Week 8, Web Polls

Hi Readers,
This week I looked into web polls. I started with freepolls.com and created the little gadget on the right. Now you can grade our school. I like how you get to see others answers to the poll after you have voted. It was easy to create, and I changed the original poll after I had installed the gadget to see if it would change the poll without the copy/paste HTML thing. It worked just fine, all you have to do is edit the poll at the freepoll website. Pretty neat. Unfortunately you need to subscribe to create polls with more than one question, but it is cheap.
After doing this I thought this could really work well for my senior block project. There is a research aspect required, and a survey will fit the bill. I went to Respondus first and it seemed great, if you have an educational tool like blackboard. I don't have access, and it would be serve as a barrier to getting the surveys answered even if I could get access to the programs. So I then went to Quia, and it seems to be more of what I was looking for. It could be set up for classes, with assignments and quizes and such, though not to the level of control that Respondus offered. More important for my current needs though was that I could create a survey and email it to whomever I wanted. I think I may try to email it to JATC instructors working for the IUPAT. I created a survey and would appreciate anyone who would answer the questions, if you are not a JATC instructor just make up answers as I am just trying to see how well it works. If this works well it could go a long way towards answering the logistics question of a research survey.
I really am enjoying this class. I have learned more in this class that I am using everyday than in any I have taken in years.

Map Building

Hi Readers,
This week I decided to take a tangent and try map building. I tried a couple of different sites. I tried http://www.wayfaring.com/ and it worked nicely. I am still having trouble getting it to show the map behind my notes without the viewer manually pressing the map/satellite/hybrid buttons, but I was able to add a note to clarify this to the viewer. As you can see by clicking on the map located on this page, the map has a lot of depth and information embedded in it. This could be very convenient in an educational setting when the students are not familiar with how to get to the campus. If a student can't find the class, they can't be taught! I'm not sure what other educational uses it might have, but it will sure make getting to my parents Lake House easier for my friends! I also tried the http://www.mapbuilder.net/ site. It really was not as user friendly, and I disliked the adds showing up on my map. It may be a decent alternative, but after starting with wayfaring it seemed like a downgrade. I also added a widget from the Nation Safety Committee on my blog so check out the weekly safety hint! Does anyone know how to create hyperlinks on this blog while inserting different text? On our blackboard I can make the links part of my text without showing the http address, and I like that much better than what I have had to do on my blog so far. If anyone knows how to do this I would appreciate the help.
-Mike

Picture Sharing at Flickr

Hi Readers,
This week I am exploring Photosharing. This was the simplest assignment yet. I decided to go with Flickr because it is a Yahoo company, and since I already have a yahoo account it made this easy. I just downloaded, filled out my profile, uploaded some pictures and there you go! I figured I would demonstrate how this could be used as an instructional tool by setting up a group of subject oriented pictures to view. I like how easy it is to pull the slide shows from Flicker, Picassa, and Photobucket. It was really user friendly. I have to admit I had already put this slideshow on my blog from a Picassa Slideshow, so its almost like I cheated, but not quite. I am still wary of putting pictures of my family up since this is a public blog, but here is a link to my Flicker site so you can see them if I invite you.http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikehartnett/

Happy Horsefly Day!

Hi Readers,
After listening to Keith Wright's podcast I decided I liked it enough to post it on my Blog. It is funny which parts of a nations history are remembered and those that are not. If not for some horseflies perhaps these truths may not have been self-evident. I hope that you enjoy his reading as much as I did.
-Mike

Podcasts, putting my voice on the net

Hi Readers. I hope your family had as nice of a 4th of July as my family did. We are all paying for it with sunburn this week. I also forgot I am not in my twenties and went tubing, now my arms cant reach above my shoulders. Such is the price of fun! Now that I am back I started working on a podcast. It was pretty frustrating at first. I took about ten takes to get it right. I then went to Gcast and signed up, quick and painless. When I tried to upload my recordingI realized my recording wasn't in MP3 form. I came to learn I didn't have the capacity to save it in MP3 form. I tried downloading Audacity, and that worked nice, but still couldn't save MP3's without downloading another program. That program was Wavepad, and it did have the ability to save MP3s, and do the actual recording too! So I stopped using Audacity and just went to Wavepad, which did all I currently needed.

(http://www.nch.com.au/wavepad/index.html) Follow that link to get to the free download for Wavepad. click on the GET IT NOW, and you have one stop shopping.

Then I went back to Gcast and uploaded my MP3. It was as simple as pie! They also made it very easy to add it to my blog. I just added a HTML gadget, and copied the code that Gcast offered. I even added it to the class Wiki, which was not as user friendly, but still pretty straight forward.

I can definitely see how this could add to our educational toolbox. We could record lectures for our students, enabling them to listen when conveint, such as during their drive to work. This would also enable them to access the information at a speed they are comforitable with. It would be especially useful for those students that are auditory learners. Merle Rogers is using this technology with his students, allowing them to read chapters of the classes textbooks on a podcast for extra credit. What a great use of the medium, and free labor!
-Mike

Web Conferencing

Hello Readers, it is almost time for Fourth of July celebrations to ensue so I will make this one brief! I had a good web conference with four other students from my instructional technology course and it went well. The site we used was CentralDesktop, and it seemed to work fairly well. It could have gone better if we were all more versed in how it worked, and perhaps we could have tried one with less options to start, but we figured it out pretty quickly. Most of this was due to the superb hosting skills of Amanda. We used the website to put together a Powerpoint presentation that we are still editing right now, but I will try to post it tomorrow before I go to the family lake house. We also discussed many of the applications that this tool could have for education and agreed that it was very useful. We each had to call in on a telephone for the conference, but there was no video so no one had to look at my Mickey Mouse pjs. All in all It was a little confusing for a onetime thing, but would be very useful as a tool if used frequently, or as a presentation tool.