After typing away madly in my ETL401 Topic 1 Forum, I've decided that I am going to also add my posts to this blog for ease of access (after I finish the subject) and so that I can use for other professional development purposes. Thinking I might use some of my discussions from my posts as the impetus to run classes, share knowledge and stimulate further discussion with colleagues. I also think having all my posts in one spot will be a great way for me to remember all that I have learnt in this course and to reflect on my thoughts and perspectives at the time.
I am also going to bookmark any sites, other social media streams and freely accesible journal articles over at my Diigo Library at http://www.diigo.com/user/skiinglibrarian, just like I said I would a few blog posts back.
These are all my attempts at managing my digital footprint and streamlining my scholarly (and not so scholarly) communications.
Showing posts with label web 2.0 tools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web 2.0 tools. Show all posts
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Week 10 - eContent and The End
I love eBooks and eContent. I love that I can carry all that stuff around in my handbag. But I hate all the platforms. I hate that I can't use them seamlessly. I live in a mixed up world of Macs, Android including the Kindle Fire (don't ask) and Windows...one word...frustration.
eContent - I recently discovered Librivox and listened to Pride and Prejudice. Some chapters were better than others as there were different narrators for different sets of chapters (hey it's free). And we all know that with audio books, the narrator is the most important part. Even a wonderful book can sound clumsy if the intonations, pauses and speed of the speech are incorrect. In this vein I also tried free audiobooks on YouTube by Librivox. Some of the books have powerpoint style videos to go with the audio -somewhat irritating for me but I showed the YouTube channel to some students and they really loved it....sort of let them do 2 things at once.
Scribd - I do use Scribd to access document and presentations for the web when I find them online but for work I use Slideshare to upload. It is great for sharing resources online with students (yeh! no more paper print outs). It also allows students and other interested people to have access to these resources - I am all for sharing these resources and making them social (isn't that phrase great... not sure where I heard that one first).
Anyway, not sure why I chose Slideshare over Scridb but in reflecting on my choice now and comparing the two, it seems you can download documents etc off Scribd and convert from text to speech. That sounds like a great feature and one I shall look into soon...maybe, it is best to use both?
Digital Storytelling - the iLearn link to the 31 of the best digital storytelling sites caught my attention (who said there isn't enough time to explore them all!!!!!). At school, students have used ToonDoos and also a great resource from ACMI (Australian Centre for Moving Images) - storyboard generator. Both great fun.......
As was this whole program. There is still much more I want to explore (hopefully we still will have access to the modules?) and refresh some of the tools I am already using.
eContent - I recently discovered Librivox and listened to Pride and Prejudice. Some chapters were better than others as there were different narrators for different sets of chapters (hey it's free). And we all know that with audio books, the narrator is the most important part. Even a wonderful book can sound clumsy if the intonations, pauses and speed of the speech are incorrect. In this vein I also tried free audiobooks on YouTube by Librivox. Some of the books have powerpoint style videos to go with the audio -somewhat irritating for me but I showed the YouTube channel to some students and they really loved it....sort of let them do 2 things at once.
Scribd - I do use Scribd to access document and presentations for the web when I find them online but for work I use Slideshare to upload. It is great for sharing resources online with students (yeh! no more paper print outs). It also allows students and other interested people to have access to these resources - I am all for sharing these resources and making them social (isn't that phrase great... not sure where I heard that one first).
 |
| Clipped from Slideshare.com |
Anyway, not sure why I chose Slideshare over Scridb but in reflecting on my choice now and comparing the two, it seems you can download documents etc off Scribd and convert from text to speech. That sounds like a great feature and one I shall look into soon...maybe, it is best to use both?
Digital Storytelling - the iLearn link to the 31 of the best digital storytelling sites caught my attention (who said there isn't enough time to explore them all!!!!!). At school, students have used ToonDoos and also a great resource from ACMI (Australian Centre for Moving Images) - storyboard generator. Both great fun.......
As was this whole program. There is still much more I want to explore (hopefully we still will have access to the modules?) and refresh some of the tools I am already using.
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Week 9 - You Call It Condensing...I Call It Content Curation or Just Plain Organising Stuff
If you want to manage your time then ignore Web 2.0...it is all engrossing, all amazing and seemingly never ending. Once again, my colleague and I today discussed why some web apps, web tools (call them what you will) rise to the top of the pile. Why Pinterest and not some other similar tool? Why Instagram and not Picnik? Anyway, we were just musing and that sort of fits in with this weeks blog about saving time and managing yourself on the web....:)
I like the idea of catching and condensing and I think that is what I already try and do every day so as not to miss out on interesting new tools, bits of information that may come in useful when talking to the boss or a teacher or deciding on a computer platform for the whole school! I lamented a few weeks back that Google notebook had disappeared and I had used this as a catching and condensing/read later tool and as a collaboration tool. I discovered just last week that all those notebooks are now Google docs
Yeh! So much fab information and insights into still relevant ideas that I can now use again.
So, I've seemingly signed up for Strawberryj.am but am still waiting for contact so have moved on to paper.li. A few of my favourite tweeters use it. So I set up my account and then updated my lists (an attempt to streamline my reading of tweets!) in Twitter so that my streams into paper.li were more condensed and made sense. Shall see how it goes at The Skiing Librarian Weekly.
Still waiting for strawberryj.am email!!!! Not in the junk mail but am I suppose to do something else but try and sign up?
