Learning Technologies

Navigation tips for the map above

1. Left-click and drag your mouse on any white space in the map window to move the map.
2. Click on the + or – symbols to increase or decrease the size of the map

3. Click on the rectangle with the outward pointing arrows to make the map full screen

4. On the map, right-pointing arrows are hyperlinks to various resources. Click on the arrow to take you to that resource

5. On the map, the icon with 3 bars across it indicates there is a note attached to the branch. Hover over it with the mouse to bring the note up

Background to using Mindmaps for Workshop Presentations

I was out at one of our institutions yesterday doing a short workshop on using images for learning and teaching. I stopped handing out printed workshop material some time ago and most of my support material is now online, usually on slideshare or on various wikis. I decided to revisit an old approach I sometimes used which was to deliver my presentations with a mindmap rather than the usual PowerPoint presentation. In the old days MindManager was my tool of choice but now I’ve moved over to MindMeister which has a number of advantages. The mindmap I created yesterday is online and shareable so as I went through various resources the participants could follow the links on the map on their own machines. I can also embed the map in a blog as shown above for future reference. It also has a live update feature so when I change something on the map it will display the latest version. So I don’t have to worry about various versions of outdated notes floating about. This will always be the most recent version and as this map is a work in progress I’ll be adding more content to it over time.

Process

1. Create Map over at Mindmeister.com There’s a free and premium version. You can create up to 6 maps with the free version.

2. Publish Map. There’s a Share This button on the bottom of the map and this will bring up the Map Properties Window shown below. If I wanted to share this map privately with a small group of participants I’d click on the Share tab. In this case I want to make it public to everyone. Click on the Publish Tab (1). You have a number of options on this page including which category to publish it to, in this case Education and whether to password protect it. It also generates a permanent public URL for the map (2).

3. The URL is rather long and it’s much more convenient to use a URL shortening service like bit.ly if you’re asking participants to follow along on the day. You can also supply your own ending which makes it much easier to remember.

Paste the URL in the address box on the bit.ly page and click on Shorten

Bit.ly will suggest a random combination of numbers and digits (1) but you can override this (2) and specify your own. In this case nacimages

So the shortened address is http://bit.ly/nacimages which I pasted into notepad, increased the font size and displayed this on the data projector for participants to type into their browsers.

4. After the workshop the map can be embedded into a blog like this by once again going to the Share Map button, going to the Publish tab and clicking on Embed map… You can set various options here including map size and whether you want it to have a live update feature.

Copy and post the embed code into your blog. This blog uses WordPress. I make sure I’m in the html window (1) in the editor then paste in the code.

And that’s it. This blog post probably seems a bit wordy for what is really a simple process!

Addict-o-matic is a free web-based service that allows you to keep up-to-date with, well whatever you’re interested in. It searches the most popular social media sites for your keyword(s). No registration required. Just enter them in the search box and click on create. Here, I’ve searched for podcasting.

It returns a page of aggregated results from selected social media sites. You can rearrange the order of the individual site boxes by click-hold-and-dragging on the title bars. Click on the x to close a box.

You can also choose which services addict-o-matic searches by clicking on the Available Sources tab and selecting which sites you want it to search.

Once you’ve customised your page just bookmark it and it will automatically fetch the latest results for your search term when you next visit it. A quick one-stop-shop way to keep up to date with the latest information. Now what are folk saying about the much speculated Apple Tablet due to be announced tomorrow.

84% of the UK population owns a mobile phone,
Deliotte April 2009 (via Google – Internet stats)

What I’ve bookmarked this week:

• Google – Internet Stats
  Useful stats snippets from a variety of sources collated by Google. There’s a section on technology which covers broadband, devices, mobiles.
• JISC Digital Media – Newsletter
  JISC Digital Media have produced a new newsletter called Intermedia. First issue content includes articles on mobile learning, flickr and podcasting
• JISC Strategy Review 2010-2012 : JISC
  JISC are looking for your views to help inform their new strategy. Closing date is 24th September 2009

What is Anorexia Nervosa Video from NHS Choices Media Library

What I’ve bookmarked this week:

• HE Scotland Blog
  New Scottish Higher Education blog rounding up the latest news from the sector.
• Queen Margaret University: what is an ePortfolio?
  Concise info on ePortfolios including video case studies from QMU
• JISC TechDis – How to write your own workshop
  Came across a copy of this while tidying out my cupboard – it’s that time of year. TechDis commissioned Phil Race to write a guide on creating effective training workshops. Some useful info in here.
• How To Copy a DVD with VLC 1.0 :: the How-To Geek
  Need a small section of a DVD to play in class? The new version of VLC, the open source media player now has this functionality. Go to view then advanced controls once installed.
• Gliffy Online Diagram Software
  Gliffy, the free online diagram tool gets an overhaul.
• NHS Choices Media Library
  Wide range of health related videos from the NHS. Useful for Health, Social Science and Sports related subjects. There’s also some audio too.

