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Showing posts from August, 2009

Captivate, perhaps.

Komarey and I tried Captivate for making a couple of learning objects. The good? It's extremely robust in its features, integrated with Adobe Connect, and has potential..once you learn it. The tough? Its not that intuitive and tutorial support isn't the greatest. Their 400 page manual is not bad, but uhhhh 400 pages. That said, features of version 4 they list as tops are round -trip PowerPoint workflow (create, record, re-record or add/delete) variables that allow personalization (name, data) of the experience and widgets such as roll overs and buttons text-to-speech functionality, esp important for the PC Photoshop layers import, useful for animations workflow enhancements and output as PDF or AVI as well as html/swf Useful to us are the ability to record in a number of ways - full motion, screen shot demo mode, and interactive mode in which students enter text or click in assigned areas with right and wrong feedback and scoring. Labels can be added, and the timing of

Enrich the Experience Through the Devices They Love with Blackboard MobilEdu

I attended this webinar this morning about MobilEdu. It's essentially housing all the web components of a school as apps on a mobile device. For example, things such as a school director, athletics, maps, events, courses (registration-add/drop), News, and Library can all be accessed through a free app that is downloadable to your mobile device that has web service. Schools such as Stanford, Duke, Texas A&M, UC San Diego, University of Washington all utilize this service as they see an increase of students using mobile devices. Maps of buildings on campus are readily available for students to find their way to their classes. An expanded photo of the building is also available if you click on your desired destination. Bus routes are also available according to your destination. Routes are supplied in addition to a schedule of time. Students also have access to web services such as registration. They can search, add, or drop courses. Final grades from previous classes are

Mobile Devices with Instruction

Presentation is based off of Project Tomorrow Data and inviting current practitioners. Digital Advance Team Trends The mobile learner It's a Web 2.0 World "I'll take a class to go!" The ultimate online textbook Exploring STEM careers Students power down to go to school, power up at the end of the day. Digital divide is getting larger. Students want to use their own devices at school with less restrictions (firewalls, rules, etc.) Panel Discussion: Baltimore County Public Schools Onslow County School District Paradise Valley Unified School District - http://technology.pvschools.net/home.html - setting up free wireless network for personal devices. Think about the network first and not the device (e.g. getting all students the same device). Change is a mindset. Instead of cracking down on devices, find ways of using it for educational purposes. For systemic change, watch the early adopter schools or teachers and let them set the pace. Engaging students has eliminated

MS Outlook Tip & Google Reader

My tip focuses on MS Outlook. As email communications, calendar appointment scheduling and tasks have increased, I realized it was a necessity for me to try and do things quicker. Here is an easy tip... When an email comes in, you can click and drag the email address to your calendar, contacts, tasks or notes icon and it'll bring in the email content automatically for you. This way, you can save time from having to copy and paste all the time. For me, I've saved a lot of time by dragging/dropping directly to my calendar and task icons. Also, to keep up with the many ongoing happenings within DL, I try to stay connected by skimming through my Google Reader daily. This tool has really made compiling all my blog feed interests nicely.

E pule kakou . . .

Aloha all, I was trying to think so hard of a "techie" tip and finally gave up. I even googled "tips and tricks" for various programs and then thought "I can't blog about something I don't actually use!" Then, as I was sitting in my Papa Makua class, doing all kinds of protocal and thought about how we keep looking for a short pule to do to open our meetings. I had `A`ali`i write a pule in Hawaiian. He was worried about the grammar and structure of it so I asked Kelly C. to kökua by editing and doing an audio recording so you can hear the pronunciation. Hope it's helpful :) E ho`omalu käkou E kö mäkou makua i loko o ka lani Mahalo no nä pömaika`i a pau. Mahalo no ke ali`i lokomaika`i o Pauahi a me këia kula nei. E `olu`olu, e kia`i iä mäkou i ke alahele küpono me ka lökahi. Ke nonoi ha`aha`a nei mäkou i ka inoa o Iesu Cristo `Ämene `Unuhi (translation): Let us pray Our Father in heaven Thank you for all the many blessings. Thank you for the gen

Keyboard Shortcuts

Some new ones to me... In any browser, Ctrl-L will highlight the URL box Just type the site name and Return/Enter, don't delete first. Fast find! On a PC, the flag key (I don't know what it's called, it's next to the Alt key) plus -D takes you to the Desktop. That key plus F takes you to the Find dialog box. Does anyone know how to get directly to the Find Folder and Files option? On a Mac Cmd-shift-F puts you into the Search box by file Name rather than by Contents. More Mac tips in Ross' Mac 101 and Rolf's Mac 202 tips at http://drop.io/hmaus_maclearn .

PowerPoint Tip

This tip is for those that work on PowerPoint slides that have many objects on them. It can be quite a hassle to select an object that is buried under several other objects. In the past, I would just select the object and "send to back" until the object I wanted was in front. Instead of doing that you can use the "Selection Pane" tool to hide the other objects, so you can focus on what you want to work on. The "Selection Pane" is located in the Format tab and works somewhat like layers in Photoshop. Once you click on "Selection Pane" you will see the "Selection and Visibility" side bar with all the objects on your slide. Click on the eyeball icon next to an object to toggle its visibility.

Excel Tip!

I wanted to post about one of the many functions in Excel. With the many master lists we have, we are always trying to sort through them for specific data. I remember when Davie was working on sorting emails for the newsletter, she said she had trouble with pulling only “@ksbe.edu” email addresses. I knew MS Excel did a lot but wasn’t sure that it would do this. So I did a little research and asked my husband (the Excel Dork). To pull specific data from a field you will need to do the following: Create a column. In the first box you will need to specify which series of text you’d like to sort so if were looking for “@ksbe.edu”, you will type in “=RIGHT()” or use the function library to find the TEXT function and select RIGHT. Select the group of data you’re asking this function to search, and the number of characters you'd like to sort counting from the right hand side of the field. Copy and paste the formula for all the fields you'd like the data to be pulled f