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I've said this before- I've found a really cool Web 2.0 application. But seriously, Diigo is really useful. We're all going to have to use this app in future group projects...

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Wow, there are even more Web 2.0 tools out there than I could imagine.

Justin Kraky has a great post about a new time management app called BubbleTimer that I know I could certainly benefit from! Check out my comments here.

Ginger Shaw also found an app called Showmewhatswrong that I think could be game changing for those of us who rely on complex software in our professional lives. This could literally be a Pro Tools, Dreamweaver, or Final Cut user life line! Check out my comments here.

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After many years, the 'net can continue to amaze...

Earlier this year, I was involved in helping write a course entitled “Web Fluency”. Now a prerequisite class for all of our students, this course was launched with the intent of helping our students understand how to leverage the Internet and not simply just use the Internet. Additionally, throughout the progression of the course, we had hoped to instill some basic media literacy skills that would assist our students with evaluating information sources on the Internet, identifying bias, and finding valuable portals for news and learning to supplement their classroom activities.

Not surprisingly, within days of adding this course to our catalog, I overhead a student in the hall demanding, “Why do we have to take this class? I know how to use the Internet!”

That is exactly how many of us feel today when faced with topics and discussions that seem to encompass ideas and technologies that we use everyday. The Internet is not exactly new. We’ve all been using You Tube for 5 years. Even Facebook and Twitter are second nature for many.

One could even carry the question further and ask why graduate students have to study Web 2.0 tools and blog for homework? Conventional wisdom would suggest we’re all teachers and we know how to use the internet.

I’ve felt like that from time to time in my professional and teaching career, but then I heard about Diigo. Now I’m starting to use Diigo. Diigo isn’t perfect, but it absolutely changes how you approach research and collaborative sharing in the world wide web.

Diigo is similar to Delicious. In its most basic form, Diigo catalogs and tags web pages that you visit. These tags and bookmarks can be made public, and you can share your Diigo bookmarks with others.

But, Diigo goes much further. Diigo allows users to leave sticky notes and highlight multiple colors of text on virtually any webpage on the Internet. Launched as an extension within your browser, Diigo helps you to not only remember where you were surfing, but why you found certain pages interesting. Friends, students, or colleagues who visit you pages and belong to your group can view you highlights, read your stickies, and comment. Additionally, with Diigo’s tagging features, by logging into Diigo you can review popular articles and tags in much the same way as Digg, Stumble Upon, and other social recommendation sites.

In short, this Web 2.0 application really brings book marking to a whole new level. Diigo is booking marking with commentary. Every day I’m leaving sticky notes in my newspaper, adding paper clips to magazine articles, and folding corners in my text books. Not to mention, as I read I’m also highlighting with a yellow pen and scribbling in the margins with a pencil.

Book marking is not new. Tabs are not new. However, Diigo’s feature set is unique enough that it really provides a whole new way to approach the web, leave information for others, and comment on the surfing and research of your peers, colleagues, and students.

With the example of Diigo and a thousand other Web 2.0 tools fresh in our minds, I sincerely hope that as educators and students alike we realize the power of the technologies at our disposal- there is too much opportunity at stake to take for granted.

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Technology can be simply amazing. Right now, I'm writing this from a cabin on the North Shore of Lake Superior in northern Minnesota- a wonderful Valentine's surprise getaway. That said, with a little WiFi, and power, I'm able to continue working, studying, and researching issues in education.

Two recent blogs I've been following are from Sharon Jones and Jeff Kohls. Jeff completely reintroduced me to the power of Google Maps in the classroom. Check out my comments on his post here and read his lesson ideas here. Also, Sharon has been using Quizlet in her classroom. As I've been looking for a Web 2.0 tool for vocabulary practice, this application might be a strong candidate. Please see her blog with my comments here and the original post here.

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As I mentioned in a previous post, I think this application is really cool. I've already used it for a lecture tomorrow. Let me know what you think, thanks for checking it out.

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Slide Rocket is really cool...

