Sharing your PDF files

Found Yudu mentioned on a blog while I was searching for something else.....one of my favorite occurrences. Kinda like finding spare change in the couch when you are looking for the missing phone. It just so happened I had given a workshop to teachers recently about running a Paperless classroom and one of the suggestions I made was to make all their worksheets/assignments available online as PDFs. The students could download them or read them from their browsers. We have the capability to do this in two ways in our building. One, is to place the files on our server. Two, is to place files in a Google Site page they create specifically for this purpose.

I now have a third option. Yudu is a way to put your PDF files online and make them available to your students for free. Some restrictions apply but they are the same ones that apply in my building so I don't see a problem.

• No adult content
• No offensive material
• No copyright abuse

You have the following options regarding your PDFs. You can make your material:

• Public Everyone can see and browse this content
• Private Only You can see this content
• Protected Password protect your content to limit who can view it.

Anybody else tried this site yet? Any opinions?


[via Free Technology for Teachers]

File structure and web design

Generally speaking, my students don't understand computer file structure. After multiple experiences losing their assignments, the majority of them can at least save into their network folder. It's kind of like the backpack many of them carry. They stuff their work into the vast void and feel secure that it' in there somewhere. Maybe not immediately retrievable but accessible.

I've read a couple of articles stating that because of tagging and improving search functions, it will someday not matter that you have your files scattered across a morass of oddly named folders and a hundred files all called "untitled". Considering the state of my physical desktop, my office and my garage, I don't have much of a high horse from which to preach. So, for most of my kids I only mock their tangled files, help them organize if they want and not accept "I don't know where I saved it" as an excuse for late homework.

Except.

My web design students need to know how to organize their files and understand their relative position to each other and how to describe the path to a specific file from another. Editing programs, like Dreamweaver, let you get away from thinking about this and link pictures and files from where ever they may lurk on your hard drive. If you were never to move those files up to a server and only look at your pages from your own machine separated from the eyes of the world, that would be fine. But, we create web pages to share. To post. To be looked at by someone other than the nagging, bearded teacher looking over your shoulder.

Therefore, I spend time trying to get my web students to understand the concepts of "tree" and "relative" and "absolute" and what "../file.doc" means. Every one of them will have to eventually troubleshoot a broken link on one of their pages. Every one of them will have to organize the multiple files and folders it takes to create a web site. I, as the teacher, need to figure out a way to help them do that in a professional manner without ranting or beating them with blunt objects.

I've tried having them map out a file structure using a graphics program but unless they are really adept at using the program, the process seems to get in the way. I was planning on looking into some of the online mind mapping programs when I stumbled upon WriteMaps from a posting by Jennifer Kyrnin on About.com. It has one purpose and that is to visualize a site map. It's simple to use. It's online. It's free. You can share your work with others. I am thinking this is the program for my class.




Students would each need to create their own account and need an email address to do so. You only have the choice of one graphic. One color. But, I think that may be part of it's usefulness. There are no distractions from the purpose of the program. You map out your site and that's it.

I'll let you know how it works out in my classroom.

[via About.Com]

[Image: A badge from the WriteMaps website: www.writemaps.com]
[Image: 2nd image was created in WriteMaps]

Selling Social Networks

This article, Go with the Flow: Selling Social Networks has some good information for answering some of the following questions about using social networks in the classroom.

• How can social software enhance learning?
• While using Web-based programs, can students stumble upon inappropriate sites?
• How can we prevent students from disclosing personal information online?
• What about students using the technology for nefarious purposes?
• Do outsiders have access to the Web site the students are using and, thus personal information?
• What about the cost?

If nothing else, it may get conversation started in your building.

[via iLibrarian]
[image: "My social Network on Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and MyblogLog": Flickr: Uploaded on November 2, 2007 by luc legay: http://www.flickr.com/photos/luc/1824234195/: Creative Commons]

On Screen Timer

Sometimes you just want a timer and you can't find a watch with a second hand. Sometimes you are giving your students a timed exercise or quiz and you want a visual to remind the kids of how much time they have left. Sometimes you want to countdown the seconds until you can run out of the building screaming.

