25 Aug / 2016

Pathbrite: An ePortfolio site and nice alternative to Google Sites

For ease of use, many of use have created ePortfolios — and helped our students create them — on Google sites. Enter Pathbrite, a website that is dedicated to creating ePortfolios. I created a free account and it prompted me to start building, with documents (“like your resume”), videos, photos, awards, etc. My first message was from Pathbrite, sharing a collection of sample portfolios.

They are definitely promoting the site to educators, with a claim that “two independent studies by San Francisco State University and Queensborough Community College showed the introduction of digital portfolios to their courses increased student completion rates by up to 33%.” There are also lots of very positive statements with regard to student metacognition and insight. And instructors can set up courses within Pathbrite, with analytics and productivity measurements, as well.

I assumed that the Free Account would be limited in some way, and they’d want me to upgrade to a paid account of some kind to access all the features and abilities. If that’s the case, they certainly are concealing it well — I can’t find anything about upgrades or paid accounts at all!

Pathbrite does integrate with many LMS, but, thus far, BrightSpace is not one of them.

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22 Aug / 2016

Artificial Intelligence research informs teaching practices for adaptive learning

Welcome back, everybody! First day of classes — go get ’em! We talk a lot about learning styles and using technology to facilitate individualized learning. This article has some interesting observations about that, as well as about why programming machines to be ‘experts’ is still a long way off — because most human experts do what they do without really knowing they’re doing it!

Somehow, that makes me feel better about how I expect today to go…!

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17 Aug / 2016

Intel says “‘What if?’ will be” with regard to “merged reality” (and it kind of freaks me out)

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22 Jun / 2016

Samsung’s Virtual Reality platform now (sort of) available in the US

“Next month, they’ll take things a step further with a competition, where indie filmmakers and creators will create VR/360 content using Samsung’s VR products and will compete in 10 different categories: Music, Auto, Science and Tech, Gaming, Travel, Fashion, Culinary, Cause-related, 4D, and Sports.”

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18 Jun / 2016

Nova Labs “Cybersecurity Challenge” game: educating AND entertaining!

Public Broadcasting Systems’ “Nova” television program has published a CyberSecurity Lab online game that educates the user about the importance of complex passwords, how to identify phishing attempts and even a little bit about coding and network security in general. There’s a very nice educator’s guide for using this resource, too. I’m going to include it in all my computer lab classes this fall!

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19 May / 2016

Google’s newest Virtual Reality play breaks the field wide open

Google has announced that, rather than holding their virtual reality platform close to their chest, they are doing what they did with Android — creating a software infrastructure and encouraging everybody to have at it, competing and collaborating to create new virtual reality viewing software on Android cell phones. This should be interesting!

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22 Apr / 2016

Evolution of the Desk

Where on the timeline did your students begin using computers and desks?

From BestReviews, thanks for allowing us to share!

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14 Apr / 2016

Powerpoint to Lecture Capture with one easy add-in

Get Office Mix If you’ve been using Powerpoint slides for lecture and would like to tryeasy lecture capture, Microsoft Office Mix may be just the thing for you. Mix is an add-in for Powerpoint 2013 and Office 365. The download is free and installation is simple. Then Mix shows up in the toolbar of Powerpoint with voice capture and editing tools. You do need a Microsoft Account to download the add-in; these accounts are free and do come with some other benefits, such as a secure “wallet” for payment information and access to Microsoft’s free cloud storage space.

Once installed, the “Mix” tab at the top of Powerpoint will give you this toolbar:
Mix Screenshot

Mix supports insertion of quizzes with student device interaction and analytics, à la Poll Everywhere and Socrative. You can also annotate slides as you add your voice-over, and your presentation can easily be uploaded to the Microsoft Mix cloud but you can also export to video, so you can put it on Youtube or whatever video platform you are used to using.

Once you’ve created a presentation video, it can be played from any machine; Mix and Powerpoint don’t have to be installed, just the usual sort of media player.

Microsoft has created some really nice video tutorials for Mix and this nice “cheat sheet” for teachers.

Mix is an obvious asset to Powerpoint; one wonders that it has taken this long to appear. It is amazingly full-featured, actually. I am often creating video tutorials or lessons on things other than Powerpoint presentations: how to navigate an application we’re using in class, marking up a Word document, etc. and I thought I would still need to use a separate screen capture application such at Tech Smith’s Snagit (my fave) for that. Wrong! Mix supports full-screen recording (and the interface is remarkably similar to SnagIt’s!)

It is possible to add Mix to the menu of External Tools on Desire 2 Learn’s Brightspace (i.e. our Learning Management System, Talon), but I think it’s just as easy to set the privacy on your Mixes appropriately and insert a direct link to them.

I’ve only started to explore Mix. Thus far, I’m pretty smitten. Do you use Mix? What do you think?

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14 Apr / 2016

RocketBook Wave — re-usable notebook optimized for image capture

I apparently bought in to one of the crowd-source funding items on IndieGogo (probably some bluetooth thingy to help me find my keys. Have you seen my keys?) and so now get their “this product is HOT” updates. This morning’s included one called Rocketbook Wave. It’s pretty simple, really, although I’m sure the background technology is very complex: it’s a notebook and pen. One takes notes in the notebook as one would if one were handwriting one’s notes instead of typing them into a laptop or other device. The pages and ink are optimized for image capture by your cellphone, Wave capture

and the image capture is automatically loaded into Rocketbook’s cloud storage system.

At first, this seems like a cumbersome process, and much less useful than, say, LiveScribe’s pen, which “records” what is written and allows playback of the same. However, while recent studies confirm that handwritten material is better retained, one of the real drawbacks is living with all the paper that accumulates. With this notebook, after you capture the images of the writing, you then microwave it to “erase” it, and start over. (Sounds rather hygienic, too… I expect most of our devices and especially keyboards would benefit from a similar cleansing).

The concept is clearly popular, as the inventors have reached 3,562% of their funding goal at this writing. I don’t think I’ll jump on the bandwagon quite yet but if you do, I hope you’ll let us know what you think! The product is currently expected to ship in August of this year.

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14 Apr / 2016

Free Technology for Teachers

“Free Technology For Teachers” — that’s the name of a Facebook page and matching website that regularly publish links to, yes, you guessed it, free technology for teachers. Much is targeted at K-12 educators; I don’t know about you, but I’ve found many such apps to be quite helpful.

One recent link was to a newsletter called Practical Ed Tech. Both sites are written by the same busy guy named Ed Byrnes. I’m impressed! Anyway, the newsletter entry was titled “5 good tools for creating audio recordings online.”

Who would need such a thing? I do, actually. For all kinds of office skills classes, I need both to have a library of “answering machine” messages that students can practice transcribing onto written message pads, as well as an easy way for students to record speaking exercises, everything from vocabulary to “how would you respond to a client who asks this question?”

The app I chose to go with is Vocaroo, which is absurdly simple. You navigate to the website from a computer or device that has a microphone installed; you record your pieces; the app asks for an email address and then it emails the voice file. That’s all there is to it! 640px-His_Master's_Voice

If you’d like to try it, I hope you’ll add to my library of “grooming request calls.” All you need to do is to pretend to be a pet owner seeking pet grooming services, or asking questions about the same. Remember, there’s no such thing as a dumb question, and also that all too many callers assume the recipient of a message can easily guess the correct spelling of their name, the area code of their phone number, etc. If you do record a message, please email it to me at kristi.murdock@kirkwood.edu. Thank you!

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