Checked out Topicmarks as this looks like a very handy tool as I read a lot of online articles as well as online journals (but these usually have an abtract to read). Added the url of an article about teenage brains that I want to read but I think I could have read it faster than topicmarks can summarise it (still waiting!)..hmmm...tried again....now giving up and tried Freesummarizer which worked in an instant (an no email signup..good). Article was great though and of much interest as I am quite intrigued by this area of research after reading an article in NG last year.
Well another module down (and no email from strawberryj.am nor has topicmarks summarised my article)...still great fun and I organised my twitter followers into lists so a productive module as well.
I like the idea of catching and condensing and I think that is what I already try and do every day so as not to miss out on interesting new tools, bits of information that may come in useful when talking to the boss or a teacher or deciding on a computer platform for the whole school! I lamented a few weeks back that Google notebook had disappeared and I had used this as a catching and condensing/read later tool and as a collaboration tool. I discovered just last week that all those notebooks are now Google docs
 |
| Clipped from Google Docs |
So, I've seemingly signed up for Strawberryj.am but am still waiting for contact so have moved on to paper.li. A few of my favourite tweeters use it. So I set up my account and then updated my lists (an attempt to streamline my reading of tweets!) in Twitter so that my streams into paper.li were more condensed and made sense. Shall see how it goes at The Skiing Librarian Weekly.
Still waiting for strawberryj.am email!!!! Not in the junk mail but am I suppose to do something else but try and sign up?
Checked out Topicmarks as this looks like a very handy tool as I read a lot of online articles as well as online journals (but these usually have an abtract to read). Added the url of an article about teenage brains that I want to read but I think I could have read it faster than topicmarks can summarise it (still waiting!)..hmmm...tried again....now giving up and tried Freesummarizer which worked in an instant (an no email signup..good). Article was great though and of much interest as I am quite intrigued by this area of research after reading an article in NG last year.
Well another module down (and no email from strawberryj.am nor has topicmarks summarised my article)...still great fun and I organised my twitter followers into lists so a productive module as well.
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Week 5 - The Dreaded Prezentation!
Okay, so I am not a fan of Prezi as I am such a linear person
(although I have no issues chasing links all over the web!!!) Prezi gives me
vertigo and I know lots of people out there like it, including teachers and
students at my school where I introduced some staff to it in 2010. You can't
convert me though as I now feel a Prezi is as passe as a Powerpoint
presentation (big statement there!). I found a great blog from someone -
MartinLIS6303 who is also doing a similar course to this and he discussed MS Powerpoints versus Prezi. I think, as other comments also
do, the convenience of Prezi is and had mad it popular. The fact that you don't
have to have MS Office is handy but we are going about to roll out Google Docs
for all students so the cloud issue will be overcome. Anyway, here is a Prezi in draft format..it has a long way to go but I think I will finish it and have it running in the Library and on the library wikispace.... more holiday work!
Online Video - Online videos are the way of the future. I am not sure this is the blog for it but I am constantly amazed at where video has and is taking us, in particular learning and innovation. As TED's Chris Anderson says, in the video embedded below, online video is bringing about the biggest learning cycle in human history. His TED talk is worth the 18 minute viewing time. As a person with a librarian background (and one who constantly questions how libraries are inventing themselves) I thought it very insightful when he also said that video is "more important" than print. And he has a point - face to face communications are what our brains are wired for (probably explains why I hate telephone calls!). Anyway...as Chris explains (with a prezi)
CROWD ACCELERATED INNOVATION = crowd + light + desire
...just watch the video...it tells the story much better....
Another interesting bit of information from this video - Chris Anderson comments that Cisco believes by 2014 90% of traffic on the internet will be video. I wanted to verify this comment and followed links to the Cisco Visual Networking Index which has this flash tool that allows you to create a graph for you blog to show the growth of such data. And I would like to have shared that graph but I can't get the embedded code to work... so using another tool they had I found out some telling statistics for Australia - "In Australia, 14 billion minutes of video content will cross the Internet each month in 2016, up from 4 billion in 2011. Further, just in Australia, 14 billion minutes (27,261 years) of video content will cross the Internet each month in 2016. That's 5,452 minutes of video streamed or downloaded every second....It really is changing the way I think about technology and schools...enabling students to be part of the innovation and creation is going to have to be a top priority.
On to Week 6...
Online Video - Online videos are the way of the future. I am not sure this is the blog for it but I am constantly amazed at where video has and is taking us, in particular learning and innovation. As TED's Chris Anderson says, in the video embedded below, online video is bringing about the biggest learning cycle in human history. His TED talk is worth the 18 minute viewing time. As a person with a librarian background (and one who constantly questions how libraries are inventing themselves) I thought it very insightful when he also said that video is "more important" than print. And he has a point - face to face communications are what our brains are wired for (probably explains why I hate telephone calls!). Anyway...as Chris explains (with a prezi)
CROWD ACCELERATED INNOVATION = crowd + light + desire
...just watch the video...it tells the story much better....
Another interesting bit of information from this video - Chris Anderson comments that Cisco believes by 2014 90% of traffic on the internet will be video. I wanted to verify this comment and followed links to the Cisco Visual Networking Index which has this flash tool that allows you to create a graph for you blog to show the growth of such data. And I would like to have shared that graph but I can't get the embedded code to work... so using another tool they had I found out some telling statistics for Australia - "In Australia, 14 billion minutes of video content will cross the Internet each month in 2016, up from 4 billion in 2011. Further, just in Australia, 14 billion minutes (27,261 years) of video content will cross the Internet each month in 2016. That's 5,452 minutes of video streamed or downloaded every second....It really is changing the way I think about technology and schools...enabling students to be part of the innovation and creation is going to have to be a top priority.
On to Week 6...
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