Our school librarian sent out this link the other day for a simple online stopwatch. I've already used it twice. The timer shown above is a little countdown bomb. I'm sure the kids will never tire of hearing how they shouldn't "bomb this test."

[Image captured from http://www.online-stopwatch.com/]

The Google Gamut

Just finished watching "The Google Gamut: Everything you need to get Started" by Darren Kuropatwa at the K12 Online Conference 2008. I'm doing a presentation next week on Google Docs for our faculty and I was looking for some ideas. Darren does a good job of helping a beginner get started and some of the options available to them. There wasn't anything here that I hadn't heard before but it wasn't designed for someone like me. His target audience are those users new to the possibilities beyond Google's search page.

Check out his presentation below or head over to the K12 Online Coference 2008 site and pick another presentation.



[Image: Captured from K12 Online Conference site: http://k12onlineconference.org/?page_id=147]

Comix Revisited

I wrote about MakeBeliefsComix.com recently and thought I'd share my experience using it in the classroom with a mixed grade level high school class. The assignment was to find one current political quote and one environmental quote to use in the creation of a comic.

I had a few kids who grabbed the first thing they found from their search and plopped it into a comic bubble. Most of my students seemed to get into the assignment and spent some time trying to find just the right quote. I was pleased with the results and grabbed a few to post. (My apologies for the blurry text....can't quite get the result I want using blogger.)

Governor Palin seemed to be a popular person to quote probably because she was in the news so much at the time we did this activity.

























I'll do this activity again next semester. Students were able to finish in one period (roughly 50 minutes) and the hardest part of the assignment for my kids was grabbing a screenshot. I always run across something that I think they will know and this semester, grabbing a screenshot is the one I thought they all would be able to do and very few could. None of my high schoolers had any problems using the tools in MakeBeliefsComix. They were up and running with no guidance from me.

There was some good discussion in class about what comic figures to use for their characters. We talked about how selecting different types of representations could reflect their opinion of that person. Also kids played with the size of the different characters in each frame to denote who was speaking or in some cases who was more important.

[Images all created in MakeBeliefsComix by Mr. Gunn's Multimedia class at Mountain Range High School]

Make Beliefs Comix

I was looking for a simple way to make a comic online and I think I found one. It's called MakeBeliefsComix.com. I had an idea for kids to take a famous quote and and use it as the dialogue for a cartoon. I think this might be a fun way for kids to gather quotes from current news, historical events or famous speeches and think about them in a visual way. How would the person look while they were speaking? What was the emotion conveyed?

It sounds like a simple concept but I am constantly amazed at how kids, even high school aged ones, miss the subtleties of a comment. I see this with my video students as they struggle to convey a feeling or mood via expression or setting.











I wish the program allowed me to add backgrounds and that there were a few more character choices, like a few more ethnic faces, but that's just being nit-picky. I'm going to run this one by my multimedia kids and see what they create.

One note before you get all your students shultzing their way to cartoondom is that they need to enter two email addresses. A link to the finished cartoon will then be sent. Or, you can print it out. Neither of these are great solutions for me, so I will be teaching my kids some basic screen capture skills when we do this activity. Directions for doing this are on the site.

[via Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… Thanks again to Larry for pointing me to some great resources.]
[Image captured from MakeBeliefsComix.com: http://www.makebeliefscomix.com]
[Cartoon created using tools at http://www.makebeliefscomix.com]

Google Education Edition

Our school district recently signed up for Google Apps Education Edition which gives our staff and students common access to Sites, Gmail and Apps. It's being rolled out first with three of our high schools in order to build up a cadre of teachers with some expertise. This cadre will then help spread the word to everyone else. I asked (begged and pleaded sounds so unmanly so I went with asked) to get our high school included in the pilot program.

Why was I excited to be involved in the pilot program? I wanted all my kids to have an easily accessible school email account which this program allows. I wanted them to have an easy way to post web pages (without any html background) and possibly build their own blog. I think Sites will make this possible.

