MSU Service Status UpdatesThe Center for Teaching and Technology is a unit in the College of Education at Michigan State University. The Center provides support for faculty, staff and students in their effort to use technology to enhance their teaching and learning, and conducts research about the use of technology in education. On this web site you will find information about the services and resources we provide, the activities we are engaged in, and the people who make it all possible.
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g the 2009-2010 academic year, the College of Education ran a pilot program using the Echo360 lecture capture appliance in rooms 133D, 133E and 113 Erickson Hall with faculty members from CEPSE and Teacher Education. The Echo360 lecture capture system in 113 Erickson Hall was used my Professor Mike Steele for his TE802 and TE804 courses in math education. In addition teaching the students enrolled in the East Lansing sections, Professor Steele was also synchronously instructing students participating in the 5th-year internship program in Chicago Public Schools. A full rich-media output of the lectures, including the Adobe Connect Pro communication with the Chicago students, was made available to all students within 24 hours of the class meeting. An RSS feed of the lectures was also made available to students so they could subscribe once to the lectures and have the feed reader of their choice bring the new lectures to their computer.
In room 133D, Professor Harold Johnson was using the lecture captures for CEP432 and CEP431 and as part of his PILI project. (Pacific Island Learning Initiative in Deaf Education) Similar to the Teacher Education courses, the rich-media output was used to capture the camera in the classroom and the computer output. However, instead of the camera being on Professor Johnson, sign language interpreters from the Resource Center for Persons with Disabilities (RCPD) were recorded for students taking the course from a distance that are hearing impaired. This made the lectures available to all students enrolled in the courses.
Rooms 133E and 128 are also available for the coming academic year starting in September 2010 for classroom capture as well as the 133F technology conference room for guest lectures, colloquium, meetings, and other special events. In addition to the rich-media output shown in the examples above, the Echo360 lecture capture system offers an enhanced podcast with chapter markers for iPods and iPhones, a vodcast (slides/audio in a browser), and an audio-only MP3 output. The vodcast is also available for download to be played locally on a computer offline.
The Center has one iPad that the Technical Interns in Education have been busy exploring in the past few weeks for the best free Apps and even some paid Apps for education. This project will continue throughout the summer with the goal of having a Brown Bag presentation before fall semester or early into fall semester. While we’d love to have more iPads for College of Education faculty to check out and begin their own exploration, the iPad is in high demand across globe and they are currently on back-order along with the various accessories for the iPad. Hopefully by the time fall semester starts, we’ll have a couple more floating around for checkout.
In the meantime, we’ve put together some resource links for the iPad including app reviews, app recommendations, and reviews of the iPad. Also, TIES Andrea and Molly have created a video review of how to use the iPad and some of the apps, including the iBook reader. Lastly, Mashable.com has an article on Steve Job’s address at the D8 conference in Los Angeles this week addressing the phenomenal growth in the sales of iPad and if tablets (like the iPad) will someday replace the PC. In it, Jobs is quoted saying, “When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.”
RSSRSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. The keyword in that name is simple because once you understand how it works, it really is, simple. The best way to describe how it works is to get you to think about RSS like you do your subscription to your favorite newspaper, journal or magazine. You sign up for delivery and then the new issue shows up at your office or home without you having to go to the bookstore to buy it. RSS is your magazine subscriptions for all your favorite Internet content, whether that is a newspaper (NY Times), a magazine, a blog, your social networking sites or your favorite websites. When you click on the RSS icon, you are subscribing to your favorite content and it will come to you whenever new content from that Internet source is published. No more going to multiple websites just to see if something new has been posted.
How do you know when you can subscribe to content on a web page? Most site use the terms RSS or XML. Many use the orange “RSS” icon found at the top this page. Below you’ll find other example of icons used to designate the “Click here to Subscribe to this content” action. Browsers like Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer have a built in “Click here to subscribe” RSS icon in the navigation field. But most people prefer to use an Internet based RSS aggregator to herd all their RSS subscriptions into one place. Some of the more popular are Bloglines, Google Reader, Netvibes, Pageflakes and iGoogle.
So how do you get started? Below are the icons that were previously mentioned and then following those are a series of screen capture videos for a few of the more popular RSS aggregators, showing how to subscribe with them and what they look like.
Icons:
Thanks to some colleagues at MSU’s vuDAT, there is a good resource to share that helps to give short but sweet explanations about some of the more popular technologies used to enhance teaching. The categories include Lecture Capture, Synchronous Communication, Audience Response, and Collaborative Document Creation. There are many, many platforms and software choices out there to choose from in those categories, so the folks at vuDAT (Brandon Blinkenberg and Jessica Knott) narrowed the list down to some that MSU supports and other popular options on campus and in the web 2.0 world.
You can find a PDF ready for download using this link: Organizing and Understanding Technologies used to Enhance Teaching
Thanks to Jessica Knott (@jlknott on Twitter) at Virtual University Design and Technology (vuDAT) for blogging about this resource from TechSmith that has great tips for recording audio for screencasting. If you want to try it out, come see the TIES in 133 Erickson Hall or shoot me an email. (terrigus@msu.edu)
