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.