Jeopardy!

Looking for a fun way to help students prepare for a test? Ed Tech has a Jeopardy system including a large format screen and 3 interactive buzzers and a scoring console. Jim Stegge, professor of Biology shown here, piloted the “Classroom Jeopardy” system to assist his students in their review for an upcoming lab test.

“It only took about 20 minutes to fill in the answers and questions for the game,” said Stegge, who chose to do a single round of Jeopardy as well as final Jeopardy for his class.

If you are interested in incorporating Classroom Jeopardy into your class,this system is available for check out. You can upgrade current Powerpoint Jeopardy to the new system as well. If you are interested, and want assistance,contact Guy Hamernik in Educational Technology to get started.

Provided by website-hit-counters.com site.

Meebo - A live chat widget

This week we are featuring Deb Vang, our new online advisor, and how we have incorporated a live chat widget into the online advisor webpage. This widget indicates to the enduser when you are on or offline. If you are online, they can start an instant chat with you.

Any online instructor could replicate this either on a department webpage, or D2L to host live chats in an area students visit often.

You simply set up a free account at meebo.com and follow the "get started" instructions. Within minutes, you'll have created your own widget.

Here's what Deb's looks like:

Cool Iris

Cooliris (www.cooliris.com) is a web browser plug-in that allows the user to dynamically organize web-based images and movies. In addition, it's a handy tool to organize your personal or departmental images and multimedia. Cooliris integrates with popular web social networks such as Facebook and Youtube, and allows you to subscribe to video channels from your favorite networks, cable, and video sites (such as HULU.) All of this is provided in a fun, high-tech interface. Cooliris may even speed your searches for media! To experience Cooliris, watch the following movie:

Evaluating with Audio/Video

Need a new twist to correcting papers?


http://screenr.com/ekl


Shout out to Melissa Houghton for the request!

National Archives Experience

DON'T CLICK on the following link unless you have a lot of time - you will be hooked for hours! The link will take you to the National Archives Experience. Choose from thousands of starting topics, and a host of related topics to view and read will surround your topic. Drag something else into the middle and you'll view a new set of relationships. Creat your own pathways and customize for class activies.

Not only is the material presented worthy of a look, but the genius in presentation is something to behold. This could lead to amazing teaching and learning.

Don't miss this one!

http://www.digitalvaults.org/

Pen-Casting

This blog is a shout out to Mary Olson from BTEC.

It's been over a year since we first told you about livescribe. (http://rctcet.blogspot.com/2009/09/livescribe.html)

Mary has recently mastered this recording pen and has been using it to explain test results to her students noting some common errors and expanding a teachable moment in a visual way with accompanying audio.

Here's Mary's pencast: http://tinyurl.com/235codm

You simply click the play button. Note you can expand to a full screen view in the upper right hand corner.

In a continued effort to create community, feel free to use the comment area and share some other ideas of how you might use this pen. Remember - Ed Tech has 2 of these pens available for checkout.

Widgetbox

Much like adding a gadget to your desktop via Windows 7 (or on a MAC) you can add "widgets" to your website, or D2L site using WIDGETBOX. Widgetbox is a free Web 2.0 app that supplies you with code to embed everything from a window into your blog or video library, to polls and slideshows. For example? We have embedded this Ed Tech blog into our Ed Tech Website, as well as a D2L class. Try it out at: http://www.widgetbox.com/

Here's our blog in our webpage:

Here's our blog in D2L:

Compress to Flash in a flash!

Any Video Converter is a free tool which can convert and compress your video files into multiple formats including flash video. This is the native video format of sites such as TeacherTube and YouTube. It also allows you to convert and save videos from these sites to your local hard drive. Videos you create can be easily converted and uploaded to D2L. To learn more about this intuitive software, watch the short tutorial movie below. Click here to download Any Video Converter for PC OR MAC






Free Counter

Google Docs AND harmon.ie

If you haven't tried google docs - you need to! Not only can you create several types of documents online and store them there, but you can make them available to others for collaboration purposes.

Google Docs:

Create documents, spreadsheets and presentations online. Keep them private, or share them with others by simply inviting them by supplying an email.

The coolest thing we've seen lately? An app that incorporates your google docs (and sharepoint sites) into your OUTLOOK! Shout-out to Thomas Yung in Technology for this one!

Here is an example of a shared document appearing within Outlook. When changes are made to this document - all those who "share" it see the reflected, updated changes.

http://www.google.com/google-d-s/tour1.html

http://harmon.ie/

WIZIQ

Have you ever tried to explain a problem over the phone, or in an email using text? Sometimes being there works wonders. Here's a free, easy way to meet with students virtually to share your desktop, whiteboard, documents and a host of other features.

It's called WizIQ and it's basic mode is free. Here' some of what you can do online with this product:

1. Explain visually using a whiteboard (notice you can hook up a webcam and talk through the problem at the same time)

2. Share and annotate on documents :

3. Create quizzes - and distribute with a URL:

Plus... show your desktop to demonstrate a task. Free, easy and even fun. Start your year out right by engaging your students differently - or use this as a new means of support, or anytime when distance is a barrier. You will need a microphone. Perfect for that hybrid class!!!

Go to http://wiziq.com/ and create your account today!

Rubric Study

This week we're featuring Tim O'Neil's study on adding a Rubric when using the discussion board in online classes. Tim would welcome you to actually register into this voicethread (can be done in under 30 seconds) and add to the discussion. Talking about rubrics is very timely with our upcoming D2L version upgrade where the rubrics tool has been vastly improved!

