Please come by the Center for Teaching and Technology for:
What: Speed Dating with Instructional Technology
When: Thursday, April 26th, 3:00 – 3:30 pm
Where: 133 Erickson Hall
Event details: Spend 5-7 minutes at three different hands-on presentations learning about technology that can be used for teaching in the classroom, online or in blended learning contexts. Pick a tool to learn about, gather around that presentation, see that demo for 5 – 7 minutes, and then go on to another hands-on presentation. The featured technologies will be: Google Hangouts, ooVoo, and Camtasia Relay. This is the final Speed Dating with Instructional Technology session for the 2012 spring semester. The series will pick up again in the fall with more new technologies to explore in the face-to-face classroom or online classroom environment.
Please come by the Center for Teaching and Technology for:
What: Speed Dating with Instructional Technology
When: Wednesday, April 11th, 3:00 – 3:30 pm
Where: 133 Erickson Hall
Event details: Spend 5-7 minutes at three different hands-on presentations learning about technology that can be used for teaching in the classroom, online or in blended learning contexts. Pick a tool to learn about, gather around that presentation, see that demo for 5 – 7 minutes, and then go on to another hands-on presentation. The featured technologies will be: Adobe Connect, Hootcourse, Etherpad.
Look for one more Speed Dating with Instructional Technology event the week of April 23rd with more featured technologies for on-campus or online summer courses, study abroad trips, or ideas to think about over the summer for planning fall courses.
OVERVIEW:
Chances are many of you have any one of the devices mentioned in the title of this blog post with you all the time, somewhere at home, or are considering purchasing one of them. Apple is dominant in that market, but phones built on the Android platform (and soon more tablets) are popping up in the hands of consumers. Productivity apps on both platforms make tasks like file sharing, group texting, to-do lists, document editing and collaboration, voice-to-text recording, and project management seamless and convenient. Many of the apps are linked to cloud based applications enabling users to access their folders, files, and to-do lists on their mobile device or any computer connected to the Internet. In this hour-long session, apps like Evernote, Dragon Dictation, DropBox, GroupMe, and Wunderlist will be demonstrated. In addition, I’ll touch on some PC/Mac applications that also help with productivity.
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)
A very popular item for checkout at the Center are the many different models of the Flip camera by Pure Digital. Currently, we have the Flip Mino, Flip Mino HD, Flip Ultra, Flip (original) and Flip Ultra HD. By have, I mean that at any given point, one of these models will be in the back inventory room. However, because they are so popular, we currently have a one week limit on checkout time. So, what is the big deal about the Flip cameras? They are incredibly easy to use. Essentially, these are the steps to using it:
Turn it on
Press the red record button to start recording
Press the red record button to stop recording
Done
Zooming in and out is limited to a digital zoom, which can make your image fuzzy, but for the most part, the video quality with these cameras is outstanding. Audio is decent as well. Getting videos off of the camera is also simple and the source of the name Flip camera. On the side of every camera is a button that you depress and out flips a USB connection. Plug it into your PC or Mac and it’ll ask you to install software called FlipShare that comes with the camera to transfer videos and edit them. Transfer the videos to your computer and you are done. If they need to be produced for the internet, the software has built in options for YouTube, Facebook, MySpace or Other websites which will give you a file to post to a private server like MSU’s Storemedia.
FlipShare Software Sharing
Back in January, I attended the Educause Learning Initiative Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas and was fortunate enough to meet Shawn Miller from Duke University who made several presentations on the Duke Digital Initiative projects, which include a loaner system for Flip cameras. Shawn was kind enough to share some tutorials with me that he created for the faculty and students at Duke University on how to use the FlipShare software. His blog post with all of the tutorials can be found at the CIT Blog. I’ve embeded a few below.
