My Top Ten Tools for Learning 2009

10

I’m updating my Top Ten Tools for Learning for Jane Hart’s Top 100 list. I decided this year that I wouldn’t look at my 2007 or 2008 lists first and would just start fresh. I’m also organizing my list into tools for personal learning and for developing courses.

Personal Learning

Google Reader is my main tool for personal learning right now, as it’s the hub where everything I read comes in.

WordPress.com is my blog host, which is still a primary tool for my personal learning even when I’m not posting as regularly. When I’m actively working on new ideas, this is where I collect my thoughts.

Diigo is the tool I use to collect all the interesting sites I find through Google Reader and elsewhere. Being able to highlight, keep cached copies of the pages, and post to my blog automatically makes it much more valuable for me than just bookmarking.

Wikipedia is the first place I check for basic, “good enough” information on many topics. If I want to learn more about something when I have little or no background information, the reference lists for each are often a good place to start. I’ve also learned through editing and updating articles.

Developing Courses

Google Docs is where I do most of my collaboration with SMEs. This is where the planning, drafting, and revision of content happens.

Dreamweaver is the tool I use to build the html content of my courses. It’s definitely a primary tool for developing learning in our process. The web pages house all the reading, interactive content, and activity directions that is eventually housed in our LMS.

Captivate is what I use for creating interactive content. I’m still on Captivate 3, but it’s a great tool. We would never have been able to create orientation tutorials for our LMS in such a short time if we didn’t have Captivate, and I’ve had good success using Captivate for simple branching activities.

As of January 2009, Sakai is our LMS, a great improvement over our previous system. It’s not perfect, but the process of building courses is much smoother and the tool options give us more opportunities to vary the type of activities.

Wikispaces is where we house all of our documentation of course development processes. Being sure that everyone always has access to the same information is critical. Wikispaces is also my preferred wiki for small group work in courses, unless the work is simple enough to use the internal Sakai wiki.

Skype is how our team talks every week for our team meeting, and it’s a great tool for quick questions of SMEs or other colleagues.

Image: Number 10
www.flickr.com/photos/77836179@N00/1168049444

Daily Bookmarks 04/24/2009

• A List Apart: Articles: In Defense of Eye Candy

  Why aesthetics are important to web design (and by extension, online learning)–we shouldn’t approach visual design as an add on, but a core part of the design

  tags: usability, webdesign

  • According to a 2002 study, the “appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size, and color schemes,” is the number one factor we use to evaluate a website’s credibility.
  • Researchers in Japan setup two ATMs, “identical in function, the number of buttons, and how they worked.” The only difference was that one machine’s buttons and screens were arranged more attractively than the other. In both Japan and Israel (where this study was repeated) researchers observed that subjects encountered fewer difficulties with the more attractive machine. The attractive machine actually worked better.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Bookmarks 04/22/2009

• GoErie.com: High-tech instruction method ‘facilitates learning’

  Nice write-up in the Erie, PA paper about a high school teacher (and new PLS online facilitator) using the technology skills he learned in the Building Online Collaborative Environments course I helped develop

  tags: k-12, education, 1to1, web2.0

  • “The teacher doesn’t become the sole source of information, and — really, in the Internet age — shouldn’t be,” Brinling said. “The teacher becomes the person who facilitates learning.”

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

TCC09: Choosing and Implementing the Right LMS

Our team (me, Natalie Kilkenny, and April Hayman) also presented at TCC 2009 on the process of selecting and implementing a new LMS. We didn’t want the standard PowerPoint bullet point slides, so we used ToonDoo to tell our story.

And in case you were wondering, on the second slide, I played the opening bars of the theme from Star Trek IV on my horn. Yes, I own Star Trek sheet music for horn.

I think the presentation went well, and we had a great discussion with the audience and a lot of good questions at the end.

Read the rest of my notes from TCC 2009.

