Education Wiki Platforms

Although in class we used Wikispaces, there are other popular wiki platforms. Along with Wikispaces, PBWorks and Wikis in Education's WetPaint are free for K-12 educators. (Pro tip: Don't go to "wetpaint.com", though. That is decidedly NOT a K-12 website. Just warnin' you.)

Creating a Form (Quiz, Survey) in Google Docs

Google Docs, in addition to creating documents and spreadsheets, allows you to create "forms" that can then be embedded in other programs, such as Blogger or Wikispaces. A form can be a survey, quiz, or poll. It is simply a way to gather information. Because of the nature of the form, it is not very secure. Your students won't be stopped from voting more than once, putting someone else's name in, or other mischievous actions.

From your Google Docs homepage, click the "Create New" and select "Form". Create the survey/quiz/poll as desired. To add another question, there is a button in the left top corner of the page with a green plus sign "Add item".

When you are done with your form, you will need to get the "embed" code to place the form into your blog or wiki. Click the button titled "More Actions" and select "Embed". You will need to copy the code in the box by highlighting it and right clicking and selecting "copy".

If you would like to place this form in a blog, simply go to a new post and paste the embed code. If you would like to place the form in a wiki, you must add the code as the "Other HTML" widget. Just paste the embed code in the box that comes up when you select the correct widget.

If you want to edit your form after you've embedded it, but before people have started taking it, you must go back to the Google Docs form page and click the "Form" tab on the blue strip near the top of the page. You will have to go back through the embed steps and replace the revised in your blog or wiki.

New Media 2011 Class Recordings

These aren't a substitute for class, but perhaps they can help you remember the procedures that we did in class. There is a search function in the video that sort of works if you are trying to find when we talked about a specific thing. Hover your mouse over the video while it is playing and the search field will appear on the left side of the screen.

• Part 1 (Google Docs, Wikis, and Google Forms)
• Part 2 (Podcasts)
• Part 3 (More podcasts)
• Part 4 (Review of day 1, blogs)
• Part 5 (More blogs, image editing)
• Part 6 (More blogs)
• Part 7 (Google Reader, Twitter search)
  

Podcasting with Audacity and Min.us

Once you have created your podcast in Audacity (complete with intro and outro music from a place like Free Music Archive), you must save it as mp3 file.

First, you must download the right encoder (lame_enc.dll) if you haven't already done so. Select the edit menu, go to preferences, select libraries. On the libraries popup menu, click on the "download" button next to "LAME MP3 Library".

Once the encoder is downloaded, select from the file menu "Export". Name the file, and select "mp3" as your file type. You will be warned about the reduction in the file size; click "OK". Fill out as much or as little of the metadata song information as you want, and then click "OK".

Once you have your mp3 file saved, open a browser window to min.us. Click "select" and find your mp3 file and click "open". Voila! You are done. Be sure to write down the unique address in the address bar before you leave the min.us site.

Project Requirements*

(*Requirements is a strong word. We want you to do these general things, but if there is something else you want to do, just let us know!)

Your blog will be your "home" project--you will link or post all your other projects to it so we can see them. At the end of the last day of class, you will just email me a link to your blog with your projects.

• Create a blog
• Modify the blog layout
  
• Modify the blog settings
• On your blog, post a picture, a video, and link to other websites
• Create podcast with intro and outro music
  
• Link to your podcast
• Create and link to your wiki pages (personal page, vacation page (with external link and picture), form/survey page)
• Anything else that catches your fancy

Technophobia 2011 Class Recordings

While not a replacement for the pure joy of being in class with us, hopefully these recording will be helpful if you want to remember something that we did together in class.

• Day 1 Part 1 (Word)
• Day 1 Part 2 (More Word)
• Day 1 Part 3 (PowerPoint)
• Day 1 Part 4 (Excel)
• Day 2 Part 5 ()
• Day 2 Part 6 ()
• Day 2 Part 7 ()
• Day 2 Part 8 ()

Podcasting Tip

This article gives a great example of using podcasts to extend the learning time for your students:

Instead of lecturing during class, he creates screencasts, which include narration and digital recordings of the PowerPoint presentations on his computer screen. His students watch the screencasts — also called vodcasts — at home and work on assignments at Michigan Center High School.

NY Times on Learning

Interesting piece in the NY Times today about learning and study habits. Here's a taste of the biggest example in the story:

...psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong. For instance, many study skills courses insist that students find a specific place, a study room or a quiet corner of the library, to take their work. The research finds just the opposite. In one classic 1978 experiment, psychologists found that college students who studied a list of 40 vocabulary words in two different rooms — one windowless and cluttered, the other modern, with a view on a courtyard — did far better on a test than students who studied the words twice, in the same room. Later studies have confirmed the finding, for a variety of topics.

