doing it might be useful to the students (and make my life easier, too). So maybe I'll think about doing that for my history methods class in the fall. I know about Khan academy, and hadn't thought much about how this type of teaching might be useful for history, but this could be one way (and simple enough that I might be able to actually do it!).
I looked on Vimeo for education related videos and didn't really find anything that interested me (in the first few pages). So I turned to YouTube, the old reliable and found this video called The Higher Education Bubble. It uses cartoon drawing animation to take on the high cost of education and the increasingly higher amounts of student debt that our graduates are accumulating. This is something that really bothers me, particularly as there is no way to get rid of this debt, even if you declare bankruptcy. A bubble indeed, I think. I am going to try to embed it; I hope it will be more successful than the attempt to embed the slide show!
hope it works.
I looked on Vimeo for education related videos and didn't really find anything that interested me (in the first few pages). So I turned to YouTube, the old reliable and found this video called The Higher Education Bubble. It uses cartoon drawing animation to take on the high cost of education and the increasingly higher amounts of student debt that our graduates are accumulating. This is something that really bothers me, particularly as there is no way to get rid of this debt, even if you declare bankruptcy. A bubble indeed, I think. I am going to try to embed it; I hope it will be more successful than the attempt to embed the slide show!
hope it works.
Photo Sharing
I looked at Flickr; it might be worth getting an account. I liked a couple of the features, such as the ability to map your vacation photos and to create galleries. I have used Flickr Commons before; it's a great source of photos. I already had a Picasa account, so I put up a small album of photos I took at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had no difficulty uploading the photos from iPhoto, but it seemed trickier to upload them directly from Picasa. I did succeed in doing one that way. I also added some descriptive captions. I study American cultural history and these photos illustrate some of the material culture of the nineteenth century, specifically in terms of household furnishings.
Where I did run into problems is with having too many different mail accounts that are Google. Because I started in Picasa Web on my gmail and then switched to my Fredonia account to do the blog, I lost the Picasa. Don't really understand why it cannot all be linked, since it's all Google! Since I cannot open both Google mail accounts in the same browser, it means I cannot upload the album, since I seem to not have access to my other Picasa web account from the Fredonia email. This is just one of my many frustrating encounters with the Web 2.0.
So I think I got this. I had to download the album to Picasa, sign into Picasa from my Fredonia account, then upload the album to THAT Picasa web album. Then follow the steps to embed the slide show. Fingers crossed that it works. Rather too complicated, if you ask me; I thought Web 2.0 was supposed to simplify life!
Okay, after three attempts to embed the slideshow, following the instructions link on TOEP, I failed miserably. So I have put a link below the slideshow instead. Also tried to insert a photo by clicking on the "insert image" but it told me that it was not available! Again, way too much trouble!!!
Okay, I figured out how to do it after embedding the video. Either the instructions on the photo sharing left out the crucial step of having to embed the code in HTML mode, or I missed it. The instructions on the video TOEP did include that step. Yeeha. The Met slide show if you please:
Where I did run into problems is with having too many different mail accounts that are Google. Because I started in Picasa Web on my gmail and then switched to my Fredonia account to do the blog, I lost the Picasa. Don't really understand why it cannot all be linked, since it's all Google! Since I cannot open both Google mail accounts in the same browser, it means I cannot upload the album, since I seem to not have access to my other Picasa web account from the Fredonia email. This is just one of my many frustrating encounters with the Web 2.0.
So I think I got this. I had to download the album to Picasa, sign into Picasa from my Fredonia account, then upload the album to THAT Picasa web album. Then follow the steps to embed the slide show. Fingers crossed that it works. Rather too complicated, if you ask me; I thought Web 2.0 was supposed to simplify life!
Okay, after three attempts to embed the slideshow, following the instructions link on TOEP, I failed miserably. So I have put a link below the slideshow instead. Also tried to insert a photo by clicking on the "insert image" but it told me that it was not available! Again, way too much trouble!!!
