Tools for Learning: Flashcards Done Right, Video Tools, & Augmented Reality

So much for the idea of trying to do a blogpost every day this month. My computer was in the shop for a couple days, sick kid, etc. So, I will try to catch up a little now (and have a lot to share!). Starting here with a list of tools recommended at yesterday’s meeting of Instructional Designers on campus.

More on Flashcards

GWhiz: http://www.gwhizmobile.com/Desktop/Home.php
StudyStack: http://www.studystack.com/

NOTE:
School of Dentistry is doing something wonderfully useful with setting up a collection of oral pathology images with definitions as flashcards in an initiative that uses multiple platforms and tools at once. They are integrating mobile, web, and social sharing, which is exactly what I love to see people doing. Maximize the access and ways people can use the information. Very cool. They evaluated a bunch of tools and selected StudyStack (as a really dependable, well tested platform that had the functionality they sought) and GWhiz for the mobile (because of the integration with StudyStack and the ease of both adding and extracting data).

There is a list of online flashcard tools earlier on this blog, which includes some newer tools not evaluated for this project.

Video Tools

Video is increasingly important on campus as a platform for:
– making content accessible outside of face-to-face class times (asynchronously);
– distance learning;
– in support of students and faculty who cannot come to class because of swine flu or other illness;
– to provide a date/time stamp on intellectual content presented in class sessions.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that several folk presented on video tools they are using educationally.

Camtasia Relay: http://www.techsmith.com/camtasiarelay.asp

NOTE:
School of Pharmacy is really leading the way for the campus with this tool, which makes it super simple for faculty to record, edit and post their own lectures WITHOUT in class tech support. By streamlining the process, this makes it more likely that faculty will take advantage of the potential of video, increasing access. The editing function is a little weak, mostly allowing trimming from the beginning or end of the video, but you can always shift to a more professional video editing application if needed.

VideoAnt:
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/bhosack/videoant/
http://ant.umn.edu/vae.php
NOTE:
The Learning Resource Center were the ones who mentioned this video annotation tool. VideoANT allows you to host comments and discussion around a video link on the web, either one you host on your own servers or one hosted in another system. They like you to use the Flash video format, which is pretty common these days. This means you can grab videos from YouTube or Vimeo or other tools for annotation and class discussion. You can watch the video in VideoANT, mark places to add a note or comment, and also leave comments on other people’s comments. Imagine a class in which the teacher posts a video link, and at specific points in the video inserts a question, asking the students to pause and reply before continuing, then getting the whole class engaged in the conversation. Pretty exciting potential. For one of my Second Life videos, I often am asked for the locations shown. VideoANT allowed me to mark specific points in the video and annotate them with directions.

VideoANT Annotation of Science Learning Opportunities in Second Life: http://ant.umn.edu/vav.php?pid=60058091758860

See Also:
Viddler: http://www.viddler.com/
BubblePly: http://www.plymedia.com/products/bubbleply/bubbleply.aspx
Nico Nico Douga (Japanese video sharing site): http://www.nicovideo.jp/
Veotag: http://www.veotag.com/
Project Pad (NWU): http://dewey.at.northwestern.edu/ppad2/
DIVER (Stanford): http://diver.stanford.edu/
Close Captioning for Youtube videos: http://www.youtubecc.com/

More tools listed at the OpenCast project:
http://www.opencastproject.org/homepage
http://www.opencastproject.org/wiki/project_pad_audio_and_video_annotation_tools

Augmented Reality

What made the discussion on augmented reality interesting was the way once folks understood what it could do, they kept saying, “Wouldn’t it be neat if you could ?” to which the answer was almost always, “Oh, you can, here is the tool that does that.” The ones that seemed most useful were Cyclopedia and Wikitude, both of which allow you to use a mobile device to retrieve information about your immediate location and environment.

Cyclopedia: http://www.chemicalwedding.tv/cyclopedia.html or http://www.appstorehq.com/cyclopedia-iphone-74227/app
http://gizmodo.com/5372243/cyclopedia-augmented-reality-iphone-app-drenches-your-world-in-wikipedia

Wikitude: http://www.wikitude.org/ and http://www.wikitude.me/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/two_apps_now_superimpose_wikipedia_over_your_iphon.php

Mobilizy: http://www.mobilizy.com/
SmartGrid: http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/

Other Tools Mentioned

Aviary: http://aviary.com/
TinEye: http://tineye.com/ OR http://tineye.com/cool_searches
TiddlyWIki: http://www.tiddlywiki.com/
EverNote: http://www.evernote.com/

Tools for Learning: Flashcards? Really?