Daily Bookmarks 04/16/2009

• Techspo: Using Interactive Multimedia within Educational Wikis

  Slideshare presentation on multimedia in Wikispaces. Starts with an overview of wikis and comparison of different wikis.

  tags: wiki, multimedia, education, collaboration

• Will at Work Learning: New Research Report on Using Culturally, Linguistically, and Situationally Relevant Scenarios

  Research on how to support learning with scenarios that are relevant to the specific situation. Even though this is explicitly about workplace training, the major recommendations could be adapted for instructional design in education contexts too.

  tags: learning, training, research, scenarios, context, diversity, instructionaldesign

  • Utilize decision-making scenarios. Consider using them not just in a minor role—for example at the end of a section—but integrated into the main narrative of your learning design.
  • Determine the most important points you want to get across AND the most important situations in which these points are critical. Then, provide extra repetitions spaced over time on these key points and situations.

• Measuring Networked (or Social) Learning « Daretoshare

  Networked learning can’t be assessed the same way as traditional, formal learning (or if it can, we wouldn’t measure the real value that way). So what do you measure? This is a starting point.

  tags: learning, networks, social, assessment, patterns

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

TCC09: Podcasting with Section 508

Podcast logo

Liveblogged notes from the TCC online conference. My comments in italics.

Presenters:

• Dr. John R. Kallis, California University of Pennsylvania
• Dr. Chris Patti, California University of Pennsylvania

This presentation will be an overview of the different methods in the planning, producing, publishing and promoting of hybrid podcasts with instructions on the building of a 508 compliant podcast. This workshop will provide participants with new concepts and augment their skills to current guidelines on the accessibility of emerging technologies. Method of delivery will be a hybrid podcast via the web with interaction either via email or a forum.

Market research on US podcast audience

• 18.5 million (2007)
• 28.0 million (2008)
• 65 million (2012 projected)

Focus on enhanced podcasts, including visuals/slides/etc.

Digital File

• Can be mp3
• AAC (m4a)–audio
• mp4 video
• m4b audiobooks
• PDF

RSS feed–podcasts are syndicated

Plan – Produce – Publish – Promote

Plan

Good to have two people–more interesting than listening to just one person at a time. Two people don’t have to be in the same physical location.

• Topic: Something you care about
• Format: solo/co-host, length, posting
• Location: setup, hardware, software

Produce

• computer
• software: GarageBand, iTunes, Camtasia, ProTools LE, Office 2008. I’ve never heard of doing podcasts in Camtasia–he says he uses ie when he wants chapters
• open source software options: Audacity
• microphone–dynamic or condenser
• Headset
• Pop filter
• Mixer–no open source ones out there, but Audacity does a lot

Learning In Hand has a free booklet with step-by-step directions for getting started with podcasting–good for K-12 or higher ed.

Podcast Gear

• He has a small recording studio at home
• He has a mic designed for podcasting–$200
• Digital reference monitors–speakers for playback
• Pop filters–you can buy it at any audio supply or use an old screen door and bend it around your mic
• He has a mixer to edit multiple people
• ProTools has a portable USB mixer
• He also has a keyboard (the piano kind) for music too

At the other end of the spectrum, you can use a headset mic and Audacity.

Audacity

• lets you get rid of your mistakes
• free mp3 encoder
• free special effects can be downloaded
• PC/Mac/Linux
• Audacity has its own tutorials, including video

Office 2008

• From PowerPoint:
  • Save as Pictures
  • Save as Movie

Camtasia

• Save in different formats
• Save to CD, swf, avi, mp3, Quicktime
• 30 day free trial
• He records in Audacity, then puts the pieces together in Camtasia

Garageband

• multitrack audio for Mac
• chapter markers
• lots of music, instruments, etc available

Save

• Include ID3 tags to make it easier for people to find

Publish

• Your server
• Ourmedia: free hosting
• Lipsync: small fee based on how many people listen
• Odeo: record, share; 50 MB limit for upload
• Many others

RSS feed: can do the XML yourself. Or just use something that provides it automatically–I wouldn’t want to mess with this regularly

iTunes has different code–not standard RSS XML

Feedburner for RSS

Use a Feed Validator if you do the code yourself

Can do conference calls to get multiple people together–Skype or whatever. I’ve done this for SME interviews for our team blog–worked pretty well.

