Turning Point Clicker Kits

This week we feature Holly Bigelow for her use of the TurningPoint 2008 Clicker Kits to enhance student participation.

Holly Bigelow, Director of Admissions and Records, wanted to encourage involvement in a recent presentation. Using the TurningPoint 2008 audience response system, she converted her PowerPoint slides into an interactive presentation that included audience feedback. The Clicker Kits are available to checkout from Educational Technology. Stop by for a demonstration. Congratulations to Holly Bigelow for using technology to enhance participation!

Featured Staff: Nancy Hust and Amy Sands

This week we feature Nancy Hust and Amy Sands for their innovative ideas to help students retain vital information to pass their tests and nursing boards.

The RCTC Nursing instructors decided that the current procedural materials used in their courses could be better explained through video to aid students. Using an instructional design approach, Hust and Sands broke down several procedures into a detailed step-by-step process. With the aid of the RCTC Educational Technology Department, the nurses used their acting talents and nursing professionalism to recreate these situations for videotape. The edited procedures were then captured and streamed through the RCTC server and the links were posted in their D2L class sites. To view these exciting procedures, click on the link below. Congratulations to Nancy Hust and Amy Sands for using technology to enhance student learning!

CLICK HERE

Doodle!

Tired of the time it takes to plan a date and time for a meeting between several people? You can either do it the old fashioned way and send out an Outlook invite - and receive several “Decline to attend” responses - or you can set up a poll in Doodle to see what time works best for everyone, and then lock it in place. In short, Doodle makes it easy by using a web poll-based scheduling system. (It’s not a calendar. )

Doodle takes the pain out of scheduling events by replacing the human coordinator with a simple web application. No registration is required for organizers or attendees and it's free! It has a clean, simple, intuitive interface. Schedule meeting options in 3 easy steps then email the link to attendees to gather their input. That’s it. When the organizer views the results, a tally appears at the bottom of each suggested date.

For more information and to sign up, click here: http://www.doodle.com/

Educational Gaming

For those that may have missed the gaming seminar at last week's staff development day, Educational Technology would like to share links to some great games you may find useful in your classes.

Purpose Games

These first two examples come from purpose games (www.purposegames.com)

How well do you know your Minnesota geography? Take this quiz to find out!

CLICK HERE

Think you know Hollywood? Match the P name with the leading actor or actress.

CLICK HERE


Study Mate

Studymate provides games that can be used by learners such as Flash Cards, Crossword Puzzles, Matching, and Pick a Letter. RCTC has paid for Studymate licenses, and you can download the application to your home PC, or ask the friendly TSC Staff to install it on your imaged workstation. Your completed quiz can easily be uploaded into your D2L class site. Contact Educational Technology if you would like assistance. (Sorry Mac users, this is currently a PC only download.)

How to access: Log into your D2L account. Under "Course Offerings," enter the Resource Room. Click on the Studymate Link (about 1/3 of the way down the page.) Download by clicking on the Studymate 2.0 link. When the installer has completed its job, launch the application. Copy and Paste the RCTC institution name, Support Contact (Missy Hagen,) and serial number into the required field when prompted.

Do you know your Springsteen from Springfield? Ann Gillian from Gilligan? Take this Pop Culture quiz to test your knowledge.

Click Here

Game Show Presenter

Want to turn your class into a game show? This fun (and sometimes obnoxious) game can be purchased for $149. per license. If you want to try it out, you can download a copy to evaluate with the link below.

CLICK HERE

Quia

Quia allows users to play classic games like Husker Du and Battleship while learning course materials. This game is sort of a hybrid between Purpose Games and Studymate, with many different type of games available for creation. Licenses cost at most $49. per instructor annually, and are actually cheaper if more licenses are purchased. For more information...

Click Here

The Last Lecture

If you enjoyed the Last Lecture and want to learn basic computer programming, try Alice. This free program allows you to animate 3D characters using fun, easy to follow tutorials. Kids enjoy it too!

Click Here

Have you built a game using one of these tools? Using a game not featured here? Tell us about it!

Online Learning Club

This week the Distance Education Committee unveiled their new Online Learning Club. The first presenter was adjunct faculty business instructor Todd Johnson. These sessions are presented virtually using Adobe Connect and recorded for later viewing to those who can't attend the meeting live. The topic for their first meeting was "Rapid Fire Feedback" in which Johnson gives audio and visual feedback to students while scrolling through their paper. Check it out:

click here to view Todd's presentation



Todd Johnson
Rapid Fire Feedback

Featured staff: Randy Renken using Voicethread

Randy came to Ed Tech early this semester looking for a way to create visuals to teach his students names and parts of the human skeleton. Typically Voicethread is a great tool for class interaction - however, it also is a tool which allows you to stop video action. This, combined with voice recording and the ability to annotate on top of the movie, proved to be not only a great collaborative tool, but also a great tool for creating presentations. Guy Hamernik took Randy's collection of bones, placed them on a turntable covered with black velvet and videoed each bone. Randy took it from there and narrated an entire collection of videos. Here's a sample:

http://voicethread.com/share/

sitepal.com

Create an animation for your website!