From Tim: This VoiceThread presentation is sharing the results from a 2009-2010 FIDG grant on Engaging and Assessing Online Dialectic. I try to run my online discussions very much like my face-to-face courses but the asynchronous environment has challenges for the back-and-forth dialectic that I prefer to use for teaching. The project compared two groups of students - two online sections in each group - over two semesters. The first group received the traditional, written instructions on excellent online participation, the second group received a rubric for assessment in addition.

You can access the presentation below and can pause it at any point to add your own comments or questions using text, microphone, webcam or telephone.

Picasa as Photo Editing Tool and More!

Looking for a fun way to organize and share your digital photos? Want to have access to a photo editor to do simple retouches, add effects, and build collages? Want a tool that integrates well with the pictures in iPhoto on your Mac? Want a program that does all this on the PC? Enough of these darn questions. If you answered "yes" to any of the above, then you owe it to yourself to check out Picasa, free photo editing software from Google. The video below explains some of the features of Picasa.

If you want to find out more information or want to download the program to your home computer, visit http://picasa.google.com

Google Reader

Does your class require you and your students to keep abreast of news events while they happen? Politics, sports, local news, and pop culture all change daily. A web reader can deliver these stories direct to you right after they're posted! Stay up to day with your favorite news sites and blogs. You can access/read all of them in one place with a reader. There are several brands of readers (all free) out on the web, but we recommend Google Reader for its ease of use and large menu of types of sites you can "register" to receive.



Google reader lets you subscribe to your favorite websites. Each posted story contains a link to the original content, and an email link to send the article to anyone in your address book. Signing up is easy (especially if you already have a Google account.)

http://www.google.com/reader

How about making your own media?

We often get asked how to "borrow" youtube videos to embed into powerpoint productions. Typically, we are apt to help - but it is important to point out that technically downloading personal copies of Youtube videos is not supported by the Youtube terms of service. There are tools and sites, such as Zamzar, Meep, Vixy and others that assist in this process - but be aware that if you do this and it is in violation of youtube's terms of service, you do so at your own risk.

If internet connection allows, it's always best to link directly as opposed to downloading a video from the web.

Better yet - there are a host of media creation software out there to try. Here's an overview of what Microsoft offers:

Delicious

This week's blog entry, Delicious, has been around for a long time. I still frequently run into people who don't know what it is - so we've decided to feature it. It's one of those must-have organizational tools that you won't know how you did without once you have it.

How many times have you bookmarked a favorite/necessary website at work, only to get home and realize you can't get to it because you saved it on another computer? If you learn to bookmark on the web, instead of your computer, this doesn't have to ever happen.

Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows you to tag, save, manage and share Web pages all in one place. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.

Things you can do with Delicious
Bookmark any site on the Internet, and get to it from anywhere
Instead of having different bookmarks on every computer, Delicious makes it easy to have a single set of bookmarks kept in sync between all of your computers. Even if you're not on a computer you own, you can still get to your bookmarks on the Delicious website.

Share your bookmarks, and get bookmarks in return
If your friends use Delicious, you can send them interesting bookmarks that they can check out the next time they log in. Of course, they can do the same for you. As you explore the site and find interesting users, you can use the Subscriptions and Network features to keep track of the Delicious tags and users you find most interesting.

Start your account now: http://www.delicious.com/

Wordle

Wordle is a web tool that generates a "word cloud" graphic - a visual representation of text. You provide text, the site creates a graphic giving prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source you provide. You can provide the text manually, or link to a website/blog to import the text.

These "wordles" were created from the text found in this blog. You can apply varying color schemes and fonts to your project.

To create your own, go to http://www.wordle.net/ .

How could you use this? Please comment below.

Windows Speech Recognition

Based on a student request, we went searching for a way to use your voice to write a paper and had to look no further than our own backyard so to speak! Speech recognition has been around for quite a few years, but with Windows 7 - it's at its best. Available previously in XP and Vista, the latest version of this software is superior in ease of use in every way.

Hidden under program accessories, in the "Ease of Access" folder, you'll find this gem of a tool. The tutorial is extremely well done, and helps your computer recognize your voice, while teaching you how to operate the software.

This is perfect for those of us who still are hunting and pecking on the keyboard, not to mention a wonderful asset for disabled students. Try it yourself, and share it with your students.

Teacher Tube is a new streaming video site, similar to YouTube, which was created by teachers for teachers. The site (which is barely 2 years old,) contains more than 26,000 videos from instructors throughout the world.

Instructors have used this resource for project submission and resource sharing. It's instructional uses allow its content to not be blocked at most institutions. Instructors may upload their video content, or link to any of the content on the site.

For more information, visit www.teachertube.com

Here is a brief yet interesting video about an amazing deep space Hubble Telescope discovery:

SpokenText

Click on the play button below. This is a recording made with a free web application that takes written text and converts it into an audio file. It is very quick and easy. Spokentext.net allows you to make recordings of text by uploading documents, web pages, or by typing on the fly.

With the initial free account, recordings only last 30 days hosted on their server, but you can download your recordings to keep permanently. Use the comments below this blog to add discussions on how likely you would be to want to use this often.

Sharepoint

Sharepoint, though full of organizationally complex benefits, is a particularly good document management system. Watch this video by commoncraft for a general overview. RCTC is running a simple version - let us know if you'd like your own site!

Screener

Screenr has just been introduced as an open-source free video screen capture application. Designed to be used in conjunction with twitter, we have found it to be a very useful tool on its own merit. The biggest improvement over other open source video capture applications, is the ability to download the final product to your computer and own the file.

Fast facts:
Record your screen actions for up to 5 minutes
WEb based - nothing to download
Mac or PC based
Share by link, or embed code
HD available
FREE!

Try it yourself: http://screenr.com/

Here is the sample we made: