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June 26,
2009 |
Contents |
-
Technology
News Briefs
- Training
Opportunities
- The Blackboard Feature:
"A Class Act"
- Teaching with Technology:
"Online Human Touch"
-
Tech Talk Topic:
"How-to Screen Videos"
- For more, see
podcast notes page for Episode
105
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"Unprovided
with original learning, unformed in the habits
of thinking, unskilled in the arts of
composition, I resolved to write a book." ~Edward
Gibbon
Technology News Briefs
-
 There
are still a few seats left for our
second annual SUMMER TECH CAMP, which will be held August
4-6. Come join the Academic
Technology staff for three full days of learning and
practicing your teaching-with-technology skills—and
get Professional Development credit for it too. We
will be meeting 9am-3pm each day. Sign up soon
because there a just a few seats left. There will be food,
giveaways and prizes along with exposure to a skill
set aimed at increasing your ability to use the new
media effectively in your fall classes.
-
Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate 3 is
available for
download. It is still beta, but
close to finished. According to Mozilla:
"While this release is considered to be stable, it
is intended for developers and members of our
testing community to use for early evaluation and
feedback. Users of the latest released version of
Firefox should not expect all of their add-ons to
work properly with this milestone." I have
many add-ons, and only one did not work properly.
Mozilla searched and found a replacement to boot, so
all looks good. New to Firefox in this version
is a
private browsing
mode, similar to such mode sin IE8 and
Safari; a new, faster
javascript
engine;
geolocation
browser awareness; improved rendering;
and various HTML5 compatibility features. This
version is not yet compatible with Blackboard and is
not recommended for Palomar College production
computers. Watch the
What's New video.
- And speaking of Release Candidates,
Windows 7
Release candidate is also
available for
download. It is a notable
improvement over Windows Vista. The official
product release date has been set for October 22,
2009--too late to put it in the computer labs for
fall semester, but likely for spring. As with
Firefox, this OS is not recommended for installation
on Palomar College production computers.
Click here
for a feature list and screenshots,
here
for demo videos. Downloads of the Release
Candidate will end August 15.
-
TechSmith,
makers of the great products
Camtasia
(for making screen videos),
SnagIt
(for capturing images off screens), and most lately,
Jing
(a free, but limited, combination of both), have
announced a new
Education
Community aimed at explaining the
benefits of screen capture technology to educators.
You will find helpful articles there, like "Introduction
to Screen Capture in Education," and "Students
Demonstrate Understanding via Video,"
along with other explanatory and communication
features, like the new
Education
Community blog.
- For you optical illusion fans, here is one of the
best I've seen, which I found on the
TED blog,
via
Discover
magazine, via
Akiyoshi Kitaoka.
What you see are spirals of green, blue and
orange-pink. Incredibly, the green and blue
colors are exactly the same color, though our "mis-wired"
brains tell us they are different. The orange
runs through the "green" (RGB color 0-255-150), but
the contrasting pink runs thru the "blue" (also RGB
color 0-255-150). Don't believe it? Load
it in Photoshop and perform color sampling.
"The reason they look different colors is because
our brain judges the color of an object by comparing
it to surrounding colors. In this case, the stripes
are not continuous as they appear at first glance.
The orange stripes don’t go through the "blue"
spiral, and the magenta ones don’t go through the
"green" one."
-
Quick, what's the difference between a netbook and a
notebook? If you don't know, you are not
alone. According to NPD, a consumer retail
information service, "...60 percent of consumers who
purchased a netbook instead of a notebook thought
their netbooks would have the same functionality as
notebooks" (NPD
Press Release). The confusion is,
naturally, leading to a lot of disappointment among
consumers who expected identical performance.
The real draw of lighter capacity "netbooks" is
their portability, not their power, which is
significantly diminished from a notebook.
"Netbooks are devices
designed purposely for the Internet, to
communicate, learn, and view information.
They have in common a compact form factor of
seven to ten inches, are light-weight,
feature comparatively longer battery life
than notebooks, and are less dependent on a
battery charger during the day. They are
easily portable and can be easily moved from
one place to another place. They may contain
more than one wireless method to connect to
the Internet.