Animoto

Need a quick way to show off some digital images - or need to create a quick promotional ad? ("embeddable" in facebook,D2L, blogs, etc). Check out "Animoto" - a web 2.0 tool MnScu trainers are singing praises over. It's quick and easy. This video was made in seconds after taking some pictures at my daughter's frisbee tournament. The music is provided by the site - but it is possible to provide your own - or to record a voiceover.

Animoto

The JING project

ok - this is pretty exciting! (albeit i must say upfront that it is a project - and therefore subject to change - i.e. eventual charge.... but for now...free free free.)

Jing is a downloadable piece of software (sorry - this means no, you can't use it on your imaged computer - but IT is looking into it) try it at home - it's very slick and easy to use.

Jing works similarly to captivate, snag-it, camtasia - and other screen capturing software. It allows you to capture images of your screen OR capture movies of you working on your desktop in any application and immediately allows you to share them by providing a URL link to your users (students, co-workers, friends). The images/videos live on their server - making the permanence factor a little ambiguous. Check it out - if nothing else - it's great experience getting used to this type of software.

here is a sample i prepared in just a few seconds:

http://screencast.com/t/9aOoaczECY

here is where you can find out more information:

http://www.jingproject.com

Protopage

This tech tip actually came from Jason Dahl quite a while ago - but i have only recently discovered how much i like it. Protopage is a webtool that allows you to create your own personalized page that gives you quick access to everything on the web that you go to most. You can use it to read news, access bookmarks, post photos, organize schedules and to do lists, post calendar items, sticky notes, the weather - the list goes on and on.

Creating a page is easy - and involves simply dragging and dropping "widgets" onto a page. Your page can be private or public and can even be set as your homepage which allows it to appear everytime you open your web browser. I just keep mine open all day long.

To start yours today - go to
http://www.protopage.com

Audacity

Audacity is a free software program for recording and editing audio. Audacity runs on several operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows."

You can use Audacity to record sounds onto your computer, either live (with a microphone) or pre-recorded (from tapes or records). Audacity can also open and edit audio files, including tracks downloaded from the internet or copied from CDs. Audacity can open and save MP3, WAV, AIFF, and several other types of audio files.

You can edit recordings with Audacity the same way you edit text with a word processor. Audacity can cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together. Filters are included for altering speed and pitch, adding echo or reverb, removing noise from recordings, and more.

This is a free, downloadable product which can be found at:


http://audacity.sourceforge.net

Voice Thread

Here is a new FREE gadget available on the web that has tons of possibilities in your classroom. It's called voicethread - and it allows you to upload photos and have people comment on them - either by voice or text. It's simple and free - you will need a microphone if you wish to use audio.



Go to the following link to create your own! (There is a GREAT sample out here - called what is a voice thread)

http://www.voicethread.com

RSS Readers

They say that surfing the net for news is so "yesterday". Rather than surging site after site to find out about the topics you are interested, bring the news to you by using an RSS Reader. RSS - stands for Really Simple Sindication - and are made into "feeds" which are often articles or audio podcasts that one can subscribe to much like one subscribes to a magazine or newspaper. If you subscribe to a feed, updates of the subscription appear on a "reader" - they are simple to add to or delete. I happen to use Google Reader - but there are several out there. Give it a try!

Photoshop Tutorials

To coincide with our Photoshop classes this week, we thought it appropriate to post a link to some tutorials you can try additionally on your own.

There are a million sites out there with great tips for this piece of software. Simply google "photoshop tutorials". Here's a sample we found:

http://www.planetphotoshop.com/tutorials.html

Make your WIKI today!

Wiki's are education's hot new trend to create documents and pages that multiple people can edit.

Check out pbwiki to make yours this weekend - where they claim it's as easy to make as a peanut butter sandwich. We agree!

pbwiki

Ed Tech uses wikis to post staff assignments and communicate department issues. Some faculty use it for creating class projects. It's fast, it's fun, it's easy - another online community!

Hellodeo

Here is a FREE quick way to put up a movie on a website or D2L. Simply go to Hellodeo.com and follow the directions. Steve and Missy made this in 30 seconds. All you need is a simple webcam hooked up to your computer.

Anonymous Office Hours - Are they for YOU?

Studies have shown that many students don't take advantage of office hours due to anxiety and that most instructors use this time to catch up on paperwork. There are also studies that show students who DO attend office hours are more likely to be successful.

We have discovered a tool developed by Marco Pollanen, a mathematics instructor from Trent University that allows one to hold online office hours - it's called enVision. This format for office hours works well for face to face classes AND online classes. Students can participate anonymously if they choose to.

It is a chat/whiteboard program for writing mathematical equations (more of a drawing program) as well as just plain text in chat mode. It is a java applet (java 1.1, no plug-in needed) that loads into a standard browser. It is FREE and available at www.xiom.org (there is currently no sound capability) Don't you LOVE people who share their stuff?

If this looks like something you'd like to download - contact computer services for assistance.

Want to IM in D2L or your website? Visit: http://www.meebo.com and get started. If it says we are online - give it a try!

PDFs - the nuts and bolts

Here's a great overview of PDF creation. How, when and why to create PDFs from documents vs. html. Written by Leslie Fisher

click here for handout