Red squirrel with pronounced winter ear tufts in the Dusseldorf Hofgarten”, Ray Eye, Wikimedia Commons

What I’ve bookmarked this week:

• JISC Digital Media – Audio: Recording Skype Calls
  Tutorial explaining how to record skype calls. Useful for recording remote interviews.
• Pingdom Web site monitoring for 100% uptime. Measure your downtime.
  Pingdom’s previously paid-for basic account package is now free – limited to monitoring one website. Be notified when your website goes down.
• Official Google Blog: Find Creative Commons images with Image Search
  You can now search for creative commons licensed photos with Google’s Image Search

I’ve not had time to catch up with all the Google Wave hype so I wanted to download this 90 minute YouTube video and watch it tonight on my shiny new WDTV. Headed over to Zamzar who offer a great free service for downloading and converting YouTube videos.

However, the free service only allows files up to a 100Mb for conversion. This file is about 180Mb. Next step, my trusty fallback when things fail – media-convert.com but it looks like they’ve removed the YouTube download service.

A quick google search and KeepVid was one of the top hits. It’s straightforward to use. Just enter the address of the YouTube video you want to download in the box below and hit download. On this occasion it asked me to choose which version of the video I wanted to convert as it was available in high and standard. I chose the high quality version then saved it to my computer. That’s it. I let it download in the background while I got on with other things. It took about an hour to download and convert the YouTube video into mp4 format.

As an added bonus the converted mp4 file will also play on my iPod Touch.

A user over on Twitter, the microblogging service, asked me how to send photos to TwitPic via my Sony Ericsson K800i phone. TwitPic is a photo service for Twitter. I have to say it’s not obvious when you sign in. What you need to do is go to your settings in TwitPic. This is where you’ll find your email address that you use to send photos to TwitPic. I’ve put together a quick summary of steps required. This assumes that you already have a working email account set up on your phone.

download phone to twitpic pdf

You know something’s mainstream when it becomes a verb – “I’ll just google it” meaning I’ll search the web for something using Google. And using Google, you’ll quickly find information with it, but is it the information you’re looking for? With a few simple techniques you can improve the relevance of the information it returns to you.

In this short screencast I’ll show you how to search for phrases, documents like microsoft powerpoint and word and finally how to restrict the domains you search – useful for narrowing down your search to academic communities.

In summary

Click on the “advanced search” link on the main google page. This takes you to this page.

Step 1. Put what you are looking for into the field labelled this exact wording or phrase. In this example I was looking for QR codes. This forces google to return this exact phrase. In a normal search google would return the terms QR and codes but not necessarily together on the same page so possibly not relevant. This narrows the returned results down from about 8 Million to 200k. A big difference.

Step 2. You can search for different filetypes in google, ranging from pdfs, word docs and powerpoint. You can see a full list from the dropdown box. In this example I’m looking for powerpoint files.

Step 3. And probably one of the most useful techniques to bring back the most relevant information is to restrict your searching by domain name. If I was only interested in finding out about QR codes in the uk academic community I could restrict the domain search to ac.uk. Every tertiary education institution in the UK has a .ac.uk domain and if I wanted to do a similar search for sites in the States, I’d replace ac.uk with edu. I can further restrict the domain search by going up another level. I know the University of Bath are doing a lot of work with QR codes at the moment so I could restrict my search by typing in bath.ac.uk. This would only return results for the QR codes at the University of Bath.

Step 4. When you’ve got your search set up hit the Advanced Search button to retrieve your results.

Step 5. Not really a step more of an observation. The code here is the syntax for your search query. If you remember this you don’t actually have to go into the advanced search page at all. You can do it directly from google’s main page or the google toolbar if you’ve got that installed on your browser. It’s not as scary as it looks and it pretty easy to remember once you get used to it.