Okay, I figured out how to do it after embedding the video. Either the instructions on the photo sharing left out the crucial step of having to embed the code in HTML mode, or I missed it. The instructions on the video TOEP did include that step. Yeeha. The Met slide show if you please:
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Social Bookmarking
I got signed up with Diigo easily enough, and filled out an application for the educator account. I still haven't heard back on that, but I explored Diigo with my basic account. I decided to just use the Diigolet while I was testing it, so I dragged that to my toolbar with no problem. When I tried to use it, however, big problem--it kept asking me to log in (even though I was already), when I logged in, it would just say that Diigolet failed. I got frustrated and gave up, then came back to it today and tried posting it as a bug in the User forum. Then found it listed as a bug with Firefox, and a suggested fix was to allow third-party cookies or put diigo.com as an exception. I did the latter, and voila, it worked.
Now this leads me to a concern I have with all these Web 2.0 tools. It seems like they want to leave cookies of all sorts, or in the case of blogging, won't work because of cookies, in which case you're supposed to clear out all your cache and cookies to make a dumb comment on a blog. I am not sure if this problem is specific to Firefox, and perhaps another browser such as Chrome works better. Maybe I'll try Chrome, as has been suggested to me. When I find time.
Anyway, back to Diigo. I added a few things to my library. One is an article from the Center for History and New Media about the benefits and perils of the wealth of primary historical sources being digitized and available on the Internet at the Library of Congress and elsewhere. Another is an article on Newport and leisure, which I can use in my course on Consumer Culture, where I talk about conspicuous consumption and use Newport as an example. The other two are biographies of a woman who wrote an article that I am going to use in the book I'm working on. So it's a variety of things. I highlighted some things on them, and did a few sticky notes, and created tags. You can check out my diigo library here. Finally, I checked out a few of the most popular bookmarked sites. I saw the tags for the articles, but didn't see any comments or highlighting when I clicked on them. So I'm not sure how that works. My favorite of the ones I looked at was Slate's piece on Google Reader joining the "graveyard of dead Google products." It had tombstones for all the different dead products, and you can click on it to place flowers on the graves. If you haven't seen this yet, it's worth a giggle: Google graveyard. I found this particularly funny since I just had to open a Google Reader account for TOEP. Another danger of the ole Web 2.0, I guess.
Now this leads me to a concern I have with all these Web 2.0 tools. It seems like they want to leave cookies of all sorts, or in the case of blogging, won't work because of cookies, in which case you're supposed to clear out all your cache and cookies to make a dumb comment on a blog. I am not sure if this problem is specific to Firefox, and perhaps another browser such as Chrome works better. Maybe I'll try Chrome, as has been suggested to me. When I find time.
Anyway, back to Diigo. I added a few things to my library. One is an article from the Center for History and New Media about the benefits and perils of the wealth of primary historical sources being digitized and available on the Internet at the Library of Congress and elsewhere. Another is an article on Newport and leisure, which I can use in my course on Consumer Culture, where I talk about conspicuous consumption and use Newport as an example. The other two are biographies of a woman who wrote an article that I am going to use in the book I'm working on. So it's a variety of things. I highlighted some things on them, and did a few sticky notes, and created tags. You can check out my diigo library here. Finally, I checked out a few of the most popular bookmarked sites. I saw the tags for the articles, but didn't see any comments or highlighting when I clicked on them. So I'm not sure how that works. My favorite of the ones I looked at was Slate's piece on Google Reader joining the "graveyard of dead Google products." It had tombstones for all the different dead products, and you can click on it to place flowers on the graves. If you haven't seen this yet, it's worth a giggle: Google graveyard. I found this particularly funny since I just had to open a Google Reader account for TOEP. Another danger of the ole Web 2.0, I guess.
Monday, March 11, 2013
Blog comment frustration
This is a call for help! I am having a problem trying to comment on blogs. I have tried this choosing both "Google account" and "Open ID" and putting in my blog URL. Neither works. When I hit "post," my comments disappear and nothing is posted. Now, I did comment earlier (Presentation Tools entry) on my own blog and it worked fine. Today I tried it and it won't work. I have tried to post comments on several people's blogs without success. I looked up the comments help on Blogger and followed the directions. I must be missing something, so perhaps someone could enlighten me!
Update: I was able to post a comment successfully to a blog that was done on Word Press, but have been unsuccessful with Blogger.
Update: I was able to post a comment successfully to a blog that was done on Word Press, but have been unsuccessful with Blogger.
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