Promote

• Aggregators
• Podcast Directories

Section 508

• Want to make sure that all students are able to learn from podcasts
• Web pages
• Captions for videos
• Need for podcast

Interactivity is important for e-learning

Very few people said they are required to meet 508 or doing anything for accessibility now

Technical Standards

• Open or closed captions
• Open captions are visible like subtitles
  

Transcripts can be used if it’s just audio (mp3 or radio)

Transcripts can be used to create captions, but aren’t appropriate as a substitute for multimedia

Software

• Dragon Naturally Speaking
• Casting Words–transcription service
• QuickTime has CC
• Camtasia has CC
• Magpie Media Access Generator This is a totally new tool to me–never heard of it before. Creates captions for rich media.
• Captivate has CC

Podcasts within LMS

• They have Blackboard–just link to everything within there
• Someone in chat said they do the same in ANGEL

Interactivity or Assessment

• Camtasia lets you do quizzes and surveys-export SCORM to Blackboard

Most people at their university use media players, not iPods

Image: ‘Official Podcast Logo‘
www.flickr.com/photos/60236052@N00/145053162

TCC09: Digital Storytelling in a Web 2.0 World

The Storyteller Tree

Liveblogged notes from the TCC online conference. My comments in italics.

Presenters:

• Chareen Snelson, Boise State University
• Annie Sheffield, Boise State University

Abstract:

Digital storytelling has arisen as a form of narrative expression that is crafted into a media production. While there appears to be general agreement that digital storytelling integrates meaningful stories with media, and characteristics of digital stories have been described, the definition of and purpose for digital storytelling remains somewhat open to interpretation. Even more unclear is how the growing array of interactive Web 2.0 video-sharing technologies are being used to facilitate digital storytelling. This paper presents a pilot study conducted to begin learning how digital storytelling is manifesting on YouTube, which is currently the most widely used of all video-sharing services. A relevance sample of 100 digital stories was obtained from YouTube. The videos were analyzed to determine how closely they match published characteristics of digital stories and to what extent interactive features of YouTube were utilized. Results indicated variation among the stories in terms of adherence to the classic model and the media elements used. Interactive tools such as ratings, comments, and video responses were used, but not extensively.

The two presenters have never met in person–one in Idaho, one in Bern, Switzerland. Their first real-time conversation was last weekend preparing for this conference; they’ve done all their research collaboration asynchronously.

Chareen is an online educator–was wondering if she is missing some human element

Agenda

• Background on Digital Storytelling
  • Perspectives
  • Classic Digital Storytelling it’s old enough for there to be a classic form?
  • Types
  • Video sharing & storytelling
• The Pilot Study

What is digital storytelling?

• Hard to define
• Narrative using digital tools

Various perspectives

• Personal narrative
• Tool for language arts
• Personal portfolios (a portfolio is a story of a student’s learning) love this image of portfolios
• Deep learning assessment

What about Web 2.0?

• Will video sharing change digital storytelling?
• Web 2.0 allows all the stories to collect–but is it happening yet

Overall Goal: Gain awareness of how digital storytelling is actually happening right now on interactive video sharing site (YouTube)

The way we’ve been doing it tends to be the way we keep doing it until something forces us to change. So true–in a lot more than storytelling

Classic Digital Story

• Image with a first person narrative
• Images are powerful for conveying emotion
• Personal narrative–tell the story behind the image
• Sometimes add music b/c it sets mood, gets emotional effect

Great examples of pictures that spark stories–thank you for using great CC photos; such a nice change from bullet points in other presentations

Center for Digital Storytelling

Example of a classic digital story: Momnotmom

Types of digital stories from the digital storytelling cookbook

• Character story: about someone important to our lives
• Memorial story: those we love and remember, mourn
• Adventure story: first trip away from home, special school trip, adventure of a lifetime
• Accomplishment story: first to graduate college, lifetime goals
• A place in my life:  family outing
• What I do: job that you love, building something yourself
• Recovery story: overcoming life challenge, witnessing miracles
• Love story: falling in love for the first time
• Discovery story: learning or uncovering information, message in a bottle, learning life comes in many forms

Sharing Digital Stories

• One problem before was addins–about half of the people in this session couldn’t see Momnotmom b/c it requires Quicktime
• Youtube should make this easier
• Web 2.0 lets you share locally and at a distance
• YouTube is the biggest–center of video sharing
• TeacherTube common for education

They studied YouTube not b/c it’s the only place, but b/c it’s the “mother ship”

Digital Stories on YouTube

• Example: Karen’s Digital Story
• Options for interacting with video
  • Ratings
  • Share
  • Video responses
  • Comments
• Most recommend 3 minutes; almost always >10 min

Research looks at whether stories on YouTube share the characteristics of classic digital stories.

