MyUSF upgrades to BB9

Friday, USF IT announced that Blackboard will be undergoing a facelift. This will not be the standard update. Blackboard will be updated to BB9. The creators have really tried to implement many web 2.0 features such as Drag and Drop info boxes (similar to your Facebook page), less clicking, and a somewhat redesigned grade center. The creators of blackboard have teamed up with NBC/Universal

Studios, to give professors and students access to the NBC News archive (Hundreds of news video footage from local and national NBC stations and affiliates, grouped by subject.) December 18th the new version of Blackboard will roll out, but if you want to see what it looks like now you can visit: http://bbpreview.acomp.usf.edu/

Tutorials for the new blackboard will becoming over the winter break.

How do you prefer to participate in education?

Converting PDFs e-books for the iPhone and Kindle

In Higher education, professors require their students to read various handouts from pertinent writers of the field of study. Many times professors provide their readings electronically as PDF documents. PDF documents require a reader such as Preview (Mac only) or Adobe’s Acrobat reader (PC or Mac) to be viewed. Many current browsers have a PDF plugin already installed, making PDF a good format to deliver electronic readings for all students to access the content.

Distance learners are many times business travelers or students who are constantly on the go. Many times they are accessing online classes through their laptops or smartphones. Many times the layout of PDFs do not lend themselves for easy reading on small portable devices such as the iPhone or blackberry. A website that I found the other day is www.epub2go.com. This site will allow the student to upload a PDF from their computer or paste in a link to a PDF that is online. The epub2go site will convet the PDF into an EPUB file. The website will either email you a link to download your EPUB or if you are on an iPhone, it will download the file to an app called Stanza. Stanza, which can be downloaded from lexcycle.com, is an e-book reader for the mac or pc with sharing capabilities to the iPhone, iPod Touch, and the Kindle.

EPUB

According to www.openbook.org EPUB is a format for reflowable digital books. These books can be easily read and manipulated by many devices since it is basically an XML format.

STANZA

Provided by lexcycle.com, Stanza can be downloaded on the mac, pc, iPhone or, iPod Touch. With Stanza, a student can change the font styling (face, color and size), background color and brightness to make reading the text on screen easier. Stanza app and epub2go.com allow the on the go student to convert online PDFs to ebooks all on the iPhone or iPod Touch with wi-fi connection; no computer needed. The student can now build their library of journal articles on their Apple mobile device to be read on the train, plane, taxi or other similar situations. Below are screenshots from my iPod Touch of the epub2go to stanza app conersion process

Encouraging Writing through Skribit

Writing is still king in education. The tools have changed but many of the challenges remain. Instead of pen and paper, writers are using the computer and blogs to share their stories, ideas, and experiences. After a time almost every writer in his or her career has experienced a lull in their writing, writers block. Many young writers struggle with writing. The barriers range from understanding the language to identifying and fleshing out  a creative idea. Skribit is a social networking tool for bloggers. It allows the reader to make topic suggestions to the writer. Other users can see previous suggestions which should limit duplication of future topic ideas being suggested. Once a topic has been suggested, the writer can quickly provide feedback as to whether they will or will not write about a a particular topic.

This is a great tool for teachers using blogs in their classroom. This is a way for students and teachers to share creative ideas for writing assignments.

ePortfolios the easy way

I have found some very good resources over at TappedIn. One of them is this ePortfolio tool that can be used by students to post artwork, photos, or anything they want to share with other people. It’s free.

Great use of technology

I found this blog entry showing how one school is using Skype to bring a homebound student into the classroom. What a neat idea. It could be done with iChat as well.

Blogging via iChat

This is my first post using a new service I found called IMified. It’s a great idea. I already spend some time chatting each day, so why not use iChat or any other IM client to post to this blog whenever I find a great website or service like this one. I’m really excited by how easy this is to use. It supports most of the major blogs (Typepad, Blogger, and my favorite WordPress). You can also use it to connect to Google Calendar.

Neat little Textedit trick

I didn’t know Textedit could speak! You just have to go into the Edit menu and look for Speech, Start Speaking. I think I will use this during my workshops when I want to get people’s attention.

Innertoob

I am very excited about this site. I found out about it through the Kidcast podcast I subscribe to. Innertoob allows you to create markers within your podcast, but the great thing about it is that the content you add to these markers is accessible by search engines. I will be posting some more about it as soon as I get to try it out.

The same people responsible for Innertoob have also created Crowdabout. This is a flash application that allows people to insert audio/text/video comments into your existing podcast and turn it into a conversation and make it more interactive. Again, I just found out about these two sites so I have not had a chance to give them a full trial yet.

More iWeb freeware

iWebMore allows you to include HTML code from Google Video, Flickr and other websites in your iWeb sites.