I jumped right in and built a support site for my Multimedia classes. I'll be introducing this application to my building staff in the near future, so, I wanted to get some pages up and working and get comfortable with the interface before I had to stand in front of my peers and answer questions. Here are my thoughts so far:

• It is easy to get a site up and running.
• Sometimes frustrating if you are used to creating your own pages or using a more advanced web editor (like Dreamweaver). Doubt this will be a problem for the majority of staff or students.
• Took some experimenting to get the hang of changing the different page elements. I'd like a help page that better describes things like column widths, header sizes, logo size, etc.
• Being able to embed a Google Calendar is a plus even though I still tend to have problems with maintaining multiple calendars. I seem to constantly be posting something to the wrong calendar. Maybe it's my age? Maybe it's my color disablity?
• The ability to put up documents for download is a big plus. We had this capability before, but this simplifies the process.
• Interface makes it easy to update/change information on my pages. I am experimenting with keeping a running list of assignments and activities for my class. Ease of use may make it possible for me to do this on a daily basis.

I'm waiting for student access to be completed, at which point, they will be creating their own pages. That experience will give me a better feel for the pitfalls and advantages. I'll keep you posted on what happens.

Here's a brief video introduction to Sites from Google.




[Image: Created by Al Gunn: Based on "Cliff jumping in S. Korea"; Flickr: Uploaded on May 17, 2005 by bzo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bzo/14417290/ and Google logo captured from www.Google.com]

MySudiyo not quite what I'm looking for...

Last Wednesday, I wrote about building an online quiz through Mystudiyo and this past week I had the opportunity to use it in my classroom. Here are my follow up thoughts.

Set up for kids was easy. I was able to get a class to the site and have them create an account with little or no problem. I sent them the URL for my quiz and they all successfully navigated to that spot and started taking the quiz. The results started popping into my reports section almost immediately. Some kids took the quiz several times and their highest score was posted. Most of them figured this out before me and took the quiz 2-3 times until they got a perfect score. I couldn't figure out a way to go in and see all their scores, just the highest. Don't think it's possible to look at anything but the highest?















We explored the program a bit as a class and discussed how they might use this application for their personal use and then moved on to the day's lesson.While I liked the setup and ease of use in the classroom, I was a little disappointed in the information I got back in the report. I won't be using this application for formal testing because:

• No way to limit number of times a student can take test or at least see their first score.
  
• In timing mode it gives me an adjusted score. I just want the number of right and wrong. I wish I could set this up in the reports also.
  
• I'd like a way to limit it to just my students. Having more names than kids makes grading a bit more difficult.
  

I'll use Mystudiyo for review activities. I see myself setting it up so the students can test themselves or compete against their classmates, but not as a tool for a formal grade. Some of the kids liked the program enough to say they would come back and use it on their own as a review tool.

This is still a beta program and I'll come back and take another look in a few months but until then, I guess it's back to the search engines to find something a little more suitable to my needs.

[Images captured from Mystudiyo web site: http://www.mystudiyo.com]

MyStudiyo for online quizzes

I've been wanting to implement online quizzing in my classes for quite some time. I want something where I can quickly put up a few questions. I want the application to have most of the following functions:

• Short answer or multiple choice
• Include pictures in the question
• Track students so they can't take quiz more than once or at least I'll know if they do
• Give the kids immediate feedback
• Inexpensive or better yet.... free
  

I mentioned Larry Ferlazzo's post "The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education" the other day and in that article he ranked My Studiyo as number six on his list and said:

" It’s without question, I believe, the best way to create online tests and quizzes. It’s easy to use, you can include multimedia, and others can add questions (that are moderated before they appear)."

That was enough recommendation for me to give it a try. I signed up for a free account (which was straight forward and painless) and jumped right into creating a quiz. I decided to make a quiz for my web design kids where they could look at a piece of bad html code and then pick the correct formatting out of four choices. Seemed like a good idea at the time but turned out to be a bad choice for my first try for a reason I shall soon reveal.

I had the opportunity to add an introduction. I wrote only a few words with the plan to come back and write something more informative after I finished the quiz. This turned out to be a problem. I couldn't seem to get back to that introduction page to write a nicer intro? Might be a glitch, but in the future, I will spend a bit more time here just in case.

I wrote five bits of bad code that I've seen in my class over the last week. I felt a little limited by how I could enter the question. I seemed to be able to write only one line. It wasn't until I was all done that I remembered the "Select Media" option.