Over the past few days, I’ve been researching a variety Web 2.0 tools in which I’ve been trying to lend a more critical eye towards those sites and resources that might best impact the learning goals of my students. As aspiring media professionals, my students need both a broad set of software and media competencies coupled with the “soft” skills needed to succeed in business.

Within the career college environment, we are working very hard to prepare young people for entry-level positions throughout a variety of media related fields. Per the needs of our employer base and current job trends found in the United States, we’ve seen an increasing demand for students with well developed interpersonal skills. As such, I’ve specifically been looking for platforms and applications that could foster strong group interaction, peer-to-peer communication, and collaborative learning and content development.

As many of our workplaces are challenged today with unprecedented competition, we imagine tomorrow’s professional environments to be more collaborative and team oriented in nature. Furthermore, many of our graduates go on to launch free-lance careers of their own. Clearly within this direct client relationship, our graduates need to have strong communication skills and an ability to work with a variety of diverse peoples.

With these criteria and needs in mind, I’ve been looking specifically for tools that offer a strong collaborative component that also blends a workflow need seem in many business environments. Fortunately, with Slide Rocket, I might have found just the one.

Slide Rocket is engineered as an online slide and presentation development tool. However, upon further digging, I found it to be quite compelling as it offers a wide variety of functionalities that one would often assume would not be present in an online application.

Many of my classmates and I have found that thus far, working collaboratively in projects using applications such as Google Docs and others can increase workflow, team cohesion, and even avoid project errors and omissions. Often times, and even as recently as last semester, when working with static host-based applications like Power Point, one of my groups experienced significant confusion as to which version of the document was our current file. After emailing edited versions back and forth, we quickly lost track of our titling system and ultimately had to leverage another online-based tool in the process.

Not to mention, despite the cross-platform nature of the majority of today’s technology, I still witness almost weekly scenarios wherein a file does or does not up load with correct formatting, fonts, etc depending upon the version of the application happens to be loaded onto the computer in the classroom or board room. Using an entirely online or cloud-based resource would mitigate any performance issues between computers, operating systems, software versions, or peripheral drives.

In short, Slide Rocket is a really exciting piece of software. Individuals can leverage the suite themselves, invite others to privately view the presentation, or allow an entire group editing abilities as well. Furthermore, Slide Rocket houses a “media library” wherein you’re able to store audio, video, and image files in their servers for later use with any presentation. Additionally, Slide Rocket uses a layout quite similar to iMovie wherein you can have multiple “projects” all hosted together. During my test phase, I developed two presentations for work as well as two more slide shows for friends and family involving vacation photos. The number of presentations you can build in Slide Rocket is only limited to your online cloud storage package. My free membership leveraged 250 megs and a paid package with 1 Gig of storage started at only $12 a month.

Within one of my marketing classes, students are required to “pitch” their final ideas or projects. Last semester, I decided to experiment a little with the final course assessments. Instead of leaving students to complete an individual final project, I allowed students to work in groups. Previously, I had discovered that some of the material covered was so foreign to our student body, that the integration and absorption of some of the more abstract information was difficult. In order to help reinforce the content, we started using final projects that were collaborative in nature where each student worked with a peer-partner, not unlike our FSO Critical Friends resource. Ultimately, we found that the student engagement and the quality of output within the final projects was significantly improved from group practice. With a tool like Slide Rocket, I’ll be able to help students work together almost up to their own presentation time with ample media, support, and editing ability. Not only that, Slide Rocket will import Keynote and Power Point presentations if a project had started in one of those platforms.

I have always believed the adage that it takes a village to raise a child. Surly, in the dynamic and diffuse nature of our current educational system (wherein the world and our knowledge base seems to expand at ever increasing rates) so too shouldn’t we leverage more supportive learning structures than the solitary student seated at a desk with an essay?

I can’t even begin to express how exiting I think this platform could be. I was able to create compelling presentation shows within an hour, upload all sorts of content for later use, and invite other users to comment and edit. I really believe that this application is a window into the future- cloud based computing, collaborative work-flow, and tremendous creative potential. Check it out…

Photos and screenshots courtesy of Slide Rocket.

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Below are links to some of the comments that I've left for other EMDT bloggers. A smart bunch to say the least...

Carlos found a great Web 2.0 tool related to business here.

I left two comments for Ginger Shaw- she found a great tool called Vidque and offered a compelling lesson plan for using Flickr in the classroom.

Justin Kraky has also been investigating a variety of Web 2.0 tools including Grooveshark which I commented on here.

Finally, Rena Hanaway posted a link to an amazing interview with Alvin Toffler, please give it a read if you have the chance. Very poignant, very relatable.

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Today, educators of every ilk are learning to leverage the Internet, and more specifically Web 2.0 tools, to add value to the classroom experience. While today’s technological advances offer a plethora of functionality that could easily be implemented into learning, many are often cautious when considering some of the unintended consequences that can arise with such adoption.

One of the earliest and most popular resources available online is Flickr, a free photo sharing website. Flickr lets users upload photos, share their photo collections, and comment on the pictures submitted by others.

Already, I have found a whole host of ways to use Flickr in the classroom with activities ranging from recognizing athletic merit in afterschool sports, to celebrating individuals demonstrating school spirit, and even learning Geography through Flickr’s Geotags functionality.

While activities such as these seem fairly straightforward and easy to implement, concerns do exist whenever students are searching and posting material on the Internet. As such, I believe that the critical barrier for implementing outside technologies like Flickr in the classroom is not the actual scope of the activities themselves, but the fear of using open and public Internet web sites with young people. However, I’m learning that many of the concerns that one might have with using an a resource like Flickr in the classroom can be mitigated.

First, accounts can be set up as private. This prevents individuals from outside the invited account from interacting with the group. If an instructor creates a group that is designated by a classroom or course section, no public users could interfere or raise privacy concerns that some may have with young learners. Furthermore, instructors have the opportunity to turn off the commenting features that are included with files posted into Flickr. Furthermore, specific tags can be established within the site to limit the types of pictures and viewable files that can be seen the group. In combination, all of these tactics can be used to limited student exposure to outside materials that are deemed too mature for certain contexts while also protecting the privacy of minors using the world wide web. I didn’t realize these functions and filters existed until recently, and I think explaining these protections outright through Screenflow or Power Point presentations would help in easing administrators, parents, or other faculty into using this power tool.

As such, I’m inspired to raise these issues with my administration in order to implement Flickr next semester. For the last several semesters, I’ve been teaching a marketing course at the Institute for Production and Recording. Within the context of marketing, we discuss art, graphic design, and aesthetics in order to better understand how to leverage print design and even merchandise development. While students are generally excited about the material, I’ve found it difficult to help them internalize topics as diffuse and diverse as “aesthetics” and “taste”. Yet with Flickr, I’m interested in designing an assignment wherein students are required to take pictures of good and bad design materials they find throughout their daily lives on billboards, televisions, magazines, or other computing devices. I would create a group for the class, and require the students to post, view, and comment on each other’s work between classroom sessions.

Later in class, we could process the merits of submitted pictures and start to draw themes, commonalities, and techniques used within effective and ineffective advertising and marketing campaigns. I think this process would increase student interest, further refine their visual processing abilities, boost inter-personal communication skills, and help develop design recognition attributes like color, balance, and kerning. Again, I think it the sharing and interactive nature of some of these resources provides an absolutely critical learning environment for young adults soon to enter the work place.

In all, I’m really enjoying some of these activities and I’ve appreciated the progression of the course wherein we’re gaining a richer experience with a few applications rather than trying to survey the entire scope of Internet technology. Web 2.0 tools like Flickr are immensely powerful, and I’m looking forward to including them in my classroom practice.

BP5_2010022_FoundafunnyChroniclelink!

Yesterday afternoon the Chronicle posted a pretty amazing video developed by a class at the University of Denver. The group made a parody of "The Office" to highlight how educators can sometimes bumble through technological implementation as Steve Carell often does in managing his staff.

