Starting a Conversation

This week the SCC faculty and staff community will begin having a real conversation about the potential of blogs and wikis as aids in our classrooms. I'm hoping each and every person who attends the initial sessions will come and visit and share their perceptions. While not all of us can or even need to incorporate these technologies in our classes, we at least need to be better aware of them.

In the initial workshop in August, several handouts were made available. These are now listed here:

7 things you should know about wikis

7 things you should know about blogs

7 things you should know about facebook

They all come from the Educause Learning Initiative website, which is a great web resource for those of us who are always trying to play "catch up" with technology.

I look forward to comments!

Publishing from Word 2007

It seems Word 2007 has a menu command specifically to help publish blog entries.

1. In Word, go to the Microsoft Office Button and choose New.
   
2. Under the Installed Templates category, choose New Blog Post.
   
3. You will be prompted to register, and it's as simple as that!
   

Found a great online site this week for teaching resources again: it's the Faculty Innovation Center from the University of Texas at Austin. Great stuff! You can click the image below to see the topics more clearly!

del.icio.us.ly Devouring Excel 2007

It’s only been three weeks since classes have ended, and already I find myself overwhelmed with commitments. For over a year I have been telling everyone I would get to them “come August”, and here it is—August. I’m feeling a little blindsided!

My two projects for this week were

1. del.icio.us
2. Excel 2007

del.icio.us How on earth did I ever exist without this site? The website is a free social book marking web service for storing and sharing bookmarks. Sign up is quick and easy, in just a few steps my 200+ Favorites were imported, and two new toolbars in my browser now allow me to add new sites quickly and painlessly. Considering I can work out of up to 5 sites in a day, being able to have access to my Favorites from anywhere with an Internet connection is incredibly useful!

If you need to consolidate all your Favorite sites so you can access them from anywhere, my advice is--don’t wait any longer!

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Project number 2 was to get up to snuff on Excel 2007. Screamed through an 800 page reference book, streamlined a training manual and got files ready to go for this month’s faculty and staff training sessions. There’s some pretty nice additions to this new version. I found out I missed Excel’s intersection formula somewhere along the line in the last few versions. Excel’s infamous INDEX and MATCH function has always made the bravest of students groan, but it can easily be replaced with an Intersection formula.

Go figure!!

TED Talks

TED Ideas Worth Spreading makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give “the talk of their lives” (in 18 minutes).

More than 100 talks are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.

This video is on PhotoSynth—software which gathers video from all over the web and integrates it into what Blaise Aguera y Arcas, its architect, call “metaknowledge”.

Back to Work

Acadia National Park in Maine is close to home for me, and last week’s respite in that park did me a world of good. It’s tough coming back from vacation, but I’m still determined to try to catch up to the rest of the pack!

I finally figured out the easy way to tap into RSS feeds, and I now get a daily dose of the latest thoughts and ideas coming out of such sites as 2 Cents Worth, Academic Commons, Educational Technologies and many other great sites. I’m starting to feel a little cocky now! (Thank you Google for making this so easy!) I’m thinking of creating a small video of how to set up RSS (and any other features I find interesting) and adding the videos to this blog. I wonder if that would be interesting for others?

This site has proven interesting to me this week—it comes from the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies. It’s a guide to trends and emerging tools and e-teaching technologies. They list a Top 100 Tools for educators and students. Many I know, but there's a couple of new ones in here that caught my eye.

I’m thinking I’d like my students to each pick one they are interested in, and as a project, have them detail the strengths, weaknesses and show samples of what one can do with their choice. We can then rank as a class as to our own opinion of which products we deem most useful. Sounds like fun!