Techie Learning Tech

Well, sadly this is my last blog post (for the course). Not to fear though - this class inspired me to create a personal blog with Wordpress where I can continue to talk about tech stuff, education, etc. I really had a blast in this class... The projects were a lot of fun, because even if you were very familiar with the tools (Powerpoint, Excel, etc.) you could always opt to take things to the next level to stretch your understanding. I liked having that flexibility.

My favorite project of the semester was probably the spreadsheet, just because I had never explored those features of Excel whatsoever (e.g., dropdowns, conditional statements, etc.) and I really learned a lot from it. I have to say though - the thing I got the most out of in this class were all of the cool links and tools that Ginny shared with us offhandedly during lecture. I greedily added them all to my Delicious account and I can honestly say this class has influenced my daily life... not something I can say about many classes.

Literally every evening, my ritual now is to catch up on news from RSS feeds and tweets. This isn't something I was doing prior to the class, and for better or worse I feel better connected to what's going on in the world. And unlike mass media, with RSS and Twitter you choose your sources of information to precisely suit your interests. I think that's something that a lot of people in our parents' generation haven't fully understood about social media. Sure, some people use social networks for nothing more than telling people what they're cooking for dinner, but this semester I've learned that its usefulness extends far beyond that.

Thanks Ginny!! I look forward to staying in touch.

This wasn't something mentioned in class (at least I don't think so), but I wanted to blog about it because I've been using it a lot lately and have fallen in love with it. It's a service called Instapaper, and you can use it to archive copies of articles you come across on the Web for later perusal.

The reason I find it so useful is that I've recently become addicted to RSS feeds and Twitter, so I'm constantly being inundated with a neverending torrent of articles that I don't have time to read. At the same time, there's some that catch my eye and I don't want them to get lost in the pit of tweets and blogs where I can't find them later. Luckily Instapaper has both a website and excellent apps for iPhone and iPad. Also, the RSS aggregator I use, NewsRack (for iPhone/iPad) which syncs with Google Reader, has a "Send to Instapaper" feature. Twitterrific, the Twitter client I use for iPhone/iPad, also has this feature.

Everytime I open the iPhone or iPad app for Instapaper, it syncs with the website and makes a local copy of all the articles I've marked for archival. This is especially handy for plane trips or other places where I don't have Internet, because I have tons of content to read, all stored locally!

So the other day I made use of a really cool site called "Quiettube" that our 486 instructor showed us. If you go to http://quiettube.com you can add a bookmarklet to your browser. When you go to YouTube and find a video you'd like to share, you click the bookmarklet and it creates a nice clean web page with a shortened URL containing your video. No ads, no fluff, and not blocked by standard filtering software that's used in schools presumably. I used it to share a video with my class the other day. Very nifty!

I finally finished it! Okay, I really went overboard on this project, but I'm double-dipping and using this to help teach my Math 113 students something called the Art Gallery Theorem.

I used a slew of tools to create this video. First, I created the original slideshow using Google Docs (images created with MS Paint). Then, when I realized the MS Powerpoint had a built-in narration feature, I exported the Google slideshow as a .ppt, and recorded a narration in MS Powerpoint.

The Powerpoint narration tool is pretty nice - it records your narration along with the timing when you advance the slide. The downside is that you have to record it in one complete take, and you can't go back and edit the narration for individual slides. So this took me literally 25+ takes.

Next, I used AuthorStream.com to convert the Powerpoint into an .mp4 video. I looked at other ways of accomplishing the same thing, such as exporting the slides as jpegs and doing the narration in iMovie, but I couldn't figure out how to sync up the timing of my narration with the images easily. I also tried the "export as movie" feature in Powerpoint, but it didn't include the audio. I could've taken that video and added the narration within iMovie, but AuthorStream was a simpler alternative.

The downside is that converting the AuthorStream to a downloadable movie costs $2, but I sprung for it. I didn't stop there however, since the aim of this project was using iMovie or MovieMaker, so I then imported the .mp4 into iMovie and added transitions at the start and finish, a caption at the beginning with my name, and a short credits slide at the end. I also added some Public Domain music in the background.

Anyway, I had fun doing this - so watch and learn!

This week we created Interactive Spreadsheets using MS Excel. The one I created was for an AP Calculus class, over derivatives. Students are given a list of 10 simple functions, and have to calculate the derivative and choose the correct answer from a drop-down list of choices. The spreadsheet then tells the student if they were correct, adds up the points, and calculates the percentage of power rule, product rule, and quotient rule problems they got correct.

I thought this was a really cool method to use for assessment. I think it'd mainly be useful as a practice quiz, since students can immediately see if they were right or wrong and then change their answer. To modify it to be an actual assessment, you wouldn't want to give them immediate feedback about whether they were right or wrong.

This week we created a chart using the software package "Inspiration." It's a really cool program which allows you to create beautiful looking tree charts, web charts, etc. easily. I really like the "outline" feature, which automatically translates a flow-chart into an outline and vice-versa.

The only thing I wish it had was an equation editor, or at least support for copying/pasting math symbols. Instead, I had to edit an equation in MS Word, take a screenshot, paste it into MS Paint and then insert the .bmp into Inspiration.

Nonetheless, I think this will definitely become part of my software arsenal. I was looking through the built-in templates, and it includes one for lesson plans. This could actually make writing lesson plans fun (imagine that)!

Last week we had the assignment of completing a "Digital Scavenger Hunt" in small groups, where we had to find various things related to our content areas, take photos and create a Google Docs presentation exhibiting the photos.

As math people, we had to find various geometric shapes and so-forth. Being the overachieving nerds that we are, we then edited the photos using MS Paint and outlined the shapes to better illustrate before resizing them to 4x6 and 72 ppi.

Here's our presentation embedded below: