In my last post, I mentioned I was at the Pacific Northwest Assessment, Teaching, and Learning Conference. After my presentation someone asked me about concept mapping tools. (I wish I could remember who he was. He was very tall. If you happen to be reading this, can you send me an email, please?) I told him that I had recently read about a tool but I couldn’t remember in that moment what it was.

I’m afraid I still can’t remember what it was, but just a few days ago Richard Byrne of the Free Technology for Teachers blog wrote about the newly-released Spider Scribe.

I created this concept map in 15 minutes, including the 2 minutes it took to watch Spider Scribe’s introductory video. It is very intuitive, making it a great tool for students!

View this map.

After registering and creating a new map, you get a blank screen. At the bottom of the screen are 5 tools, which they call stencils: Text box, insert a file, insert an image, insert a map, or create notes with a time/date stamp.

To add a text box, just click and drag the text box stencil onto the map. Type whatever you’d like in the box. Want another box? Repeat the process. Click on one of your text boxes, and alter background color or text color by making changes in the “Properties” box on the right side of the screen.

Want to upload an image? Drag the image box onto the canvas and upload the image from your computer. Want to add another image? Repeat the process.

Want to resize a box? Grab the handle in the bottom left corner of any on-screen box and pull or push to change the size.

They’re still in beta (officially on 5/16/11), so look for the addition of new stencils and additional tools for each stencil, such as different fonts beyond the currently available serif and sans serif.

To link content, mouse over a box. See the circle at the bottom of the box? Mouse over it and it will turn into a + sign. Click on it to generate an arrow. Now drag the arrow over another box, and unclick. Done. The two boxes are now linked. Click on a box to move it around; the arrow will follow. To disconnect them, click on the arrow you want to delete. That’s it.

Maps can be private (only you can see them), or they can be public in a variety of ways.

• I can grant only certain people permission to view it.
• I can give certain people permission to edit it.
• I can get a URL so only those with the URL can view it. (That’s what I chose for the “view this map” link above.)
• I can make it completely public so that’s it’s discoverable by search engines.

Spider Scribe promises to be a very powerful concept mapping tool. I’m looking forward to watching it develop!

I had the pleasure of spending last Thursday and Friday in Spokane, WA at the Pacific Northwest Assessment, Teaching, and Learning Conference. This annual conference is presented by the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (WA SBCTC) and draws mostly from this group but there was a smattering of faculty from the 4-year colleges and universities in Washington, Oregon, and California.

The plenary was given by Bill Moore, head of the Assessment, Teaching, and Learning wing of the Washington SBCTC. His presentation was largely a reminder that educators do not have to work in isolation. He concluded with an activity. We were seated at tables of 8-10 people. In this activity we each took a few minutes to identify a teaching-related problem we had. Then one person volunteered to take 5 minutes to describe their problem to the group. The group then had 5 minutes to ask clarifying questions. For the next 15 minutes, the person with the issue kept silent as the group members discussed the problem, proposing possible solutions. Finally, in the last 5 minutes, the person with the issue reacted to the discussion. While our table was initially skeptical of this process, some of us found it so useful that we may make it part of our on-campus professional development training.

My tech tools presentation was in the first concurrent session of the conference. When I walked in the room and saw that there was no projector, I remembered that presenters at this conference are asked to bring their own projectors. I have one. Unfortunately it was sitting under the desk in my office 300 miles away.

After doing much asking around, Jerry Lewis at Columbia Basin College offered the use of his. It was in his hotel room a bit of a hike away. He arrived 3 minutes before the 10:30am start time. He ran part of the way. (Thank you, Jerry!!) With 75-80 people in attendance, it would have been difficult to have them huddled around my computer screen. I suppose the alternative would have been an interpretive dance of the various tech tools. That would have whittled down the audience enough that we could have huddled around my computer screen. There were several people in the room with computers. If the free wifi at the Spokane Convention Center would have been faster than dial-up, I could have used JoinMe to beam my desktop to the participants. JoinMe does work on web-enabled phones.

To avoid that snafu in the future, I created a FollowUp.cc for the day before I am to leave for next year’s conference reminding myself to take a projector if I’m presenting.

For this presentation, I started with directing participants to my workshop backchan.nl. To get there one could either enter the URL directly into one’s web browser or smartphone users (approximately 75% of attendees) could scan the QR code I gave them. Participants used backchan.nl to offer their suggestions regarding the tools I discussed or additional tools that the participants might find useful.

Next up was Dropbox.com. Educators frequently have to access their files from their offices, their homes, their classrooms, and on the go, like when they’re at conferences. I would be remiss if I gave a tech presentation and omitted Dropbox. About a quarter of the attendees currently used this tool. After covering some of the major features, I suspect at least another 25% were onboard. In fact, some had it installed on their smartphones before the session was over.