Notebooks are more multiple-purpose
computers in a form factor of about ten
inches and up. Notebooks can create content
and handle heavy multi-tasking loads with
many applications running at once. They can
view, create, and edit high-definition video
content and run intensive programs like
computer aided engineering and mathematical
modeling...So netbooks are purpose-built for
a limited role, while traditional notebooks
are multi-purpose general tool" (BrightHub). |
-
 Featured
Safari Tech Book Online:
The Manga Guide
to Physics by Hideo Nitta and Keita
Takatsu. "Megumi is an all-star athlete, but
she's a failure when it comes to physics class. And
she can't concentrate on her tennis matches when
she's worried about the questions she missed on the
big test! Luckily for her, she befriends Ryota, a
patient physics geek who uses real-world examples to
help her understand classical mechanics-and improve
her tennis game in the process!" Palomar maintains a subscription to
Tech Books Online, and the books can be accessed
from any computer on the campus network without as
login, or with your Palomar login and password from
anywhere in the world.
Training
Opportunities
- Academic Technology Workshops
- The Academic Technology schedule of workshops
has been published for fall 2009.
Click here
to access the schedule. We will be offering
workshops in various topics related to Blackboard,
classroom technology, Google Earth, our new Learning
Object products for journals, blogs, wikis and
podcasts, and traditional workshops in web site
development and PowerPoint. We are offering
many workshops on Fridays this semester, along with
an all-day web development workshop on a Saturday
which will include lunch.
- Summer Tech camp has also been announced.
It will occur on August 4-6. Sign-up at the
PD Office.
- We have developed some anytime sets of
screen videos (screencasts) that teach how to use the features of
the various technology tools available to faculty
members through Blackboard:
How-to screencasts:
The Blackboard
Feature of the Week - David Gray
Blackboard: A Class Act
Rather than dwell on specific tools in
Blackboard, this time I'd like to draw comparisons between
several of the options in Blackboard and actual in-classroom
functions. If you're struggling to figure out what
Blackboard can do for you, perhaps this will help.
In class it's useful to get a feel for
which students are attending regularly. Most of the time
this is done anecdotally by recognizing the students; in
Blackboard you can stop by the Performance Dashboard and
easily see the last time a student has accessed the course
site.
In the classroom, if something out of the
ordinary is about to happen, or if something that's been on
the schedule for a while is about to be due, you might write
a note on the chalkboard. With the truly important things,
you may even want to "DNE" it, so other classes do not erase
it. Clearly this is the Announcement tool in Blackboard,
even down to the Make Permanent function to "DNE" your
information.
The most obvious comparison between
Blackboard and classroom functions is with handouts. If you
would have material photocopied and passed out in class, you
could have it posted as an item in Blackboard. A slightly
overlooked option is how Blackboard items also replicate
demonstration objects that you might bring into the
classroom. If you want your students to see an Asiatic mask,
or a monkey skull, or a topographic map of North America,
these things could also be displayed in Blackboard. Possibly
shooting a digital picture of the item would work, but there
are more freely available resources of complexity available
online than you might think; perhaps someone has a 3-D model
of that monkey skull, probably some governmental department
has the maps you need available. If you're not sure how to
get started finding such resources, that's a pretty
legitimate reason to call on Academic Technology for help.
If you do objective tests in class, you
likely have your students use a Scantron. If you just can't
limit yourself to "pick A-E for each question" testing, you
may have to manually grade objective tests by hand, which is
never a fun exercise. Blackboard's testing module excels at
automatically and immediately scoring objective test
questions, and may have more question choices than you'd
ever believe. Up to twenty possible answers per multiple
choice question, matching, ordering, multiple answer, fill
in the blank, and even "Where's Waldo" style Hotspot
questions where the student answers by clicking a specific
spot on an image are all easily set up in a Blackboard test.
If you ever use blue books, you may want
to try instead having students type up their work and submit
it via a Blackboard assignment. Imagine never needing to
decipher student penmanship again… And if your concern is
over limiting the time in which the students are working,
just have the papers typed up in a monitored environment,
either by bringing the whole class into a computer lab for
that class session, or by having laptops rolled out to your
classroom for students to use during the class session. Of
course a fully online class would just want to assume all
writing assignments are open book anyway, but an on-campus
class would not need to.
If your students are ever invited to talk
about class material during class sessions, then using the
Blackboard Discussion Board could be a good idea. Just set
up a forum, possibly seed it with some questions, then tell
the students to "talk amongst yourselves." Just because
students post to the forum doesn't make it uncontrolled;
there are options to have moderated discussions, and you
could even allow some trusted students to moderate in your
place. If you just want to facilitate student discussion
without making it a normal part of class, just set up a
forum and let students know they can post there for any
extra things they wish to discuss.