One other thing they mentioned in the article was about learning styles. They linked to an abstract that made the following conclusion. 

Our review of the literature disclosed ample evidence that children and adults will, if asked, express preferences about how they prefer information to be presented to them. There is also plentiful evidence arguing that people differ in the degree to which they have some fairly specific aptitudes for different kinds of thinking and for processing different types of information. However, we found virtually no evidence for the interaction pattern mentioned above, which was judged to be a precondition for validating the educational applications of learning styles. Although the literature on learning styles is enormous, very few studies have even used an experimental methodology capable of testing the validity of learning styles applied to education. Moreover, of those that did use an appropriate method, several found results that flatly contradict the popular meshing hypothesis.
We conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice.

Overview of awesome stuff

We didn't have time to work with all the amazing education programs out there, but you can do it on your own time. Check some of these links out, play around, and see what you can do!

• Glogster: "Posters" with links for your wiki or blog (online)
  
• Google Earth: Amazing satellite views of the entire world (downloadable)
  
• Voice Thread: Narrate or comment on slide shows (online)
  
• Prezi: A new way to do a presentation, quite different than PowerPoint (online and downloadable)
  
• Khan Academy: Video podcasts of many, many subjects (online)
  
• Lynda: (Some free, most not) Excellent tutorials on many of the most common computer programs (online)
• Google reader: A quick way to browse your favorite websites and blogs
  

Image Editing

Photographs and images are powerful tools to use in blogs and wikis (not to mention classroom presentations). Often, however, you want to edit the image--to make it prettier, smaller, larger, different.

In the last several years, free photo editing software is available both online and for download. (You can also use non-free image editing software, which is usually more powerful, such as Photoshop and Illustrator.) Here are some of the more popular free programs:

• Picnik
• Picasa
• Paint.net

Podcast Examples

Podcasts can be scripted or conversational; both can be effective ways to engage the listener and impart information.

Listen to an episode of a popular scripted podcast, "Grammar Girl".

Listen to an episode of a popular conversational podcast, "Stuff You Missed in History Class".

Blog Templates

Blog templates (the look of the blog) can be as simple or as complex as you wish. Each blogging platform offers basic templates to use--in Blogger, they can be found under the "Design" tab. There are many websites that offer free templates to use with Blogger. Here are just a few (if you do a Google search, you are sure to find many more):

• Hot Bliggity Blog
• The Cutest Blog on the Block
• Free Blogger Templates
• Blogger Templates

New Media 2010 Class Recordings

Part 1 - Browsers, Google Docs, Wikispaces
Part 2 - More on Wikis
Part 3 - Blogs
Part 4 - More Blogs
Part 5 - Review of Day 1, Podcasting
Part 6 - Audacity for creating podcasts
Part 7 - Images in Picnik
Part 8 - Show and Tell on extra components

Project Requirements*

(*Requirements is a strong word. We want you to do these general things, but if there is something else you want to do, just let us know!)

Your blog will be your "home" project--you will link or post all your other projects to it so we can see them. At the end of the last day of class, you will just email me a link to your blog with your projects.

• Create a blog
• Modify the layout
  
• Modify the settings
• Post a picture, a video, link to other websites
• Link to your podcast
• Link to your wiki pages (personal page and garden page)
  
• Anything else that catches your fancy
  

Highlights from the Web on Classroom New Media

David Wiley wrote about the cool experience he had by inviting his students to submit their homework writing assignments via a public blog.

The result was a teacher’s dream — the students’ writing became a little longer, a little more thoughtful, and a little more representative of their actual intellectual abilities. And this benefit came by simply asking students to submit their homework through a different channel. They were already going to write and submit it; I was already going to read it. This was a true two-for-one.

Salman Khan has been creating small video clips on YouTube that teach a modular concept. He's got over 1400 of them up so far at his Khan Academy. In an interview with Jon Udell, he talked about how cool it would be if kids created their own video clips in the same way. (Listen at about 33:00 for that particular sound bite.)

William Thomas blew me away with an EDUCAUSE presentation about getting students in a university setting to use online tools like wikis to radically improve the mega-class-size freshman history courses. His goal was to introduce these students to the craft of writing history without overwhelming the instructor with an ungradeable raft of papers. The solution feels like a win-win.

Tanya Roscorio had a good piece in Converge Magazine that provided a quick-read overview of some of the ways teachers are using "tech" in the classroom, including such fancy tech as pencils.

Sharon Bowman has a very clever summary of some principles in brain science that might encourage us to try interesting things in the classroom. She calls them her "six trumps."