The other tools I wanted to make sure I covered were YouCanBook.Me and Doodle’s MeetMe. In this presentation the only people who had heard of the former were from my college. Given the number of students and advisees we have, one of these tools, or something like them, is a necessity.

The other tool I wanted to demonstrate was Conduit’s web browser toolbar. Research shows that the fewer barriers there are between you and a behavior, the more likely you are to engage in that behavior. As one conference participant put it, “So the toolbar will be there when the student is on Facebook?” Yes, it will.

Of the remaining tools, participants were interested in Audacity for providing feedback to students. Other participants suggested alternatives such as Tegrity, a tool freely available to members of the Washington State Community and Technical College system. Another person was interested in PhraseExpress, another tool useful for grading papers.

What I especially like about this presentation approach is that I get to cover what I think are the most important tools while giving participants an opportunity to hear about the tools they’re most interested in.

It was now time for lunch. I had the pleasure of sitting with a couple psychology faculty from South Puget Sound Community College in Olympia, WA. Our conversation covered a lot of ground, including both psychology and technology.

Oh. And I got an award. My sincerest thanks to my Vice President of Academic Affairs, Jeff Wagnitz, for suggesting the nomination and to my colleague, Social Science Division Chair, and friend, Ruth Frickle, for writing the nomination letter. Over the last 10 years I’ve done much work at my college around assessment of student learning outcomes. I’m now leaving that role to focus on the technology of teaching and learning. It means a lot to me to have my assessment work acknowledged and appreciated.

I spent the afternoon in the ‘eLearning Center’. That was a new addition at this year’s conference. Participants could drop in for help with any technology related to teaching and learning. While it was primarily used as a place for the tech folks to hang out and chat, those conversations were quite fruitful.

The second and final day of the conference started with a series of concurrent sessions. The first one I attended was by Stephanie Delaney at Cascadia Community College. She piloted a peer mentor program that was based on two premises: 1) The first two weeks are crucial to student success in an online or hybrid course; 2) Students who need the most help do not seek it out. With a small grant, she hired two student workers to contact approximately 200 students identified as high risk, including students in their first or second quarter in an online course. Two weeks before the quarter started, the target students were contacted by phone and/or email to see if they needed help with the course management system and to identify any roadblocks, such as no computer/internet at home. A week before the quarter started, students were contacted again with a reminder to log into the online/hybrid course next week and do something. At the end of the first week, they were contacted a third time to see how things went during the first week. At the end of the second week, they were contacted one last time. For students who were struggling, they were given information about where to get help as well as how to go about dropping the course if they had decided that online courses weren’t for them. Despite the program’s success, it was not funded for next year. Participants suggested other ways to run it, such as through the tutoring center or as a student government initiative.

The second session of the day was on Tegrity, lecture capture software, presented by Jerry Lewis from Columbia Basin College, my hero with the projector. I started using Tegrity earlier this year so there wasn’t much new in his presentation for me. I did learn how to solve one of my Tegrity problems. When I have my headset on and I’m playing a video, the audio only plays in my ear. It doesn’t play over the speakers. David Spiel, also of Columbia Basin College, told me the solution. I haven’t tried it yet. As soon as I get it working, I’ll post the solution here.

The third and last session of the day came from Tom Caswell and Scott Dennis, both from the WA SBCTC. Their presentation was on how to use third party tools, such as what I cover in this blog, in combination with a course management system. You can download their handout here, which includes some examples from the Google suite of products. Be sure to check out Scott Dennis’ tech tools bookmarks.

If you’re located in the Pacific Northwest or are looking for an excuse to visit, I hope to see you at the 2012 conference May 2-4 in Vancouver, WA. Be sure to say hi!

Here’s some news for the Google calendar users. You can now change the color of an individual event. Click the top of an existing event, then select the down arrow next to the event title. Choose the color you’d like. The top bar where the time is will remain the same color as your calendar, but the section that includes the name of the event will change color.

When you create a new event or click on ‘edit event details,’ you can change the event color there.

You can now mark those especially important meetings in red and the less important in grey. What you do with that information is up to you.

For those of you who have taken the Dropbox plunge, if you signed up with your edu email account Dropbox wants to double the space you get from referrals. That’s now 500MB per referral. And it’s retroactive. That’s right. They’ll double the extra space you’ve already received from referrals.

Just visit this webpage and confirm your email address. Your space will be automatically increased.

If you’re not a Dropbox user, it’s time to sign up. Not familiar with Dropbox? See this earlier blog post.