Do you show PowerPoint Presentations in
the classroom? Do you lecture? Likely you do, and Blackboard
has a variety of ways to make this material available to
students. Use the Elluminate tool to have a live
presentation online with your students, and record that so
the student who missed can at least see what went on. Or,
record a solo session, where you run through your
presentation similar to what you might do in a lecture hall,
then let the students watch that recording and post
questions to a discussion board. Even if you already have
all your material available in a written format, you could
still make little audio snippets using the Wimba Voice Tools
to accompany the written material, verbally drawing student
attention to the most vital material or correcting the
common misperceptions that your experience in the classroom
tells you at least someone will have.
With the tools in Blackboard it is
possible to replicate many of the features of a classroom
environment over the Internet. However, it is even more
possible to closely tie Blackboard features into an
on-campus class, and offer a richness to the flow of a
semester that could help your students to succeed. If
there's something you are doing in the classroom, and you're
interested in seeing if you can develop an online aid or
equivalent, give us in Academic Technology a call (atrc@palomar.edu
or X2862) and we'll see if we can work something out
together.
Teaching with Technology -
Dr. Haydn Davis Online Human Touch
Student enrollment in online classes continues to
increase nationwide. But, unfortunately, student
attrition is much higher in online classes relative
to traditional, on-campus classes.
Drexel University has developed an interesting
approach to ensuring that online students don’t drop
out. Called the Online Human Touch program. This
approach asserts that students are more likely to
remain in online courses if they are engaged with
the course and if their online learning experience
is personalized. While the Drexel program is a
comprehensive one that couldn’t be implemented here
in its entirety, some important elements could be –
and these could make a huge difference in student
retention.
Here are some practical ways that student
engagement and personalized communication can be
integrated into an online class (or an on-campus
class to for that matter).
- Welcome To Students
- the week before the semester begins,
make a phone call to each student – while
this may seem initially, like a time
consuming effort, it really doesn’t have to
be: when you reach a phone message it will
take maybe 30 seconds or so to welcome the
student to your class and if you actually
get the student on the phone it probably
will only be a minute or two in most cases
- record a welcome message, place it
somewhere in your course and link to it from
the Announcement area so students will see
(and listen) to it when they first enter the
class
- Use first names in all correspondence to
students
- Create a forum that allows students to
introduce themselves to each other – the Drexel
program requires students to post audio/voice
and text introductions and to respond to at
least two classmates during the first week
- Provide individualized feedback
- Drexel University faculty are required
to provide individualized comments on all
graded assignments – these comments allow
students to understand what they have done
well and what they need to modify
- Audio/Voice Contact
- consider sending voice emails – you can
create one and send it to all students (for
example a summary of that week’s activities)
or create a personalized one to send to a
particular student (for example reminding a
student to post to the DB or submit
assignments on time or praise for doing
something well)
- create brief audio messages regarding
such topics as weekly overview of the coming
week’s assignments, audio announcements
regarding local current events or a movie or
TV special that relates to that week’s
content, weekly wrap-ups that highlight some
main learning objectives and/or that mention
– by name – some student contribution, a
weekly (or periodic) podcast relevant to the
course
Survey data from students enrolled in the Drexel
University program that implemented the OHT approach
indicated that the online education they received
from this program was the same (53%) or higher (39%)
quality than on-campus programs.
Tech-Talk-Topic - Terry
GrayHow-to Screen Videos
 We
have developed an
extensive list
of how-to screen videos on using technology tools in
teaching, but this week I would like to bring you
several how-to videos produced by the vendors of the
technology products we use.
The first is from Jing maven Mike Curtis on how
to create a high-definition screen video with Jing
(a free screen capture utility from TechSmith) and
upload it to YouTube. YouTube upload requires
Jing Pro, which costs $14.95 per year. Of
course, you can save the $14.95 and upload the HD
Jing video on your own without the one-button
convenience, so it is not really required after all.
Click here
for the video.
The second screen video I have is an introduction
to StudyMate. StudyMate is an easy-to-use
program that we license from Respondus.com. By
simply entering a list of terms and definitions up
to ten flash-based learning activities can be
generated such as flash cards, fill-in-the-blank
exercises, matching activities, multiple choice
questions, even crossword puzzles. It is a
terrific program (but Windows only, sorry) and can
be
downloaded/licensed by Palomar faculty
members from our secure web site.
Click here
for the screen video.
Finally, we now have the ability to create
journals, blogs, wikis and podcasts built right in
to Blackboard.
Click here
for full information, and
here
to watch a screen video on the Journal tool.
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