Screencasting with Jing

As someone who uses technology to teach and assess students, I love Screencasting.  Screencasting allows me to demonstrate complex procedures and give presentations from a distance.  Since these videos are uploaded and streamed online, my students can view the screencasts at their own pace and review parts they might have missed during class.  When teaching online classes, I create screencasts for each of the modules in the course.  By incorporating my voice (and sometimes my face), I find that the screencasts can personalize the online course content and make the online learning environment seem less static and text-based.

Of the different screencasting tools available, Jing stands out as one of the best.  Unlike some screencasting tools that require you to pay to use the application, Jing offers a free version that can be downloaded for a Mac or a PC.  Jing is also really easy to use.  With a few clicks, you can record all of the actions on your screen.  After recording the screencast, Jing uploads the video to Screencast.com which will stream it for free.  If you can click “Record” on a VCR or hit “Play” on a DVD player, you can use Jing.

Besides being used to instruct students, Jing can also be used to assess students.  Consider having your students create a screencast of a presentation and streaming it online.  Or consider having students record the dialogue from a debate or act out some roleplay.  Since Jing easily records voice and any images on the screen, the possibilities are endless.

For a short tutorial on using Jing, be sure to check out the YouTube video below.

Student Engagement with Poll Everywhere

I’m sure this is a common experience.  I’m in the middle of a brilliant lesson with my students and we’re discussing something really important.  I look back and I see a student who isn’t that engaged with what the rest of the class is discussing.  In fact, the student seems to be more interested in a small electronic device that he (or she) is trying to hide.  That’s when I realize that it’s happened again.  I’ve lost another student to The Texting Zone.

As tools, cell phones are amazing devices.  When you think about it, the basic cell phone that most of our students carry to class is more powerful than the computers that were available twenty years ago.  What if the cell phone’s power and ubiquity could be used educationally?  What if educators could turn the tables on texting and use the process to assess and engage students?  This week’s Tech Tip is Poll Everywhere, a site that allows people to create free online polls where participants can text their responses.  Imagine you’re teaching a class and you want to survey the students on their ideas on a particular subject.  Poll Everywhere allows you to create a survey, display it to the class and have students text their responses.  The polls can include multiple choice or open-ended questions.  Besides text responses, Poll Everywhere also allows other forms of participation (web-based polls, Twitter, etc) that the poll administrator can control.  The responses can even be displayed in a Powerpoint slide that updates poll data in real-time as people participate.  Poll Everywhere offers the interactivity of Personal Response Systems (clickers) but uses a device that the majority of our students already own.  Please advised, however, that although Poll Everywhere is free to use, standard text messaging fees would apply.

For more information, be sure to check out the short tutorial below:

Reflecting with Wordle

This week’s Tech Tip is Wordle (found at http://www.wordle.net).  Wordle is an online tool for generating “word clouds” based on submitted text.  By varying the size of the words in the word cloud, Wordle shows which words are used most frequently within the text.  The really large words are used very frequently and really small words are used less frequently.  If this sounds really simple, it is.  It is also very easy to use.  If you can copy and paste, you can use Wordle.  But despite its simplicity and ease of use, Wordle can be a powerful reflective tool not only for our students but also for our roles as educators as well.  In fact, the idea for this week’s Tech Tip came from a colleague who suggested that we submit our syllabi into Wordle to see what we emphasized in our classes. With our students, imagine giving a reflective essay and having your students paste the text into Wordle.  The generated word cloud would highlight the terms that were used most frequently and give the student a visual representation of what they have emphasized grammatically in their essay.

Here is a Wordle of the Declaration of Independence that I created

It can also be found on the Wordle website at: http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1529840/Declaration_of_Independence

If you need a hand, be sure to check out the tutorial below to learn how to use Wordle.

Embedding Files with Embeditin

If you’ve been following the blog or Tech Tip emails, you’ll notice that I’ve used the word “embed” a few times.  When I featured Slide Share, I talked about being able to embed a Powerpoint presentation on Blackboard or on another website.  When I featured Audiopal, I also talked about being able to embed audio files into other locations.  Embedding is a process of broadcasting information that is saved at one site through another site.  It happens a lot with YouTube videos.  You’ll see a video play on another site that actually is saved on YouTube.  Embedding isn’t real complicated.  By just copying some code, material from one site can easily be embedded somewhere else.

This week’s Tech Tip is Embeditin (found at http://embedit.in).  Embeditin allows you to share all sorts of files by simply uploading the file and copying the embed code.  The really great aspect is that you don’t really need a username or password to use the site.  If you already have an account from a third party site like Google or WordPress, however, Embeditin accepts that information.  Embeditin will work with many document files (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and PDFs) and will even allow images to be embedded.

The question you might be asking is why should we embed content at all.  I think the important thing to remember is that many of our students do not come to our classes with the same resources.  While we would hope that all of our students would have access to the newest Microsoft products, the truth is that is not the case.  By using embedding features, we can equitably share information with our students.

For more information on Embeditin, be sure to check out the tutorial below.