Archive for February, 2009
Meebo, Adium, and Pidgin three communication tools with strange names.
Posted by Tyler Wall in Communication on February 27th, 2009
Many instant messaging tools (MSN, Gtalk, Yahoo, AIM) really bridged the gap that email left by allowing you to have synchronous conversations with people. The only problem with it is that there are so many services out there that it gets hard to figure out which friend/collegue/student is on which service. That is where Adium, Meebo and Pidgin come in. They collect various IM services into one service.
So How could this work for Education?
As an instructor you could make yourself available to all your students by using this service. That way it doesn’t require them to change their ways any and makes you available to them for whatever times you designate.
Set up lectures with question periods and have it open so students with laptops can message their questions in. This engages the more shy students and lets you preview a question temporarily before answering.
If you want a comparison chart that I created of the three services you can download the PDF here.
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Mess up any website with Twiddla for the good of Education
Posted by Tyler Wall in Browsers, Collaboration on February 25th, 2009
Image via CrunchBase
I am sure most of you have heard of online whiteboards and applications like Elluminate well Twiddla is very much like these types of applications. At its core it allows you to easily set up a common Twiddla session complete with audio and text chat. You have a suite of editing tools which include drawing, text bubbles, media import and the biggest reason to use Twiddla, web page importing. Drop any URL into the Twiddla online browser and voila you can mark up that page however you want. All this is done online with no downloads, no signups and a very easy invitation form to invite other attendees.
So how can you use Twiddla for Education:
- Have distance students attend a session where you use Twiddla like a physical Whiteboard. Like a lecture.
- Open a Wikipedia page and show where it is inaccurate or accurate. You can then browse to different webpages and dynamically change those new sites.
- Have a collaborative brainstorming session.
- Solve Math problems either collaboratively or in the form of a lecture.
- Upload images and mark them up.
- Upload documents to send to all attendees.
- With the ability to embed other widgets the possibilities really open up and allow a whole new host of things that are possible.
That’s what I would do but I don’t have the opportunities that some of you have so let me know what you would use it for or what you use Elluminate for and share the love.
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Wordle, a word cloud generator
Posted by Tyler Wall in Uncategorized on February 24th, 2009
There isn’t much to Wordle it just does what it does very well and that is create word clouds from text that you input. If you have never experienced a word cloud then you are missing out, the more often a word shows up in a chunk of text the larger it appears in the cloud (see the example below). There is no signup required although it helps with a few things. You have a fair amount of control over the word cloud by being able to change the font, layout, colour and all the usual visual treatments.
So how can this benefit education?
- Create a visual of by pasting the text from a chapter of a book/text/article and easily represent the words that show up most in the book.
- Get your students to create word clouds (a word of caution on this use as the gallery is not moderated so it is possible for students to browse and find unsuitable word clouds and images so a word to the wise).
- Put word clouds into your course as often as you can to spice it up and show the content of the the course section at a glance.
That’s all I got so help me out and give me some ideas of great ways to use this free service.
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