I'm interested to see if any of you ever feel this way or can empathize with some of the students.

Check it out...

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Class-Produces-Parody-of-The/21169/

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Wow. I’m a little overwhelmed. When I first glanced through our assignments for the week, I was expecting to find a comprehensive list of Web 2.0 collaborative tools in our reference link. However, I did not expect to find an exhaustive list.

That said, as an instructor at a career college, I immediately started to peruse the sites classified under the Business tab. One of the critical outcomes for our students at IPR is employment. So, I was interested in finding a tool that could assist them with either finding work or networking with active professionals.

After investigating several different applications, Twitres caught my eye. In short, Twitres is an online portal designed to assist users in uploading and sharing their resumes. Clearly, within the last few years, Twitter has become a powerful communication tool. By utilizing that platform, the programmers at Twitres tout the instantaneous nature of Twitter as an ideal mechanism for resume distribution.

Strangely enough, I believe them. I have several close acquaintances in the design community, and they keep relating a story last summer wherein an unemployed copywriter launched a personal Twitter campaign to get a job. Through the viral nature of Twitter the idea was such a novelty that apparently, a nationally renowned marketing firm hired him.

Such anecdotes (and I’ll do some research to get to the bottom of that story) suggest that maybe Twitter could be a valuable tool for sending out a resume.

However, as I dug deeper into the program, I realized that all Twitres really does is distribute a file somewhat limiting its value. After a few more minutes, I discovered that their entire “about” section of the website was only three or four sentences long. Furthermore, wouldn’t it be just as easy to post one’s resume online and simply tweet a link to that location?

Yet when I researched Twitres’s parent company, ResumePark, I was a little more intrigued. ResumePark is a hosting and sharing site allowing users to view, comment, and track the interest of their resume in real time. From a teacher’s perspective, tools like this that assist our students in broadcasting their skills and abilities are extremely interesting. I firmly believe that today’s young learners should leverage the internet in their job search especially if the software in question allows collaborative support, data analytics, and feedback.

However, despite ResumePark’s greater feature set, I was soon questioning the viability of their business as well. Why would someone use ResumePark? Does the site really offer a unique solution to online resume posting? Why wouldn’t a young graduate upload their materials instead to sites such as Monster.com, LinkedIn, or even Facebook which are much more mature platforms and already garner millions of visitors?

All these things considered, I think we’re sitting on a bit of a bubble- a web 2.0 and widget bubble. Today, in the case of TwitRes, creating another Web 2.0 application can be as easy as adding some basic features to your main product. As was the case with another tools I was looking at (including Blue Tie, Hollrr, backboard, and Harvest), quite a few of these new entrants were useful and compelling but didn’t always measure up to more established products from Google and other major firms.

Despite my personal reflections, I think ResumePark and Twitres offers a really useful opportunity for college graduates. Furthermore, I think it goes without saying that tools like these should absolutely be used to help students post resumes, receive feedback, and apply for positions which match their field of interest. And, considering I’ve only scratched the surface of the sites profiled on Gotoweb20.net, I have a lot more exploring to do and my students will be the ultimate beneficiaries.

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How do we manage everything?

Traditionally, I have a very hard time organizing the milieu of information that I not only receive, but also seek out each and every day in my professional career. Sometimes, it can take half a morning to catch up on the news that is affecting our rapidly changing world. However, that was before I set up a Google Reader account last week.

Already, I’m sold. Just like our introductory video suggested, using Google Reader really is a better way to sort through our favorite web sites. The news actually comes to us throughout the day, not just to our front door step in the morning.