How do you get space for referrals? Log into your Dropbox.com account, and click on the “Referral Status” tab. At the very bottom of the page, click where it says “Invite more people to join Dropbox!” At the very bottom of that page is URL you can give to friends, family, or complete strangers. If they use that URL to sign up for a Dropbox account, Dropbox will give you an extra 250MB of space – or 500MB if you use your edu email to create your account.

I had a student come by my office yesterday. She has a website where she’d like to have a discussion board for her visitors to use. I knew that there must be some discussion board services out there that will give you html code so that you can embed the board on your website. Of course I couldn’t recommend something without trying it out myself.

I decided to go with Nabble.com. In the navigation bar at the top of this blog click on the new discussion board link to see it in action. The discussion board is for you to post questions and suggestions. I hope you find it useful!

My readers know that I’m a big fan of YouCanBook.Me (see this post). In fact YouCanBook.Me has some new functionality since I last wrote about it, which means I owe you another post on that tool. In short, YouCanBook.Me gives others the power to schedule themselves into your calendar. Some of you let me know that you don’t want to give students that kind of power. For you, Doodle has a new tool.

You may already be familiar with Doodle (see this post) because you’ve used it to get a bunch of people to agree on a time to meet or to vote on some decisions that need to be made.

Doodle just launched a new tool called MeetMe. Other people can see when you’re busy, and they can request a few times as possible meeting times. The key word here is “request.” With YouCanBook.Me, the person chooses the time, and that time is booked in your calendar. With MeetMe, the person requests one or more possible times, and you make the final decision on whether or not you will meet, and, if so, when.

I have a Doodle account that is linked to my Google calendar, so when you visit my Doodle MeetMe page, you see my busy times.

If you were logged into your Doodle account, you would be able to select your calendar, and it would appear next to mine so you could easily see when we were both free. Doodle appears happy to use most web-based calendars such as Google or Yahoo. It looks like you can also use Microsoft Exchange. (If your institution uses Outlook, you’re probably using Exchange.)

Click on the times you’d like to propose. Those appear in blue. Change the length of time by grabbing the small double bars at the bottom of the meeting time and moving them up or down. When you’re satisfied with your choices, click ‘create meeting request.’

If the person who is making the request is logged in to Doodle, it will ask the person if they’d like to have those times blocked off in their own calendar. Handy if you’d like to keep those times blocked off while you wait for the person you’re inviting, in this case, me, to decide.

After the request is made, the person making the request gets an email with a link to follow if they decide they’d like to make changes to the requested times.

As the invited person I get an email asking me to respond to the meeting request by following the link in the email. When I follow the link, I log into Doodle and see the options on my calendar.

When I mouse over one of the requested times, I get this pop-up.

When I click ‘OK,’ the date turns green, and the other requested times go grey. I can also request new dates, ignore the request (harsh!), or reject the proposed times altogether. If I pick a time, as I’ve done here, I can select which calendar, if I’m using more than one, I’d like the appointment added to. If I choose nothing, it’s added to my default calendar. Finally, I click ‘Confirm date’.

But I’m not done yet. On the next page I can type a personal message to be added to the Doodle-generated email if I’d like. In either case, I have to hit ‘send’ on this page to lock in the time and send the person who requested the time an email letting them know which time I chose.

That’s it. The accepted time has been added to my calendar. And the person making the request has been sent an email with the appointment information. If they were logged into their own Doodle account when they made the appointment, the chosen appointment has also been added to their calendar. If they don’t have a Doodle account or a digital calendar, they still have the email with the time and date so they can write it in their Day Planner.

If you decide to give this one a whirl, let me know how it works for you!

As many of you know, I’ve been a fan of Delicious social bookmarks for quite a while. (See this post from two years ago.) Its future came into question recently when Yahoo, who bought Delicious in 2004, decided to yank the staff it had devoted to it. The blogosphere exploded with the suggestions for other social bookmarking sites. I had tried some of those sites before, others I hadn’t heard of. After dancing amongst them, I decided that Delicious was the best choice for me, so I decided to ride it out and see what happened.

Imagine my pleasant surprise when I received this email last night:

I followed the link and gave my permission. If you have Delicious bookmarks, you have until July 2011 to give your permission, otherwise you lose access to your account.

Yahoo didn’t do much with Delicious after its purchase in 2004, so I’m very interested in seeing when AVOS’ plans are for what is already a rich tool.

[UPDATE 10/9/2012   : Tegrity now has dual-monitor support for both Macs and PCs.  When you run the Tegrity recorder, if Tegrity detects more than one monitor, it will ask if you’d like to record the current monitor.  If you want to record the other one, click the blue arrow to change monitors.  Very easy!]

