Have you ever worked in a group and received a file that you couldn’t open for various reasons. Many times its a Apple vs. Microsoft issue or a newer file type is not accessible in an older program such as trying to open a 2007 Word DOCX file in Word 2003. This can be very frustrating for group members especially if the sender does not know how to save the file in a format that can be accessible to everyone such as a PDF or older file type (ie .doc instead of .docx).

There are websites that will allow you to upload the inaccessible file you just received and email you back a PDF file. One such site is PDFonline (http://www.pdfonline.com/convert-pdf/). 

Recently this site was used to convert a calendar created by a professor in Microsoft Publisher given to a course developer who used only a Mac. PDFonline was used to create a file that the developer could use to retrieve the information without having to disturb the professor while they were on vacation.

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

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.

I recently helped one of our students design a test for special education students to be delivered using iPods. The idea was inspired by the Louisa Muscatine iPod Project, even though my approach is a little bit different than theirs. Today, I finally had a chance to look at their site, where they had a short video explaining how they created their tests. I have to commend them on this creative use of the iPod in the classroom. As a visually impaired person, I am always looking for ways that this wonderful device can be used as an assistive technology.

I think their approach has two key advantages:

• It is very easy for teachers to create the test items. They can use Keynote or PowerPoint to create slides that are exported as images, and these slides can include other images such as simple graphs or tables. My approach, which uses the notes feature of the iPod, involves a little more work because each individual test item is an individual note on the ipod and these notes are linked through hyperlinks. I fear that as soon as you mention that hyperlinks and HTML are involved (even if it’s only two tags) this may turn off many teachers from wanting to implement this kind of technology. To get around this, you can provide a template for teachers to follow, as I did with the student I worked with.
• It is also very easy for the students to navigate through the questions once they are on the iPod. They just have to click on the back or forward button to navigate, whereas with my approach they must scroll to a link until it changes color to indicate that it is active, then click on the center button to move to the next note. For younger students, this may be too difficult.

For elementary school students, I would say that their approach is ideal. However, for older students I think my approach has some advantages:

• The notes feature has an advantage when it comes to text. You are not limited by what can be displayed on the screen at one time. For questions where students have to read a short passage (FCAT reading review, etc), the notes method would be ideal because you can scroll to see more content. The text is also more legible when you use notes. This is a limitation of the movie size created by Garageband, which will hopefully be addressed in the next release of the program.
• The use of hyperlinks gives you more flexibility in the types of exhibits you can use with the test items. You can easily link to video clips and images in the same test. When you create the test using the podcast track in Garageband, you can only include still images or video, but not both (unless you create the whole thing as a movie in iMovie and then import into Garageband–but now you’re introducing another program into the equation). This is another limitation that will hopefully be addressed in the next version of iLife.
• The use of “museum mode” allows you to lock down the iPod so that students are not distracted by other content on the iPod. They only have access to the content in the notes folder, which would be your test and any instructions. Obviously, you would not have any music or other content on the iPod before administering a test, but the temptation to click on other things (even if it’s just the settings) is too much of a distraction.

For older students I think the use of the notes is fine. They probably already have some experience with the iPod, so learning the navigation is probably not too much of a problem.  And as I said before, once you create a test once, you can continue to reuse it as a template.  All you have to do is substitute the text for the new items and link to new exhibits.

I can see combining the two approaches as well.  That is, I would have the iPod set to notes mode to “lock it down”, then include a menu for each section of the test (using a .linx note)  and use a podcast (created with Garageband) for each section.  This would work well for a test where you only have text and the items are short.

As they say, there is “more than one way to skin a cat”.  The way in which we both developed a successful iPod test demonstrates that there are several ways to get this done, each with advantages and disadvantages.  The method you choose will depend on the tech savvy of the teachers and the needs of the audience as well as the requirements of the test.

Yes, it is possible to do it.  I tried it yesterday.  You have to download Windows Media Encoder, then use one of the components called Windows File Editor (WME is a suite of the encoder and a couple of tools, one of which is the file editor).  You can then open your file and play it back.  You can pause at different points and add a marker.  You can also add a script that will open a website, but I did not like the way this worked.  First of all, the person viewing the file has to change their preferences for the scripts to work (Tools > Options > Security > Allow scripts).  Second, the scripts are activated without user intervention in a way that is a little abrupt.  It would be better if the links showed up on the screen while the file is playing so you then had an option.  I don’t know if the new WMP supports this or if it works differently under Vista with the new WMP.

Once you’re finished setting markers, do a File > Save and Index and save your file with a new file name.  To use the markers, open it with Windows Media Player and then go to File > Markers and select the marker you want to skip to.

I tried to convert the file into iPod format using Videora, but the markers were gone.  What you can do is save two versions (one for the computer that can be viewed using WMP, and one for the iPod that has been converted using Videora).  If you don’t have Videora, go out and grab it.  This is a great little program that allows you to do a one-click conversion of any .wmv file to .mp4, which can be played on the iPod.

Netvibes is a great personal start page. One feature I had not noticed before is the tabs feature. Using the tabs feature, I now have the following tabs set up:

1. Productivity: GMail checker, GMail Calendar, Laptop Lounge Calendar (via Google Calendar..I love that you can subscribe to iCal calendars using Google Calendar).
2. News: headlines from MSNB, CNN
3. Social Web: the latest stories on Digg and del.icio.us.
4. Bookmarks: all of my bookmarks on del.icio.us
5. Photos: the RSS feed for my photos (mostly my daughter) at Flickr, also Flickr memories, a good feed of pictures I can use for wallpaper.
6. Weather: five week forecast of weather in Tampa
7. Podcasts: the top 2 or 3 podcasts I listen to. I discovered that you can even play them using an embeded player with Netvibes, so no need to open up a separate window, etc.

Netvibes is a great way to have all the information you need in one place (page). The only other window I need to have open is Pandora, currently my favorite website.