Currently, I’m following a variety of sites which focus on technology, music, economics, and education including:

Wired Magazine’s Epicenter Blog- Focusing on technology and society, Wired has been an invaluable news source and commentator on a broad array of issues relating to how technological innovations are affecting our communities, schools, businesses, and lives. Many feature articles and topics first covered in Wired have gone on to become leading principals in business and best selling books.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/

Hypebot- Hypebot is a blog focusing on topics relating to current events within the music business. As a media professional, I count on Hypebot’s analysis and news coverage to help refine my company’s business practices.

http://hypebot.com/

The Chronicle of Higher Education- I’ve been a reader of the Chronicle for years, and now their articles and insights are part of my daily media intake. The Chronicle has great content based on not only education related issues, but the lives of teachers and the art of teaching.

http://chronicle.com/blog/wiredcampus/5/

Seth Godin’s Blog- Seth Godin is an author, commentator, and blogger who is known for his ability to synthesize of complex ideas into understandable terms. Compilations of his daily posts and larger studies of current business trends have become best selling books and led to a lucrative consulting career.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

Digital Music News- Digital Music News has been a top site covering current events within the music and entertainment industry. While their team usually deep analysis of the issues, DMN aggregates top stories from around the world and offer links to and from the sources of today’s critical news. http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/blog

Thanks to everyone else in Full Sail's ETC course for sharing their- clearly I'll be subscribing to a few more sites in the coming days!

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On a week when stories of Apple iPads and Facebook etiquette grace the cover of the Chronicle of Higher Education, it is clear that technology is transforming our classrooms and administrative offices. Yet as I’ve shared in previous posts, like many of my classmates I’m sure, I was initially hesitant to enroll in an online educational program. How could technology really replace the immediacy of a room full of peers and direct interaction with a professor?

Thus far, with blogging being the latest piece of technology to be introduced into our Full Sail curricula, I’m becoming a true believer.

Throughout the past week, I’ve discovered that blogging deftly marries instantaneous content publication with an astounding global distribution potential. As I’ve chosen to follow various other blogs, I find myself feeling more connected and intimately intertwined with a whole host of peers, colleagues, and industry professionals than I ever imagined. This reaction is literally the opposite perspective I held that blogging was an isolated and largely narcissistic activity. Quite honestly, the process of posting and following feels more akin to sharing than anything else.

While I haven’t had the chance to implement this technology into my classroom, I think the possibilities are significant. For instance, earlier this year President Obama called for our students to be exposed to the best and the brightest teachers in the world. While this would be no small feat in an analog environment, by simply helping my students to follow various industry and community leaders, this goal could be achieved immediately for the cost of an Internet connection.

Furthermore, as a lecture teacher with 60 some students in each class section, I normally have very little time for student-to-student interaction. If students were to follow each other through blogging, they suddenly have an unprecedented opportunity to share and interact with each other in a manner that is simply not feasible in a traditional classroom.

Additionally, in any given week my students and I only have 4 hours together. If students were required to follow my blog, I can instantaneously update my entire class on assignments, news and information, and even the status of graded assignments as Dr. Deason demonstrated last semester.

In all, blogging provides an unprecedented access to not only information, but people. Implementing blogging throughout our classrooms could boost media literacy, provide students access to top intellectuals and industry professionals, and further engender a greater level of interaction and understanding amongst the student body. Blogging could even cut down on paper consumption if my grading protocols involve commenting on student blogs rather than scribbling red pens across printed essays.

As a Full Sail student, I have been amazed at how many times the EMDT program has changed my perception and appreciation for a given piece of technology or information. Yes, I knew about blogs and read them quite often. But, in joining this conversation as a participant blogger, I’m starting to see a vast potential for real impact within the classroom.

I’m discovering that this process really works. Almost hourly, I’m reading comments and learning new perspectives from my fellow classmates in real time. I can’t wait to implement such tools within my classroom environment to ultimately foster greater student-to-student and even student-to-community relationships.

Thank you everyone for sharing.

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Thus far, I have been very impressed with iGoogle. The interface is easy to understand, and it only takes a few minutes to quickly aggregate all of your media into one location. Quite convenient!

Furthermore, as I've discussed the platform with others, I discovered that unbeknownst to me, quite a few of my colleagues have been leveraging iGoogle for some time for both personal and professional use.

Bellow are a few iGoogle screenshots that I've used to set up my Personal Learning Environment.