Flashcards seem to lend themselves to the trite, and are often considered old school, albeit tried and true at the same time. People use them a lot because they actually work, after all. I have a collection of online flashcard tools ranging from search engines to make-your-own to online social networks and wikis for sharing and discovering flashcards and tools. Most of these are Flash based, some of them let you make Flashcards with embedded videos and audio, and some have more than two sides! Quite a few of them have built-in software options to make learning more efficient and to manage the display, timing, and repetition of the questions. For those, you want to explore the different options and see what actually works best for you. Some of them include a wiki or blogs along with other social netwokring options to allow sharing and collaboration in studying. Many allow you to create or save flashcards for use on your iPhone or similar mobile device, some of which are both phone and web compatible. So, at the risk of sounding trite, these are not your Grandma’s flashcards, Dorothy.

You don’t have to use them the old ways, either. Try doing something new. Thinking of the more social flashcard sites, like Cobocards or FunnelBrain or many others, set up a group for your class for the students to share flashcards they make, then assign them to make flashcards for a controversial topic. Cobocards lets students use Skype to partner while studying or quiz each other, so you could assign partners or teams. Or ask students to create quizzes for each other (which isn’t new) and then critique the quality of the flashcards they designed.

Using the multimedia options, make flashcards with a auscultation or breath sounds quiz, snippets of patient interviews from cases, diagnostic movements, or examples of interviewing skills and patient history taking questions. The whole point of the “flash” of flash cards is to get at that information that needs to be so deeply embedded and quickly retrieved that it seems like instinct. What you need to know without stopping to think how you know it. Maybe it is professional jargon, maybe it is research methodologies, maybe it is types of charts.

I’ve never seen a flashcard set with, for example, data visualizations on one side and the matching types of data to use as the answers. With images, you can include histology or pathology images, anatomy dissections, drug administration modalities, anatomical landmarks, mapping, disease spread patterns, pathogens, and much more. With the “three sided” flashcards available on some of these sites (like Flashcard Manager), you could do if/then types of questions, or miniature decision trees, or stages of a process. You could have an image, followed by a word or name or date, and then the student gives the other matching piece or the significance.

If you are thinking of these as supporting distance learning, make a midterm from a flashcard quiz, untimed, and assign the students to work through the quiz providing a few sentences or paragraphs in response to the “triggers” given in the flashcards. You don’t have to think of the flashcards as being the quiz themselves, but can think of them as a delivery mechanism, you can turn them into a game. Many of the flashcard creation sites also offer related tools for creating edugames. In distance learning, or working with trying to assess student achievement over the internet, sometimes games can be a really effective and time efficient way to get at this.

The Japanese have a traditional card game played on New Year’s (hanafuda or hyakunin) that is actually very similar to flashcards, and also related to the matching memory games played here. It is based on their most significant pieces of traditional literature, with very short quotations from the work or poems on each card, with images illustrating the poem.

If you really want to challenge the creativity of your students, ask them either individually or collaboratively to create a deck of playing cards to illustrate the most important concepts of the topic, reserving the “royal” cards for the most significant concepts.

Festisite: http://www.festisite.com/cardgame/

While this isn’t exactly flashcards, I used MultiURL to generate a nifty interactive tool for you to explore these. It provides a frame-based exploration. You create an account, list the URLs you want to share, and it gives you a short link. I have 25 URLs listed in this one. As you flip the “pages” with the arrow, it loads the page in the window, making it easy for you to skim the set of collected tools.

Interactive: http://www.multiurl.com/g/00i

LIST:
BrainFlips: http://brainflips.com/
Cobocards: http://www.cobocards.com/
CramBerry: http://cramberry.net/
cueflash: http://www.cueflash.com/
Ediscio: http://www.ediscio.com/
Flash Card Machine: http://www.flashcardmachine.com/
Flashcard Flash (Custom Search Engine for Flashcards): http://www.flashcardflash.com/
FlashcardDB: http://flashcarddb.com/cardset/31497-cells-flashcards
FlashCardExchange: http://www.flashcardexchange.com/
FlashCardFriends: http://flashcardfriends.com/
Free Printable Flash Card Maker: http://www.kitzkikz.com/flashcards/
Free World U: Flashcards: http://www.freeworldu.org/Flashcards/
FunnelBrain: http://www.funnelbrain.com/
iFlipR (Make Flashcard for iPhone or on the Web): http://www.iflipr.com/
IQFuse: http://www.iqfuse.com/
Knowtes: http://www.knowtes.com/
Memorize: http://memorize.com/
Muchobeets: http://www.muchobeets.com/
OmniMemo: http://www.omnimemo.com/
ProProfs: http://www.proprofs.com/
Quizlet: http://quizlet.com/
Scholastic: Homework Hub: Flashcard Maker: http://www.scholastic.com/kids/homework/flashcards.htm
Study Stack: http://www.studystack.com/
StudyBlue: http://www.studyblue.com/
studybulb: http://www.studybulb.com/
WordLearner: http://www.wordlearner.com/

Cool Toys, August 2009

Here are the slides and links for this month’s Cool Toys Conversation group meeting. Remember, you can track these on a daily basis at Momentile: Cool Toys.