Content analysis with a coding system for characteristics

Categories for content analysis

• Attributes (story type, perspective, topic)–each subdivided
• Media (media elements, duration)
• Interativity (comments, ratings, video responses, # of views)

Samples

• Hard to get a truly random sample
• Got a relevance sample instead
• Used the exact phrase “digital story” and limited to English and education as search
• Limited by search capabilities

Collecting and analyze data

• Frequency count for each category
• They added categories to what they originally planned from the digital storytelling cookbook

How closely did digital stories on YouTube align with the classic model?

• 55% matched classic model for types
• 45% were not classic types
• Only 17 of 100 were a perfect match for those (image sequence, 1st person narrative)

How are interactive tools used?

• Comments and ratings more common
• No video responses to their sample, so that isn’t a highly used feature so there isn’t a great community of sharing and responding to stories

Conclusions

• Classic attributes are there but not universal. Do we need a bigget taxonomy?
• Lots of variations in story type and media
• Many were class projects
• Although it’s possible to have a community around stories with tools in YouTube, that isn’t happening now

Part of this seems to be that the definition of  digital stories is emerging. However we define it needs to be flexible enough to allow for different forms and tools.

Math with stories: Give a context and real world connection

Next steps? They are interested in using digital storytelling within eportfolios. This would be very cool research

They are also working on more research on self-disclosure on YouTube (specifically people posting themselves drunk)

Image: ‘The Storyteller Tree‘
www.flickr.com/photos/31989108@N04/3157117480

Daily Bookmarks 04/15/2009

• Building a Drag-and-Drop Jigsaw Puzzle – Part 1

  Free files & directions for creating a drag & drop puzzle activity in Flash. Use your own images.

  tags: flash

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

TCC09: Wikis that Work: Effective Wiki Practices for Virtual Learning Communities

Wiki Wiki

Liveblogged notes from the TCC online conference. My notes in italics.

In this session, we will share a collaborative wiki created by a self-organized, self-managed group of online graduate students. This virtual learning community took the initiative to form a study group and share strategies for completing course problem-solving assignments. They effectively managed issues of trust, workload, and learning within their social network. We will discuss our observations and recommendations for using wikis as a collaborative learning tool.

Presenters:

• Barbara Frey, University of Pittsburgh
• Lorna Kearns, University of Pittsburgh
• Carol Johnston, University of Pittsburgh

Agenda

• Theoretical foundation
• Define wiki
• Examples
• Recommended practices
• Identify future directions
• Resources & references

Social Learning/Social Constructivism

• We’ve had learning communities before, but online learning makes it more visible
• Research showing benefits of learning communities
• Community of Inquiry
• Social presence–ability to project yourself in an online environment and make connections with others

Started with a study of their students–how students were communicating outside the classroom

• 100% used email
• 60% used cell phone
• 60% used collaborative authoring (wiki)
• Social gaming (e.g., Second Life) very low

What is a wiki

Skipping most of the intro here–interesting that they define it as WYSIWYG editing. Not really true in all cases.

Organized by context, not by chronology like a discussion board

Benefits for Education

• Freely available
• Easy to archive for later
• Support for group work

Challenges

• Getting students to contribute
• Setting rules to allow for organic evolution of the wiki
• Getting contributors to feel comfortable editing work of others, having their work edited

Risks

• If you use third party, your internal tech support can’t help
• Backups–hosted elsewhere

Examples

• Personality Pedagogy

Instructional and extracurricular wikis

Library Science course on Retrieving Information

Students (including Carol Johnston, presenting) decided to start a wiki themselves

Search and Seize assignments: What is this? On the slide but not explained yet

Students were very active–they are all on the wiki just about every day. Increased their sense of community with others in the course. Said it gave her more of an on-campus feeling in an off-campus environment.

Because everyone could go to their own library and share resources, they got many more resources than they would have otherwise. Wished they would have prioritized the best resources though.

As an entirely personal note, it’s hard to look at slides with a solid gray background and bullet points with very few images. I will give credit to Carol that she’s just talking and not reading bullet points, but it’s hard to keep focus with multiple webinars when you have boring visuals.