This allowed me to write out something more similar to how a snippet of code might look. I grabbed this picture of a sample question (above) to show how what I wrote and how it would look in finished form (below).





















I wrote out my questions and answers and got the whole thing put together in about 20 minutes. Took me this long as I had to think up questions and reasonable wrong answers along the way. If I had been better prepared, I think it would have taken about as long as it took me to type. Only wait time was when I moved to each new question and that was around 10-20 seconds.

I previewed my quiz and immediately thought, "This was a waste of time!" Half of my questions and answers were blank. I was about to blow the whole site off when I realized that the blank questions and answers were where I wrote html code. I suspected the program was reading my code and trying to implement it. I tinkered with a few answers and that turned out to be the case. I quickly went in and made a few changes and got around this glitch that is only going to come up for those of us teaching html. There are work arounds so I'm not too concerned.

I had the option of giving feedback on each question and so I did. I could set a time limit for each question and set it at 60 seconds just to test out how that works. I also set it up so that the questions would appear randomly so students sitting next to each other would less likely be looking at the same screen.

I was given the opportunity to have two different endings and opted for scoreboard for this first quiz. It will give each student their score and an opportunity to see their ranking.

Then I got a unique URL where I can send my students to take the quiz. I won't post this until I try it out in the classroom so feel free to go take a peek.

I can also embed the quiz on a web page such as a personal blog. So, here it is that way. I have yet to get the embedded feature to work. Maybe you'll have better luck?



After going to the URL of my quiz, I realized my students would all have to create a login in order to take it. I went in and created a separate login pretending to be an eager 16 year old and took the test. That part worked fine. When I logged back in as myself, I was unable to see the student score? Another glitch?

I'm going to go ahead and try this out with my class and see what happens. I'm a little worried about getting their final score and I don't like that they all have to create an account. But, I'm willing to give it a spin in a "real classroom".

My thoughts so far:

• Easy to login and get my first quiz set up
• Editing a little slower and clunky than whey your first set it up
  
• Had a hard time testing the report functions.
  
• Wasn't able to get a working quiz to embed in either my Blogger blog or a Google sites page.
• There is a cookie that allows your browser to remember you when you return to the site. Great for a single user at a single machine but I am a little worried about this in a lab that sees 5-6 different users on each machine every day.

I'll be back with more info after I try it out with my students. If any of you have had experience using the program, please leave a comment.

[Images: All captured from http://www.mystudiyo.com/: Sept 20, 2008]

Blocked YouTube

My school district blocks YouTube. I understand why. I still don't like losing access to many video's I use in my classroom. There is a wealth of valuable content mixed in there with some of the more questionable not-appropriate-for-school stuff. Most of the videos I post on this blog can't be watched at my school by either my colleagues or my students.

What's a teacher to do?

I download the videos and then burn them to CD. I use a free application available for the Mac platform called TubeTV for this task. It's worked for me reliably and my only complaint is how long it takes, roughly 5 minutes for every minute of the original. I don't think that is a problem with the program but a reflection of my internet connection at home and the size of the movies I'm grabbing. It is also a reflection of the impatience of an old man, we are talking video files here. Once converted to an .m4v file, it is available in iTunes and I can easily burn it to disk from there.

My school librarian recommended another option a few weeks ago. It's an online service called zamzar.com. Give zamzar the url of the video you want to convert, pick what format you want it converted to and give it an email address. As soon as it's finished converting you'll get an email with an url from which you can download the video. You have 24 hours from the time the email is sent to get the file before it is deleted.

The nice thing about this system is you can do this all at home and then download the video at work. It does have a 100 mb file size limit for the free version so you won't be able to convert any really large files. You can buy into a plan that lets you convert larger movies and gives you some online storage. How fast it converts your request depends a lot on how busy they are at the moment. They prioritize their paying customers first. This can be a slower process than using TubeTV. I ran a test on the same movie I converted using TubeTV and it took 30 minutes from the time I set it up before I got an email in my inbox. This isn't a big deal if you are setting things up at home and then downloading the film the next day at school.