Crowdsourcing, Collaboration

Yelp A2: http://www.yelp.com/ann-arbor-mi
Collage: https://develop.www.umich.edu/collage/ (UM login ID required)
IndExhibit: http://www.indexhibit.org/
Universal Everything: http://universaleverything.com/

Citizen Journalism

AnnArbor.com
NewAssignment.net

Citizen Science, DIY Science, Crowdsourcing Science

Galaxy Zoo 2: http://galaxyzoo.org/
MakeZine: Isolate amniotic stem cells from a placenta, at home: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2007/01/how_to_isolate_amniotic_s.html
Google Code: Semantic Science: http://code.google.com/p/semanticscience/
TheScientist: Video Awards: http://www.the-scientist.com/videoawards

Education

CloudSocial: http://www.cloudsocial.org/signin.php
CloudCollab: http://www.cloudcollab.com/
CourseSmart.com
OpenEd: http://opened.creativecommons.org/Main_Page

Graphics & Media

PaletteBuilder.com
Schillr.com
Youtube: Reporters Center: http://www.youtube.com/user/reporterscenter
TubeMogul.com

Health & Healthcare

SIDER: http://sideeffects.embl.de/
University of Maryland: Virtual Robotic Surgery Tour: http://www.umm.edu/virtualtours/standalones/roboticsurgery_ummc/tourfiles/flash/index.html

History

John Quincy Adams, via Twitter: http://twitter.com/JQAdams_MHS
Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, via Twitter: http://twitter.com/cdarwin

New Tools

Scr.im
Boopsie.com
OmniGraffle: http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/OmniGraffle/
Graffletopia.com
Google Fusion Tables: http://tables.googlelabs.com/public/tour/tour1.html

Social Media

SocialSafe: http://www.socialsafe.net/
PopURLs: http://popurls.com/
TrendMetr: http://www.trendmetr.com/
Personas: http://personas.media.mit.edu/
KnowEm?: http://knowem.com/

Blogroll, pt. 1: EduBlogs

There are a lot of really wonderful blogs and new media sources that I track. Here is a super rough list of my faves, at least a section of them. This is sloppy, but my computer is in the shop, so I don’t have easy access to my coherent organized list.

I am finding that a lot of the most useful content for me is coming from (1) Twitter, (2) K-12 teach or media teachers, and (2) Special Education teachers. There are some really wonderful blogs by friends of mine that I want to make part of a blogroll, but they tend to be blogs I read and discuss more than go hunt for tools when I have a class coming up. So these are a few of the places where I find the Cool Toys that are part of my regular job life these days.

EDUBLOGS

A. Kipta’s Blog: http://akipta.blogspot.com/

I’m Not Actually a Geek: http://bhc3.wordpress.com/

From Toy to Tool: Cell Phones in Learning: http://www.cellphonesinlearning.com/

The Cool Cat Teacher Blog: http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/

Emerging Internet Technologies for Education: http://www.emergingedtech.com/

Free Technology for Teachers: http://www.freetech4teachers.com/

Welcome to NCS-Tech!: http://www.ncs-tech.org/

MobiLearner: http://www.mobilearner.org

Free Resources from the Net for (Special) Education: http://paulhami.edublogs.org/

ScottMerrick.net: http://scottmerrick.blogspot.com/

Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs: http://teachinglearnerswithmultipleneeds.blogspot.com/

USN Lower School Technology! http://usnlstech.blogspot.com/

ALA ETechLib Discussion

There is a very interesting discussion about emerging technologies in libraries going on over at ALA Connect. For those of you who aren’t librarians, this is the social network discussion forum from the American Libraries Association. Jenny Levine twittered this earlier today, and Mark (whose desk in the cubefarm is kitty corner to mine) made sure I saw it.

ALA Connect: Program Proposals for 2010 ALA for Emerging Technologies Interest Group: http://connect.ala.org/node/78083

Some very interesting discussion going on! It looked to me like that discussion led to another thread suggesting resources for ETechLibs.

