“Acrobat.com is a set of online services; file sharing and storage, PDF converter, online word processor, and web conferencing that you can use to create and share documents, communicate in real time and simplify working with others.”
You, your colleagues and/or your students will need to create an account — but it’s FREE. Each Acrobat.com account grants you 5Gb of storage space. Compare it to your UT free web storage limit – 50MB. That’s 100 times bigger!
Discover what’s new at http://www.adobe.com/acom/. Click on any of the five icons to learn more about each service.
Share provides for easy online file sharing whether you’re in your office or on the road.
Adobe Buzzword is an online word processor. You can access your documents from anywhere and easily collaborate with others.
My Files provides an interface to store and organize all your files, all types of files such as images, spreadsheets, mp3’s.
Create PDF converts up to five different files (excel, PowerPoint, images) and stores them as a single file. This is an easy way for you or your students to create a PDF portfolio.
Adobe ConnectNow provides an easy interface for meeting online, videoconferencing and screen sharing.
And while you’re exploring, check out all the new features of Adobe Acrobat 9; portfolios, lesson planning, forms, assessments, and eLearning. http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/
Amp up those Internet searches in your next class by adding a visit to the TouchGraph Google Browser.
This Internet search engine displays results in graphical interface, mapping the relationship of one topic to another, based upon key words and web page connections.
Search results shuffle onto the screen in a colorful display of related “graphs,” as well as appearing in a topic tree along the left side of the screen. The topic tree is color coded for convenience. Users can click on a graph to activate a link and follow the link to the next site. Or click and drag a map on the screen to highlight a certain topic.
The TouchGraph Google Browser is a fun way to explore the relationships of topics as they appear in the Internet. For example, instructors may search on a topic, such as Web 2.0, and the results from the TouchGraph Google Browser include everything from YouTube to Wikipedia to Flickr.
Search, graph, and explore with TouchGraph Google Browser!
To see this search engine in action, follow this link and enter a topic:
Simply put, a wiki is a collection of Web pages to which anyone with access can contribute or modify. Perhaps the most famous wiki is the free encyclopedia, wikipedia. Uses of wikis within K-12 and higher education have been emerging over the past few years. And our own UTK faculty are beginning to use wikis in their courses as a place for students to collaboratively produce and display group projects and research papers.
In an August 20 Campus Technology article The Power of Wikis in Higher Ed, the author notes several advantages to using wikis including enabling student collaboration, fewer projects and papers for a faculty member to assess, and the ability of a faculty member to monitor project progress along the way with wiki tracking tools.
For Online@UT users, the built-in wiki tool can be used to create whole class or small group wikis. The ITC offers workshops on how to configure and manage both blogs and wikis in Online@UT. The next session is scheduled for Thursday, September 4 from 3-4 p.m. Visit our workshops registration page to sign up.
If you are interested in hosting a wiki outside of Online@UT, check out free, easy-to-use tools such at Wikispaces and Peanut Butter Wiki.
The University of Tennessee Knoxville will join Stanford, MIT, and other world-class universities in publishing video and audio podcasts using iTunes U.
iTunes U is part of the iTunes Store within iTunes and works with both Mac and PC*. You can find podcasts by category, college & university, or use the search feature to locate works by author or title. Educational material can be accessed 24/7. The audio and video content make subject matter more “alive” than the printed page. And podcasts can be downloaded to any laptop or iPod for mobile learning.
UTK faculty will be offered course areas to upload podcasts of lectures, guest speakers, lab demonstrations, etc. Podcasts may be restricted to enrolled students, the UTK community, or open to the public. UTK students may also produce their own podcasts as part of their coursework portfolio.
Have a photo that needs a little work, but you don’t have the full version of Photoshop? Edit that image with PhotoShop Express [beta], a free, online, image editing and storage tool, recently launched by Adobe. Photoshop Express offers editing tools and storage space (up to 2 GB of photos for free). You can also create your own URL that links directly to your gallery where you can share photos with your class, and even share photos with other web tools like MySpace, Facebook, blogs, etc.
To get started exploring the beta version of Photoshop Express, follow the link below and sign up for the service. (You will be required to enter an email address and agree to terms and conditions.)
A picture is worth a thousand words… so take a little off the top, side, bottom, etc., and Photoshop Express can help you make that image display just what you need for your lesson, and enable you to share it with your class.
A recent (7/1) Campus Technology article Taking the “A” out of Asynchronous contains a series of short case studies on how colleges and universities are using real-time (synchronous) collaboration tools. Faculty are conducting online office hours, creating spaces in which teams can collaborate, and enabling students to share and edit documents with one another.
At least anecdotally, the results of these efforts have been overwhelmingly positive, sparking creativity and enhancing the learning process as a whole. That’s encouraging for the rest of us, since it appears these collaboration trends will continue with vigor in the years ahead.
UT faculty are taking advantage of the affordances of synchronous technology as well - mainly for delivering totally online courses, but we’re also starting to see faculty who primarily teach face-to-face use synchronous tools in creative and effective ways.
Check out an ITC Faculty Spotlight from last year - Beyond Campus: Collaboration - to read about how Dr. Wesley Hines uses the synchronous virtual classroom tool LiveOnline@UT (Centra) in his teaching and research.
“Sing a song of… bacteria, a pocket full of… um… germs?”
Well, songwriters are probably in no fear of me stealing their thunder.
Yet when it comes to connecting what may be considered an unusual song topic, like bacteria, with teaching and technology… one professor has hit upon a high note.
As described in an article appearing in The Wired Campus, Professor Sarah E. Forgie of the University of Alberta incorporates parodies of well known songs into her lesson plan to explain the history, and behavior, of bacteria. She shares the musical creations via podcasts.
Students seem to be responding well to the podcasts, as Professor Forgie explains, the “…stuff from the jazz band had around 100-percent recall.”
If you’re curious about how to incorporate podcasts into your class, visit the Volcasting website at: http://volcasting.utk.edu/ , or call 974-9670 for more information.
One of the recent posts suggested how to make a presentation more captivating. Using VoiceThread, you can take it a step further and create a presentation that engages students in an online voice or video conversation on a topic.
VoiceThread is an easy-to-use online application. Upload video, images, or PowerPoint slides saved as images. Then record your voice for individual items. Invite selected individuals to view your presentation. Ask them to comment on your slides by typing, recording audio or video comments, or drawing on the image/video itself. You can even embed your VoiceThread in your Blackboard course site!
Play the video below to see VoiceThread in action.
Are you interested in this teaching and learning tool? Let the Innovative Technology Center know! Contact us at itc@utk.edu.
“Best practices are suggesting that shorter, modular clips … are more successful than 50-minute sections,” says John G. Flores, chief executive of the United States Distance Learning Association. “The days of having someone lecture for 50 minutes via video pretty much are — or are least should be — a thing of the past,” he says.
Another good example of taking lessons learned in the online environment and applying them to face-to-face teaching and learning. However, there are concerns that this is yet another case of oversimplifying education.
Q: What do Dolly Parton and the Library of Congress have in common?
A: Digital media.
Dolly’s music is part of the Library of Congress’ expansive digital media library, a collection of original recordings, prints and photographs, maps, etc. that are available online via the LOC’s Digital Collections and Services website.
If you’re searching for a way to enrich a topical discussion, or empower students to explore online resources, the LOC’s Digital Collections and Services site includes links to articles, digital files, and even webcasts from the library with topics ranging from American History to archived web pages.
The site also includes links to catalogs, research centers, and how to contact a LOC librarian for assistance.
For more information about the site, click on the link below:
