Teaching With Blogs by Todd Nickle

Todd Nickle has put up a great resource that focuses on teaching with blogs and several tools that can help you do that.

http://easyblogteaching.blogspot.ca/ is the link. Check it out.

Prezi adds Voice Overs and Background Music

I have been using Prezi off and on for a few years. One of the features that Prezi has lacked until now is the ability to put a voice narration on your presentation. There are plenty of ways to do this with slideshows made with other tools and you could actually do it with Prezi but it was not easy because you had to stick the sound file into a SWF file and post it to your Prezi canvas like a flash object. Not any more.

LORE.com

Last term I explored using a brand new EdTech tool call Coursekit.com that was a free online alternative to Blackboard. I was teaching two sections of my Creativity in the Workplace class and I put both sections on it, after asking the students if they were game to test it out.  It went well.

It was brand new and still a little rough around the edges but the feedback from the students was that they liked it better than Blackboard, which they are all familiar with because it is heavily used at MRU. Coursekit is interesting because it is free to use, well supported and developed by university students. It was the last characteristic to attracted my attention the most. I was intrigued with how university students would design a better LMS.

This summer Coursekit was renamed to LORE.com and received a significant facelift.  It is very student and community centred. Not unlike Facebook. I found it the most useful to get the students to share with each other, which is not easy to do in Blackboard.

You need to check it out if you are looking for an alternative to your institutionally provided LMS.  What is great about LORE.com is that it is designed to be adopted at the instructor level so you don't have to try to talk your institution into adopting it.   And your students can use their Facebook logins to log in to LORE.com so they don't have to manage another login.

I don't think I will be using it this year because now that we have Google Apps for Education, I am going to be designing our course sites using Google Sites and Groups. These are more mobile device friendly, too.

If you have used LORE.com, post a comment about it.

Using games in teaching Chemistry

I am making a presentation today on how to use games to teaching chemistry.  Go to http://goo.gl/epcK to access the hand out of links and resources.

Rod Corbett

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.

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.

Another Free eBook on Teaching with Web 2.0 Apps

Here is another free ebook on how to use free Web 2.0 or Cloud Computing apps to enhance your teaching.  This ebook is by Ana Maria Menezes

 Very interesting.  Some of the tools were covered is the two books by Michael Zimmer but there are always new ideas to be gleaned.

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.

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/

EtherPad Clones

Etherpad is a very interesting tool for collaboratively writing on the web without anyone having to register and set up accounts.  It has some wonderful features to make this easy but Google has decided to take it off-line.  But Google has allowed its code to be shared and so there are several clone sites appearing on the web.  Click here to see a list of clone sites.

Mashpedia - The Real-Time Encyclopedia

Here is another gem that Leon shared with me. Mashpedia claims to be a real-time encyclopedia.  What it really is is a meta search tool.

On the front page you can see what are current news items, trending topics, people and brands. And you can see links to the current movies out.

When you enter a search string in the search field what Mashpedia does is searches the following sites with that search string, which is also what is does if you click on any of the links on the front page:

Big Huge Labs (Education Edition)

I have been playing around with Big Huge Labs site for a bit now and it is worth a deeper look.  If you are using digital photography in your teaching and you are looking for some fun things to do with your photos, this site provides an array of tools that you can use. And there is an educational feature that makes it easier to work with your students as they use it.

Brainstorming in the Clouds - Edistorm

Here is a gem I just found and I am eager to use in class and a workshop on Tuesday.  It is called Edistorm.   It is a brainstorming tool that using the metaphor of using different coloured sticky notes on a wall to collect, share, sort and rank ideas.  What I like about it is:

Dropbox.com

I just recently discovered this gem. Dropbox.com is a free (has a free level of use) cloud based file backup and retrieval tool. But it does a lot more:

• You get 2 GB (or 2,000 MB) of storage space to start with.  I only have 10 MB on this Blog site.
  
  

Presentations with Prezi.com

Prezi is a new kind of presentation tool. It is quite different from PowerPoint and slideshow based presentations tools. It allows you to approach preparing and giving presentations in very different way.

What I like about Prezi:

• It is free.

Cloud Computing for Your Classroom

There are many useful cloud computing applications that are emergingthat you can easily use in your classroom to engage your students and supportcollaborative learning. Cloud computing applications are tools that reside totallyon the Web and you can access through any computer with a Web browser andInternet connection. Many of these tools can be used with very little investmentof time to learn and set up -- and, most of them are free. In this session, we willreview several of these resources and how you can employ them to enhance your teaching.

Resources:

• Prezi including links to my three top ten lists.
• Shared Typewith.me document.
• Go2Web20.net- Cloud Computing Applications Index
• Growing list of Free Cloud Computing Teaching Tools that I and others are compiling.
• Click here to sign up for a free Dropbox.com account and get a 250MB Bonus.

If you are using a free cloud computing app in your teaching, share it with us. Post a comment.

Rod Corbett

Using Games in Class

Games can be used for many aspects of teaching but they can be great for reviewing content. Here are a list of free web-based resources that will make it easy for you to create a game for doing a review activity.

• Parade of Games in Powerpoint - free templates for several types of PowerPoint games
• JeopardyLabs - create Jeopardy games without PowerPoint
• Novel Games - embed flash games in to your course pages.
• Five Free Crossword Puzzle Builders -
• Free PowerPoint Templates
• Free PowerPoint Games
• More Games Templates

Jeopardy Labs: Make Your Own Online Jeopardy Game

I just ran across this cool cloud-based tool. It is a website where you can create your own Jeopardy games to be used in class.

Jeopardy Labs: Make Your Own Online Jeopardy Game is a post about it but you can go directly to the website at http://jeopardylabs.com/ And if you don't what to build a template yourself, there are several there already to choose from.

Things I like about it:

• It is free to use,
• it is very easy to use,
• no software installation required,
• no registration required and
• you don't need PowerPoint.

Rod

Give Away of the Day website

This is an interesting site. Everyday, they give away a software tool or utility that you can download install and try out. Check out at http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/

All the offers I have seen so far are for Windows computers and it appears that you have to download and install on the "give away" day in order for the license keys to activate.

Rod

Adobe Photoshop for Free?

Adobe has released a free online version of Adobe Photoshop. It is called Adobe Photoshop Express. Sure, it doesn't have all of the power of the original version but it is free and online so you can use it without having to install anything, if you have Flash Player already installed.

I have taken it for a quick test drive and it looks great. Check it out at http://www.photoshop.com/express/

Rod