ALA Connect: Resources for Emerging Technologies: http://connect.ala.org/node/78086#comment-1441

I posted there, but get so many requests here for my blogroll, I thought I’d repeat it here. I wanted to make this a blogroll, but have had no luck figuring out the blogroll widget for the WordPress theme I’m using. So I am going to have a couple of blogroll posts coming up, but will cluster my favorites resource locations into a couple of groups. Meanwhile, watch the discussion at ALA Connect.

Looking for a Job or New Hire? What about Social Media, Cloud Computing, and Virtual Worlds?

Part One

A friend of mine just got a really nifty and exciting position here on campus, well suited for her talents, interests and abilities. I am thrilled for her! I am also thrilled for the campus, since she will be bringing some new skills and experience to the mix and will hopefully apply these in new ways to the existing position. Before this came along, she’d been doing a lot of work in her industry in Second Life, blogging, and had worked professionally supporting distance education, which meant using social media and a wide variety of online tools and resources. Her new job is in one of the most traditional of all old-fashioned library positions – a curator of a special collection area. I am terribly excited to see the recognition and potential of new media connections with classic librarianship!

Part Two

This morning an article appeared in my Plurk stream on using social media and virtual worlds for hiring. LinkedIn was being used to discover folks with unusual or rare skillsets, and Second Life (the 3d virtual world) is being used for actually interviews. There is a lot more than this going on in both places mentioned as well as others, but here is the article. Read it and then think more broadly.

Karl Flinders. Will LinkedIn and Second Life kill the recruitment industry? 8 Jul 2009. http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/07/08/236804/will-linkedin-and-second-life-kill-the-recruitment-industry.htm

Part Three

Last night, I got a message via Slideshare from a startup with an interesting vision. Insightory is a social media space specifically for people interested in business trends and corporate marketing and management. Folk there are sharing a lot of high quality articles, presentations, reports, white papers, and other publications as well as establishing their own credentials and expertise.

I popped over to check it out, and immediately was sucked in by a number of the resources available that caught my eye. I liked the features and functionality, too! It allows you to download, provides PDFs of articles as well as presentations, and is embeddable (although not at WordPress.com, darn it!). I wish it let you skip to a particular page, especially as the document I want to highlight below is 144 pages and the best part is at the end.

This presentation by Michael Marlatt not only lists a lot of really interesting websites, tools, and resources but also provides strategies on how to make use of them and apply them specifically for recruitment and hiring. He captures relevant trends, and seems to focus on the same ones identified by the 2009 Horizon Report, which lends credibility and support for his vision. He pulls it all together in an overarching vision. Even if you are not a recruiter yourself, this presentation is worth looking at just for the resources highlighted! Any of you who follow my Cool Toys Conversations will find this of interest.

Michael Marlatt. The Future of Recruiting is in the Cloud (Insightory): http://www.insightory.com/view/1917/the_future_of_recruiting_is_in_the_cloud

Here are the basics Marratt mentions about the tech infrastructure we need to be SMART in the immediate future.

“Synchronized
Mobile
Appropriately equipped
RSS enabled
Tuned In”

If your corporate and personal work environments are not here now, think about catching up. Or, as he says it, tune in.

Cool Toys Conversation, June 2009

Productivity & Personal

Petrofix: http://petrofix.com/
Twivaways: http://www.twivaways.com/
TwoQuick: http://www.twoquick.com/
Posterous: http://www.posterous.com/
Hey! Paste It: http://www.heypasteit.com/

Gadgets & Geeks

Mozy: http://www.mozy.com/
Talkr: http://www.talkr.com/
WordOff: http://www.wordoff.org/
SpyOnWeb: http://spyonweb.com
RobTex: http://www.robtex.com
Random: http://www.random.org/
Pulse: http://www.livescribe.com/
Google Mobile: http://www.google.com/mobile/
GeoDome: http://www.geodome.info/

Academic & Education

VideoLectures: http://www.videolectures.net/
MIT Open Courseware: Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mitopencourseware/sets/
SIRS Researcher: http://sks.sirs.com/cgi-bin/hst-portal-res?id=S1590125-0-2504
VisionMapper: http://www.visionmapper.org.uk/
SmartHistory: http://www.smarthistory.org/
WolframAlpha: http://www.wolframalpha.com/
PubFeed: http://pubfeed.cs.toronto.edu/
PhotoPeach: http://photopeach.com/ EXAMPLE: http://photopeach.com/album/7e7usn