Bear with me while I digress from my normal postings. Typically I discuss technology that is freely available to most or about technology that many already have, such as Microsoft Office. This time I’m going to discuss an issue that I spent quite a bit of time working on before hitting upon a solution. This post is for people who meet the following two conditions:

1. You use dual monitors for your presentations. That means that you have your regular computer screen and you have an ‘extended desktop’ projected on a second monitor. In my classroom, my laptop is my main monitor, and what is projected onto the screen that my students see is the secondary monitor (aka ‘extended desktop monitor’).
2. You use Tegrity. Tegrity is lecture capture software. It will record whatever is on your computer screen and webcam and whatever audio is fed through a microphone. In other words, it captures your lecture as you lecture. It’s very helpful for students who missed class, for students who have an accommodation for a notetaker, for ESL students, or for students who just want to hear the instructor’s explanation one more time.

My setup

In the image below, on the left is what my students see projected on the classroom screen. On the right is PowerPoint presenter view (see this blog post if you’re unfamiliar with presenter view. Briefly, the projected screen is duplicated in the top left of the laptop window. My notes are on the right, and at the bottom of my laptop screen is a filmstrip of my slides that allows me to jump to any slide in my presentation.)

The problem

Tegrity only captures what is on my laptop screen (my notes, all of my slides), not what I’ve projected on the classroom screen. I want that to be the other way around. You’d think that Tegrity would be able to detect when dual monitors are in use and allow the user to determine which monitor would be recorded. But, as of this writing, that’s not an option.

The work-around solution

To get Tegrity to record what is on the classroom screen, I need to trade screens. I need to put my computer on the projected screen and put the extended desktop on my laptop.

1. Flip the monitors. For me that means right clicking on my desktop and under ‘graphic properties’ I make the monitor (projected screen) my primary device and make my notebook my secondary device.

   

   My computer’s desktop is now visible on the projected screen. This is what Tegrity will record.

   Tip: If you don’t want your students to see your desktop icons, you can temporarily hide them. Right click on the desktop. Under view, uncheck ‘show desktop icons.’

   

   If I just stop here and run PowerPoint, all of my notes and the filmstrip of my slides will appear on the projected screen, and just the slide will appear on my laptop. Not what I want. To solve that, I need give PowerPoint some instructions.

2. Flip PowerPoint presenter view. Open the PowerPoint presentation, and on the Slide Show tab, check ‘Use Presenter View.’ Directly above that, where it says “Show On:’ select ‘Primary Monitor.’ In step one, we made the ‘primary monitor’ the projected screen. That means that slides will now be projected on the classroom screen. This will need to be done for all of your PowerPoint files. Once you change one PowerPoint file, all of the others (just in the same folder?) will change as well. [Updated  5/3/2011.]

   

In a nutshell

Tegrity will only record the primary monitor. What I’ve done is make the projected screen the primary monitor, and I’ve told PowerPoint to project slides onto the primary monitor.

As my regular readers know, I’m a big fan of Dropbox (see this earlier post). Dropbox adds a new folder to your ‘My Documents’ folder called ‘My Dropbox.’ Let’s say that you’ve created a folder in ‘My Documents’ called ‘Important Committee.’ Inside that folder are several other folders. Let’s say one of them is called ‘Stuff to Share.’ You want to share this folder with your fellow committee members for coordinating the work of your committee. But you don’t want to move your entire committee folder to Dropbox, and you don’t want to pull that one subfolder out; you like to keep your files neatly organized in one place.

Enter Dropbox Folder Sync.

After it’s installed, and you tell it where your ‘My Dropbox’ folder is located, just right click on your ‘Stuff to Share’ folder and select ‘Sync with Dropbox.’ Dropbox Folder Sync will effectively move your ‘Stuff to Share’ folder to your ‘My Dropbox’ folder, white creating a shadow folder (called a symbolic link) at its original location in the ‘Important Committee’ folder. Add a file to ‘Stuff to Share’ in either location, and the file will immediately appear in the other location. Edit a file in one location, and the edited file will appear in the other location.

If you choose the 2.0 Beta version, you also get an unsync option. Right click on the folder that’s in its original location, and select ‘UnSync with Dropbox.’ The folder in ‘My Dropbox’ will be deleted, and all of that folder’s files will only, once again, reside in the original location.

How slick is that?

In December 2010 I wrote a post about Corkboard, a virtual bulletin board.

They just announced some new features.

You’re welcome to play around with this live board.

If you have frequently-changing content for your students, it would be easy enough to embed a corkboard in your website or course management system (CMS), and just update the sticky notes as needed. No need to edit your website or CMS.

Have other uses for it? Leave a comment!