So, don't let a pesky block stop you from including some great content in your classroom presentations.

[Image: Mashup of famous Orson Wells shot from the Third Man (1949) and the YouTube logo captured from their site: http://www.youtube.com/]

Thirty One Online Applications

Ran across this link to "The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education" on Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… He has a list of thirty-one free online applications that could be used by your students and/or yourself. There is a brief write up on each application and I didn't see one that I'm not planning on checking out. I was going to write about a couple to fill out my weeks worth of posts but there is too much here to hoard. If you are like me and still trying to flesh out your lessons for this first semester, this might be the place to find an idea or two. Or just possibly thirty-one!

I often think that I am more aware than the average web-head of a lot that's available out there in cyberspace and then I find a resource like this where I discover I am just a babe in the woods playing with twigs while there are lumberjacks out there harvesting lodge pole pines. I may have to just send my wife packing so I can spend more time searching and surfing the internet. Or... I could keep the wife, learn to be satisfied gathering sticks and just add this blog to my RSS feed?

Image: Flickr: "She's Leaving Home": Uploaded on August 7, 2006 by Thomas Hawk: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/208990544/((CC)Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic)

Fantastic Contraption: Physics Simulation

I just lost a couple of hours playing this online physics game, Fantastic Contraption. My high school students spend huge amounts of time playing similar games that aren't as complex. Usually while I am in the front of the room praising the beauty of a perfectly placed HTML tag. ( Classroom management, that's a story for another day)

Today, I want to praise this simulation and the learning that occurs unbeknownst to your unwary child, student or spouse.

Years ago I used a similar program ( the name escapes me?) in my 6th grade technology lab. It gave the kids a chance to create and test mechanical contraptions without getting their hands dirty. I observed a lot of crossover when they went to build an actual contraption and referred back to an experience they had in the computer program.

I had to justify that game every time my principal walked through.

Al, It looks like they're just playing a game.

No....really, they have to do some higher level critical thinking.

But they look like they're having fun.

Those are just nervous smiles. Some kind of adolescent stress related facial rigor.

Oh...all right. Just turn it off when I give a tour of the building. I don't want people to get the wrong idea.

I eventually won her over when I had her sit down and try it out. Who knew that learning could be fun?

(Via GeekDad)
[Image: Captured from GeekDad because I never thought to grab a picture while I was playing and now it's late and I feel rushed. Oh the pressure!:http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2008/08/what-a-fantasti.html]

Howard Rheingold

I was an avid reader of the Whole Earth Review back in the 90's. I believe it was there that I first was exposed to Howard Rheingold. He contributed articles and edited the magazine for a while. I'm a fan of his writing and was pleased to find that he now has a vlog. He introduces his site this way:

Twenty years ago, I wrote “A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community”. When I thought about updating it, I realized that video is better than text for showing how I spend time online. This is the first in a series of short videos documenting my use of social media in my professional and personal life.

Watching this video was a reminder of how different things are since I got my first computer in 1985. This series of videos should be a fun reminder of where we started, where we are now and I would expect some speculation on where we might be headed.



[Image: Captured from "A reslice of life online: Part One"; http://vlog.rheingold.com/index.php/site/video/a-reslice-of-life-online-part-one-introduction/]

K12 Online Conference 2007

Stumbled across a link to the K12 Online Conference 2007. Clicked on it and thought right away that this sounded like something I want to attend. If I understand this correctly, it is free and it is all online. They have some video teasers available and I watched a few. I decided already on some of the sessions I want to attend.

Dean Shareski
“Design matters”
Drew Murphy
“Step by Step- Building a Web2.0 Classroom”
Jeff Utecht
“Sustained Blogging in the Classroom
Lee Baber, Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim and Thomas Locke
“Building Online Communities for Youth”
Karen Richardson
“Crossing the Copyright Boundary in the Digital Age”

These are all topics I've been thinking about lately. I am so intrigued about this gathering that I've added a link to my blog. If you are into tech education, there has got to be at least one presentation that grabs your interest. Take a peek.

[Screenshot: "k12 Online Conference 2007." k12 Online Conference 2007. k12 Online Conference 2007. 7 Sep 2007 .]