Rod's Teaching with Technology Blog

Reviving this Blog

I have just moved my blog over to Posterous.com. I was able to move the archive of posts from before to this site. I have been posting to twitter for a few months now and will start blogging here again. 

I choose this tool because it makes it much easier to post to. I can use the Android apps and email to post to it allowing me to post more often. 

Easy Annotator for your Presentation

If you don't use PowerPoint, or even if you do, to make presentation, check out this little freeware gem. It is called Pointofix and it allows you to capture any screen during your presentation, annotate it, print or save it for archiving or sharing with your audience.

It is a German product so the web site is in German but enough of it is in English that you should be able to find the Download and install the English translation of the menus. You can always use Google Translate at http://translate.google.com/  to translate the website into English.  It is worth the trouble.

The way it works is that you run it and leave it in the upper right hand corner until you need to annotate the screen. Then you click the Start button and it will freeze your screen and allow you to annotate, magnify and save it to a png or jpg file for sharing. You can also print or copy the screen to the clipboard ready for pasting into another app.  When you are done, click on the Done button and it goes back to sleep and gives you back control of the screen.

I really like it because:

  • You don't have to install it. It is small and even runs off of a USB Drive. 
  • It is easy to use and free, so you can make copies on all of the computers you use. 
  • It will even allow you to capture screens of video and annotate on them. 
  • It is designed to be useful during a presentation when you are in front of an audience with little fumbling.
  • You can also use it in your office to prepare screen shots for other purposes. 
  • Unfortunately, it doesn't run on Macs. 
Teaching applications
  • Use this for capturing and annotating any screen during your class room presentations and share with your students by posting the png files on your course website . 
  • Use it for preparing illustrative images for inclusion into course materials. 
  • Capture still screens from videos and add captions to them. 
Rod's Ed Tech Review Posts

New Features to Mention

I just received three significant new features on some of the tools I used that you may be interested in.

Gmail:  You can now add multiple signatures with Rich Formatting and images for each of your email addresses.  I have been waiting for this as I use Gmail for at least three email addresses regularly including my work email address so now I can set up a signature line that is specific with my work contact information.

iPod Touch OS4:  Unfortunately, I bought my iPod Touch too early last year and missed getting the 3G model. Consequently, when I upgraded to OS4, I was not able to get the multi-tasking feature but the new Folders feature for apps was well worth the trouble.  Now I can stop deleting apps in order to explore new apps. Yes, I have filled up my quota of 11 Apps pages.  Now I can go beyond that limit, until I hit the next.

Google Forms: This the forms or survey tool in Google Docs. They just added the feature that allows you to set a Goto Page for each option in the multiple choice question type. The power of this is huge. This makes the tool a lot like Quandary where you can design scenario based learning activities or branching story lines.  I have used Quandary for this a few years ago to make role-play activities that the students can work through to challenge their problem solving and critical thinking skills. Although Quandary provides a bit more tools for this, you can't monitor the choices the students make as they walk through it. In Google Forms you can.  Very interesting.

Rod

Rod's Ed Tech Review Posts

Creating Books from Wikipedia

Most of us all know a bit about Wikipedia but did you know that you can create your own books from Wikipedia pages?  And since you can add to existing pages or add pages yourself, this is an interesting and new way to create and publish books.

How do you do this?  Go to Wikipedia.org and get to any article or the Main Page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page.  Then look for the option on the left tools menu that says Create a Book.  You may have to click on and open the Print/export submenu.   You have three options here, Create a book, Download as PDF and Printable Version.  The latter two options are also useful and self-explanatory but it is the first that is really interesting.

After clicking on Create a book option, you will see the Book Creator page with directions to follow. Essentially you just need to click on the Green button that says "Start Book creator"  Then you go and look for articles that you want to have in your book.  When you find one you click on "Add this page to your book" button that you will now see at the top.   Add as many pages as you like. There is no limit that I have found.

When you have added all of the pages you want for your book, you can click on the Show Book button and look at the pages you selected.  Oh, if you need help finding pages, click on the Suggest Pages button and Wikipedia to suggest some pages based on the pages you have already selected.

Once you have clicked on Show Book, you should now see the Manage your book screen. This is where you can do the following things with your book:

  • Give your book a title and subtitle
  • Remove a page
  • Change order of the pages
  • Order hardcopies of your book to be printed and sent to you. This costs but you can see how much before you commit. 
  • Best of all, you can download you book into a PDF file that you can then distribute to your students or whoever you want to receive your book. 
  • You can even choice to have it downloaded in Open Office Writer format that you can then edit afterwards.   
I also learned that if you sign up for a user account on wikipedia and make 10 contributions, you get extra privileges with your books.  Namely, you can save your books on the site and have more than one book in development.  And naturally you can then share access to your books so you can share them while they are still in development. I haven't tried that yet but I believe you can contribute 10 photos to the Media Commons and get the credit for that. 