Graphics / Visual / Visualization

Vimeo: Swan Lake Zeno Music Visualiser: http://www.vimeo.com/2027825?pg=embed&sec=2027825
Your Flowing Data: http://your.flowingdata.com/ OR http://flowingdata.com/2009/03/10/yourflowingdata-collect-data-about-yourself-via-twitter/
Pattern Cooler: http://www.patterncooler.com/
Pixlr: http://www.pixlr.com/

Health & Science

Health Action Now: http://www.healthactionnow.org/Default.aspx
WorldMapper: http://www.worldmapper.org/
FluTracker: http://flutracker.rhizalabs.com/
TripAnswers: http://www.tripanswers.org/
TweetPsych: http://www.tweetpsych.com/
Pink @ the Polls: http://www.pinkatthepolls.org/site.php
ChefMD: http://www.chefmd.com/
SigntificLab: http://play.signtific.org/
SCIgen: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

Writing

SMOG – Simple Measure of Gobbledygook: http://www.harrymclaughlin.com/SMOG.htm OR http://www.wordscount.info/
Twyric: http://twyric.com/
Trapeze / Poster Experience: http://posterexperience.com/

Other Ideas

Open Source Grid/ OSGrid: http://www.osgrid.org/
You Are the Model: http://www.youarethemodel.com/
Serve: http://www.serve.gov/

Cool Toys Conversations, March 2009

I had some tech problems that slowed me down for March. Fingers crossed for the future!

I’m doing things a little differently than I have been. Instead of trying to show you everything I’ve found cool during a given month, I am instead depending on the momentile stream. This means I select one tool each day, and at the monthly discussions we talk about those, why they are interesting, what related tools are also interesting. The slides will only have those roughly 30 tools listed. The full list of what I saved to show that month is captured in my Delicious account. So let’s give it a try.

Here are the slides from March.

Here are the links for March (over 300, which was too many for slides).

Delicious: CoolToys March 2009: http://delicious.com/rosefirerising/cooltoys0903

See what you think. Enjoy.

Cool Toys Momentiles, March 09, Part 1

Here are the sites highlighted in the Cool Toys Momentile stream in its first few weeks.

TrialX: http://trialx.org/
TwitterMosaic: sxoop.com/twitter/

Veritocracy: http://www.veri.com/

CramBerry: cramberry.net/
Stimulus Watch: stimuluswatch.org/

Wunderground Mobile Apps: http://www.wunderground.com/download/index.asp
DoGooderTV: http://www.dogooder.tv/

Serious Games Taxonomy: www.seriousgames.org/presentations/serious-games-taxonomy-2008_web.pdf
Autism Spot: http://www.autismspot.com

MicroPlaza: www.microplaza.com
Slideshare Karaoka: http://slidesharetoys.com/karaoke/

ThruYou: thru-you.com
PlaceBlogger: placeblogger.com

Mint: www.mint.com
WebPAX: www.webpax.com

Momentile Plus Cool Toys

I am guilty – I haven’t posted the slides/links for the last Cool Toys Conversations yet. Consider this a teaser.

We talked about a whole bunch of neat stuff, but got a bit into Momentile. It is kind of an odd thing, since Momentile doesn’t do much.

Momentile basically simplifies the photoblog concept, with a strict one-a-day policy. Oh, and it lets you caption pictures. Well, only other people’s pictures, not your own. Hunh? Yep, that’s pretty much it. Oh, you can do the usual social media stuff – pick people you want to ‘friend’ (‘cept they call it stalking), favorite copies of other people’s pics, etc. Oh, and put captions on other people’s pics.

People are doing some awfully exciting things with Momentile, tho. I think it is something like writing a sonnet — the restrictions challenge you and force you to find innovative and creative ways to exploit the medium. The first time I noticed this was with TheSky.

Momentile: TheSky: http://www.momentile.com/thesky/

How simple. Just one picture, every day, a picture of the sky. Day or night. Beautiful, every single one of them.

I noticed a few other folks working a theme — an amateur cartoonist who posts one toon a day, an artist who posts one sketch a day. We started talking about how this could work as an assignment or as part of a grad student project, perhaps documenting an archaeological dig or architecture project or … and our minds soared. We talked about making poems from the captions, and making a notebook from the project.

Then someone said, “You could do this. You know? With these cool toys?” Oh, right, yes, I could. So I did.

Momentile: Cool Toys: http://www.momentile.com/cooltoys/

Next post will list the highlights of the Cool Toys Momentile stream in its first couple weeks. Meanwhile, any of you feeling inspired? I have some Momentile invites left. Send me your email (DM me at Twitter) and say you want one.