In the main google page I’ve typed this query into the search box.

I’m telling google to search for the exact phrase “qr codes”. I’ve done this by enclosing it in quotation marks. I then restrict the domain search to the academic community in the UK by typing the the term site:ac.uk and finally I’m only looking for powerpoint files. I do this by typing filetype:ppt.

Three simple techniques in a nutshell to improve the (potential) relevancy of your searches: phrases, domain restriction and filetype.

We’ll be looking at Google Alerts in Part 2 of Finding Information on the Web

Memory sticks, flash drives, usb drives, pen drives, thumb drives. All different names for the same technology – a usb storage device – a small portable device for storing data.

Back in 2005 JISC produced a booklet called “Innovative Practice with eLearning“. One of the case studies looked at the use of memory sticks with students. The challenge, at the University of Sussex was to “encourage greater ownership of digital learning materials”. Students were issued with a memory stick with course materials preloaded and encouraged to save their own work and “found” resources. Finding and sharing resources also formed part of the course assessment.

The Learning and Teaching potential was noted below

1. Can encourage student ownership of digital course materials
2. Can support collaborative activities
3. Enables continuity of work across different locations

As well as saving files on a memory stick you can actually run portable applications without the need to install anything on your computer. This is also great for students working across many different computers. They can set up the applications with their preferences without having to change them all the time.

For general portable applications a good place to start is portableapps.com. This site contains portable applications of many of the leading opensource and freeware applications including FireFox (Web Browser), Open Office (Alternative to MS Office) and Audacity (Audio Editor – great for podcasting).

Another excellent resource is AccessApps, an initiative developed by the Scottish JISC Regional Support Centres in cooperation with JISC TechDis. It consists of over 50 open source and freeware assistive technology applications which can be entirely used from a USB stick on a Windows computer. There are a range of e-learning solutions to support writing, reading and planning as well as visual and mobility difficulties.

Some things to consider when using a memory stick

1. If you plan to use memory sticks with students make sure they can access the usb ports on shared computers. I’ve only seen usb ports blocked in two institutions I’ve visited but it’s worth checking with your IT department as there could be potential network security risks when running portable applications.

2. What would happen if you lost your memory stick. Does it contain sensitive information (See 3). Have you backed up your stick? PortableApps contains an integrated backup tool. There are also sites like Mozy which do automatic remote backups. They have a free 2Gb account. An alternative to automatic backup solutions is to do it manually. Just remember to do it every so often! There a number of free sites like ADrive which offer a whopping 50 Gb of free online storage space for your data. Just checked out the ADrive website again and it looks like they now offer a remote backup solution on their free accounts too.

The advantage of having your data online is that you can access it anywhere that has an Internet connection. The downside is what if the company folds? Personally I use a belts and braces approach. I have my data stored locally and online.

Another tip is to put a plain text file on the top level (first window you see when you open it) of your memory stick called “If found” with your contact details. So if someone finds it, it can (potentially!) be returned to you.

3. There have been many stories in the news recently about memory sticks containing huge amounts of personal data ranging from dates of birth to bank details going missing. If you’re concerned about the data stored on your memory stick you could install something like TrueCrypt a free opensource encryption tool to protect your data.

So that’s a snapshot of some of the uses for memory sticks. I’ll cover more uses in future posts.

If you’re looking for information on the benefits of using images in your learning and teaching materials and looking for sources of images, TASI in partnership with Intute have just released a virtual training suite called “Internet for Image Searching“. There’s also a useful section on copyright law and image rights.

Intute: VIrtual Training Suite (VTS) are a collection of free Internet tutorials for teaching Internet research skills for over 65 university & college subjects. The tutorials are authored and updated by a national network of subject experts from UK universities and colleges. If you’re not familiar with the Virtual Training Suite model they are broken down into four sections: Tour, Discover, Judge, Success stories. There are resources mentioned throughout and you can click on the “add to basket” icon for any resources of interest. A bit like adding items to the basket if you’ve used Amazon before.

And when you’ve finished you click on the the Links basket icon (1). You’re then presented with a list of links you’ve added to your basket (2). And you can then email the list of links (3) to yourself for later reference.

Intute also provide a range of support materials including handouts and worksheets for use in teaching and training. And concluding the images theme they have a VTS on Digital Photography.

Intute VTS || Digital Photography