Applications for teaching: 
  • You can create your own book, reading pack or textbook and provide it to your students in PDF for free. 
  • Your students could create a book as part of a project or assignment. 
If you have tried this, please post a comment about how it went. 


Rod

Rod's Ed Tech Review Posts

Two free eBooks about teaching with new Web 2.0 tools

I ran across two very good ebooks about teaching with some of the newest Web 2.0 tools. These tools are actually Cloud Computing based tools that are free to use, as are the ebooks.  Michael Zimmer is the author of both books. The ebooks are short and only take a few minutes to flip through. They are hosted on a site called issue.com, another cloud app that allows you to publish ebooks like these.

I can even embed the books in this post. This first is titled: "Tools for the 21st Century Teacher"

And the second is titled:  "A New Way to Lecture" and focuses on new Cloud Apps that you can use to lecture, without using PowerPoint.

But, these are in Flash format so you won't be able to read them on your iPhone, or iPad. :-(

Rod's Ed Tech Review Posts

Open Ed Disc

If you haven't heard of the Open Education Disc or Open Disc read on.  There is an overwhelming volume of open and free software applications available for anyone to explore out there but what educator has the time or experience to harvest that effectively.  The people behind the Open Disc have done a great service to all educators.  Basically, they have surveyed what open software applications are out there and selected the best that could be used to meet the needs of students and teachers and assembled them on one Disc, which is now a DVD. And the list of free applications is great.  You can see the list at http://www.theopendisc.com/education/

The disc also comes with a menu that helps to guide you through the 50 odd free applications that you can install on your computer today, legally.

A great scenario that always comes to my mind is that brand new college student, armed with a brand new laptop that has practically no software installed, but the student has no budget for being computer applications like MS Office even.  This Open Ed Disc is exactly what they need. It will give them all of the software they will ever need to complete their studies and these are tools they can use on the job after they graduate.  It is free, legal and they can pass the disc to a friend.

To get the disc, you need to download the ISO file to your computer.  This is a large file and will take awhile. This file is an image of the 1.3 GB DVD, compressed all in one file.  Then you need a DVD burner and software that knows how to burn an ISO file to a blank DVD.  This is not as hard as it may sound.  If you have a DVD Burner but the software doesn't seem to know what an ISO file is go to  http://infrarecorder.org/?page_id=5 and download the InfraRecorder program and use that.

The only downside to this is that this disc is for Windows and not Macintosh computers.  I found Macintosh versions of most of the same programs on the disc at http://www.opensourcemac.org/. class="blogger-post-footer">Rod's Ed Tech Review Posts

iPad Review

The Apple iPad has been available in Canada for a week now but I have had one to try out for about three weeks.  I have had a lot of people ask me if I would buy one and No, I would not. For the following reasons:

  • Too expensive - for the low end price of $550, you could get a real pretty computer real computer. Or get an iPod Touch for less than half of that. 
  • I have an iPod Touch which I use all the time. The iPad is too much like it and doesn't fit into my pocket. 
  • The iPad lacks several key functions that I need in a computer:
    • Flash player - it sounds like it never will support this. 
    • Multitasking - I never realized how I have taken this for granted until I don't have it. 
    • Web cam - even $300 netbooks have this. 
    • Can't edit Google Docs docs probably.  I use Google Docs a lot. 
    • VERY Limited file sharing between applications. I can live with this on my iPod but this is one thing  that keeps the iPad from being a computer. 
  • Better alternatives on their way.  Thanks to Google Android OS, there are several Android Tablets that are about to enter the market and some of them look very good.  Dell even has one coming out this summer. And they have all of the missing functions that I need for less money. 
Who would like to own an iPad?  I do think there is market for these, it just doesn't include me. If you are looking for a personal e-book reader combination media player and you need the larger screen than you will love this.  It plays movies, audio, music wonderfully.  You can read books, newspapers, magazines it very well, but not websites with Flash objects so makes it poor for students. 

The applications for iPad are similar as those for iPhone which can give you some very productive tools but you are still limited by the limited file sharing between applications.  One way that App producing get around this is a Wifi network connection to your primary computer but if you work in an environment where this is blocks, this doesn't help. 
Rod's Ed Tech Review Posts