This was a self-selected group of students

Another example: Introduction to Information Science

• co-taught with a 92-year-old prof who was teaching his first online course
• Lecture videos, readings, participation, asynchronous discussions
• Used wiki as a place for students to collect summaries of content each week showing connections in content–2 students assigned to do the summaries with connections each week
• Got some feedback that it was too much to switch back and forth between discussion and wiki
• Sign of success: students asked if they could download the wiki as a reference after the course was done

Study Group wikis

• encourage students to communicate with each other outside of class
• don’t institutionalize the wiki–let it belong to them, they should have a space to complain

And practice presenting in the actual environment before you go live. This is getting painful to listen to as the poor moderator tries to explain to the student presenter how to open a new browser tab so they can do a web tour. And the wiki they want to show is password protected…leaving now

Image: ‘WikiWiki Means Fast‘
www.flickr.com/photos/95601478@N00/232142019

TCC09: Creating a Culture of Learning

Full Title: Creating a Culture of Learning – Modeling a Vision for Technology Use in an Online Environment to Impact the Use of Technology in the K-12 System

Liveblogged notes from the TCC online conference. My notes in italics.

Summary: “This session will share ideas of how to create a culture of learning in an online class at the university level so that it will impact the vision and use of technology at the K-12 level. Regardless of age, individuals learn differently. Creating an online learning environment that utilizes differentiated strategies to meet the needs of a diverse student population will be addressed.”

Presenters:

• Silvia Braidic, California University of Pennsylvania
• Joe Oliphant, California University of Pennsylvania

Joe was a teacher for 6 years, now graduate student/technology director working to help teachers use tools

Topics Addressed

• Background
• Lead by example
• Model and Infuse Effective Practices of Technology
• Technology Tools
• Enabling Others
• Increase Technology Awareness
• Research on Coaching
• A little Trivia

Their program follows Quality Matters–teacher & principal training

What steps can we take to impact how technology is used in K-12 classrooms?

Resources can be used for other fields, not just education

Their vision: Lead the way

University Program > University Student (Principal candidates) > Teachers > Students

How do we lead the way?

• Awareness of tools
• Understand what tools are capable of
• Learner-centered environment–need to get our learners involved
• Promote participation
• Instructional coaching for technology

Technology Tools

• Support communication
• Foster collaboration
• Meet diverse student needs

Skype

• Most people had used Skype
• I’m not taking notes on their overviews of the tools–you can get that info elsewhere. Ask in the comments if a tools is mentioned that you want to learn more about.
  
• Example: Live Webcam piano lesson via Skype

Feed Readers

• Someone mentioned that Twitter has become her feed reader
• Great way to spend a certain amount of time as a principal learning without having to go hunt for stuff

Google Docs

• They have used Google Docs for student feedback with comments–avoids the emailing back and forth
• They would like more administrators to start using it to model for teachers–maybe with Google spreadsheets with teachers for fundraising.
• Can start small
• As a tech person in the schools, Joe was able to model tools, get the principal to model, and have it start to trickle down

Google Forms

• Follow the wizard to create
• Compiles it automatically into a spreadsheet

Wiki

• Classroom websites for free
• Gave example of a 1st grade teacher with a very slick looking “bulletin board” with links to different projects
• Share info with parents w/o wasting paper
• Example given in the chat: all but the first page is student-created work: http://weewebwonders.pbwiki.com/
• Use wikis as archive of resources for students to refer to as needed
• Share documents together
• Multimedia posted on the wiki like Blabberize

Principals have walkthroughs for things to observe in classrooms, but often don’t have walkthroughs for their tools

ISTE has a free classroom observation tool: ICOT. Helps principals identify best practices being used in classrooms.

Funny parody video with technology for getting walkthroughs done–Walkthrough and Learning Objectives

Online Portfolios

• LiveText
• Get principals to model by creating their own portfolios

Steps to increase technology awareness for principals

• Show how supports teaching and learning
• Advocate tools available–lots are free
• Involve parents, school board members, staff
• Use a wiki to share best practices
• Model positive relationships between principals and tech coordinators

Coaching does improve use of technology

Common Craft videos as examples

Used a Google Form to share resources at the end–get everyone to participate