Very briefly, we just completed the event that has been keeping me so busy the past couple weeks. I’ll say more over the next few days, but for right now, just a tiny pointer to more info.
There was an awful lot of excitement that Barry from the national team actually came into Second Life, listened and conversed with the audience for the whole thing (over 2 hours). Here is a picture of Barry.
We will be archiving chatlogs and other content at SimTeach. Expect this will appear over a few days or weeks.
The Flickr group is started. If you were there, please add your images of the event.
There will be a variety of videos that will become available. Miraculously, the first one IS already available! I can’t embed it here, but I can sure point you to it. Enjoy!
I know, I know – Slideshare embeds, two days in a row? I try not to, but this one is (a) too good not to share, (b) has been sorely neglected and underappreciated, and (c) is really relevant to the National Educational Technology Plan event in Second Life this week. Oh, I haven’t mentioned that, have I?
The backstory is that I attended the recent public forum for the NETP here in Ann Arbor. I will share my notes here in the blog soon. One of the pieces I didn’t hear there was talk about how educational technologies have changed over time and how rapidly they are changing now. As someone tracking emerging technologies in general and educational technologies specifically I’m wondering how we make a five-year plan when the hot new technology for education two years from now will probably be something most people would have trouble imagining now? So when I was clicking related links on a different presentation this morning and found this one that steps through a variety of educational technologies and how they have evolved over the past 100 years, I was fascinated and wanted to share it with all of you. I am thinking of it as background for the meeting on Thursday. Don’t let the title confuse you – it really is about broader tech issues and not specifically web 2.0. I suspect that might be why it has been underutilized. I hope you enjoy!
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.
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.
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.
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.
What it does:
While many higher education institutions have branded wiki platforms for coursework, it is sometimes challenging for local implementations of popular tool platforms like wikis to keep up with the functionality of commercial tools. With the advent of the social web, we discovered more and more tools offering free and fee versions. Wetpaint is a popular and sophisticated, easy to use wiki platform that offers a free version supported by embedded advertising alongside a commercial version without the ads. When used for educational purposes, defined as with a teacher and students working together, teacher can apply to have advertising suppressed on their sites. (Update: As of August 2009, this is no longer available.)
Wetpaint is not your ordinary wiki. In addition to easy and fully-functional editing that looks almost identical to popular word processors, it also makes it amazingly simple to embed popular media and flash objects ranging from Flickr images (or uploaded photos) to Youtube videos to embedded objects/widgets/gadgets from less well known media sites. You can even easily embed a Google Calendar. Beyond the ease of generating, organizing and editing a variety of content types, Wetpaint has integrated all the basic functions of social networking sites to enhance the collaboration space of the wiki. Users of the wiki can friend other wiki members, have private conversations, open threaded public discussions, and more.
Tech Requirements:
Mac or PC with internet connection faster than dialup; web browser should be Firefox with Flash installed (preferred).
Privacy / Security:
Wetpaint wikis can be configured with a variety of security and privacy levels, from a personal archive site with a single editor, invitation only viewing or collaborating, private project team working space, public-view wikis edited by a small group of writers, public wikis joinable by anyone with editing limited to writers and moderators, and more. The range of security settings available make this a valuable and productive working environment.
Support / Troubleshooting:
Wetpaint has a Getting Started section, an excellent help and troubleshooting section, along with a blog for announcements, feedback pages, and forums for community support and discussion. They have easily identifiable community managers in the forums, as in real people with names and faces who actually answer questions, email, and solve problems. Beyond the above, for those who are real coding geeks, there is a developers section with information about how to customize Wetpaint.
Strengths for Education:
Wetpaint has a strong commitment to education, and they put their money where their mouth is. They provide strong resources for educators and the educational community, and have a strong educational infrastructure as well as the no-ads version, educational discounts, and staff devoted to supporting educators. Here are some of the resources they offer. Wikis In Education Wetpaint Education Ambassador How can wikis be used in the classroom? Education Templates
Limitations:
The big one for most people is that Wetpaint is not browser independent. The big one for most of the faculty I’ve talked iwth is that they want to log in as UM people through our local authenication gateway. As far as I know, there is no easy way to do that. Security depends on setting up a separate Wetpaint account and the permissions connected to those, and there is no surefire verification by institution. That may be possible and just I don’t know about it. On the other hand, for a collaboration with persons outside of our university, Wetpaint may be easier to administer.
Recommended Audience:
College and above. High school with teacher oversight.
What it does:
xTimeline is a multimedia timeline editor that allows wiki-style collaborative editing. It makes it easy to embed pictures and videos, and can generate a timeline from an RSS feed. Interactive displays, easy browsing, editing, commenting. Add a time datapoint, and then enrich it with details including media and detailed commentary or excerpts. Entry form for time-point encourages entering substantial metadata. Allows groups, comments, discussion, favoriting.
Tech Requirements:
Web browser, internet connection faster than dialup, Flash.
Privacy / Security:
Requires an account to create or edit timelines. Allows users to set timesline to private. Can invite other editors, share with a group, allow public viewing, and public editing. Privacy Policy
Strengths for Education:
Novel and engaging way to support in-class presentations or small group reports. Promotes collaboration. Can support critical thinking through editing and discussion of selected time/data points and supporting resources.
Limitations:
Requires use of real dates. While use of Flash is common, some secured environments block Flash or consider it a risk. It would be helpful if xTimeline included warnings or reminders about use of copyrighted material and resources or encouragement for use of Creative Commons media.
Ideas for Educational Use:
(1) Epidemiology Small Group Project.
Track disease outbreak in a community. Have group divide up tracking significant events from when public health concern developed backward to the first known case appearance. Track the epidemiological process forward from awareness of issue through steps to discover origins. Include images, evidence, data, citations.
(2) Patient Case Report.
Use timeline to support interactive presentation of case report. Using fictionalized dates/times, present patient history, significant symptoms, disease progressing. Include pathology images; audio of heart sounds / breath sounds as relevant; video of gait analysis or movement or simulated patient/family interview. Suitable for either individual or small group project.
(3) Model Professional Development Exercise
Have students collaborate on developing and presenting professional ethics question or other controversial issue interactively via timeline with embedded multimedia clarifying aspects of the question. Ask other students to comment on choice or selection of data points. Could do this as a debate – ask one group to prepare timeline in support (Pros) and another against (Cons).
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). 
