"All of these toolbars are designed primarily for spot checks on a single page. However, if your site is templated (even Dreamweaver templated) you can catch a lot of template errors doing a one-page check up. You can also quickly check objects which normally cause the biggest headaches - images ALT tags, ill-structured tables and improperly labelled form fields. Modern tools are also letting detect ARIA page structures (or the lack of them)."

The next post this week comes from the Technology Training Community, where Nikke Moore, TLT instructional designer, has a helpful tip for people who need to track project time. She has discovered Toggl, an online time tracking tool, and finds it to be very helpful. 

"Toggl is an online time tracking tool. It features 1-click time tracking and helps you see where your time goes. Free and paid versions are available, depending on your needs.  Not only will Toggl track your time, but you can specify which project, client, or task is associated with the time spent working. When you’re finished, you can create nicely formatted, custom reports for your records."

Around Education Technology Services lately, there has been a lot of discussion about workspace. Dave Stong, TLT graphic artist, has some thoughts about work space and ponders the thinking that went into some of University Park's best buildings. 

"There's some great discussions about workspace going on. There's the ETS workspace in Rider that may undergo some adaptation, along with the opening and experimenting with new spaces at the Library and new spaces in Chambers Building, as well as innovative space proposals for Hammond. The discussion around these things is exciting our group, and that gives our space a good atmosphere."

Over the past two years, Chris Long, associate dean of undergraduate education with the College of Liberal Arts, has engaged in ongoing dialogue about the culture of drinking at Penn State with the presidents of the Liberal Arts Undergraduate Council. With State Patty's Day tomorrow, he decided it would be a good time to share the latest of these dialogues with the current president. 

“Tech tutors will focus on students helping students with projects that involve technology,” said Heather Huntsinger, IT Training Specialist for ITS Training Services. “Part of that help will be provided in scheduled lab hours and we have selected labs spread throughout the University Park campus that we know are populated by students at core hours, usually between 10:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m."

"We have some insight that those are labs students use when working on projects,” added Huntsinger. “The other part of that is, students can also request a time that is not part of those scheduled lab hours, and we’re hoping that that will take off in its own right as well.”

The Tech Tutors service offers help in popular topics for students such as Access, Blogs at Penn State, Excel, PowerPoint, Photoshop, InDesign, and more.

The labs are located in convenient and relevant places around campus. “We’ve chosen three labs that we’ll concentrate on for the spring semester. These are the Redifer commons, 201 Pollock and 15 Sparks,” said Glenna Emel, Instructional Designer for ITS Training Services. 

“The labs are distributed in three locations across campus where Tech Tutors hold weekly hours. Those hours are listed on the calendar embedded in the Tech Tutors website,” added Emel.

“Each of our tutors has a specialty area or two that they are more comfortable and confident assisting with, and we’ve noted those specialty areas on the calendar,” said Huntsinger.

Tech Tutors are recognizable by their uniformed shirts. “We have dark purple shirts that say Tech Tutors in very large, bright white lettering on the back,” said Emel. “They are wearing these in the labs and should be fairly easy to pick out from the crowd,” she added.

“There’s an evaluation process with these Tech Tutors, so students who participate or request assistance from a Tech Tutor will receive a feedback survey. We would like as much student response as possible to make future choices about where the program goes, types of projects, types of topics that are most needed, the most frequent times and locations, etc. We want to go to where the students are that need the help, so getting as much feedback as possible will be beneficial as we move forward,” noted Emel.

The Tech Tutors service is designed to help students successfully accomplish assignments and projects that require knowledge of specific technologies. With student response and feedback, Tech Tutors will become a strong asset to ITS on the University Park campus.

This ITS service is looking to help students perform to their highest abilities and is readily available at three labs around campus during the spring 2012 semester. Please visithttp://its.psu.edu/training/techtutors/ for available times and locations or to schedule an appointment. Tech Tutors are eager to help all students make the most out of their learning experience at Penn State.

Article by Sarah Stoolman, TLT Marketing Communications Intern

Podcast transcription

"I usually work in a digital format and then need to resolve issues when I go to hard copy. For this, I worked up the drawing to a finished state as a hard copy then added the brown background digitally. I need three illustrations, and they should be somewhat light, but a little sophisticated, too. Funny but serious."

Next we look at diversity and education with Elizabeth Pyatt, TLT instructional designer. Elizabeth finds fault with how Asians in American history are often portrayed. 

"For example....my capstone assignment for 10th grade Asian history in high school. I recognize that Asian history, Chinese history in particular, is very long and complex and frankly pretty detached from Western history for the most part. You can't really expect to sensibly cover 2500+ years of history in two weeks, but here's the assignment I most remember from that curriculum."

Next, Cole Camplese, TLT senior director, offers a look at how the iPad can be used for work like note taking and even as a sketching tool. 

"If you know me you know I use my iPad quite a bit and have really since the device came out a couple of years ago.  I even gave my laptop up for a month to just focus on understanding how the iPad could fit into my workflow.  I have written several times about what I’ve learned, but wanted to dive into how functional it has become for me all over again in the last few days."

Allan Gyorke, director of Education Technology Services, recently attended the 2012 EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative annual meeting and he is gracious enough to share some of his experiences with us in his blog this week. 

"For those who don’t know, the ELI conference is a gathering of about 700 people who are focused on various aspects of educational technology, mostly from higher education. I knew that others in our group would be attending sessions on topics like analytics and gaming, so I spent all of my time at sessions focused on mobile learning and eTextbook/Paperless initiatives."

That's all for this week's BuzzLion. Thanks for reading!

"I just read a feature article posted by the American Psychological Association providing some depressing statistics and, what I feel are, common insights into why students cheat. A survey of 40,000 U.S. high school students found that more than half have cheated on a test, 34% have done it more than twice, and 1/3 have used the internet to plagiarize. Additional surveys indicate that their behavior continues in college, and might even be associated with dishonesty later in life."

Next, we have Brett Bixler, senior instructional designer with Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT), who notes this week that the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy is studying the benefits of video games, including how they might help education. 

"The White House has an Office of Science and Technology Policy. Since September, Constance Steinkuehler has been a senior policy analyst for this office, where she's shaping the Obama administration's policies around games that improve health, education, civic engagement and the environment, among other areas."

Next, we hear from Cole Camplese, senior director of TLT, who has a great post on Apple's iBooks and how it allows us to more easily publish content. 

"This is not a post discussing the merits of Apple’s iBooks 2 announcement … that has been done all over the web. Instead I did what I typically do when a new publishing engine emerges, I try to publish content with it. So attached to this post is a first shot at publishing some content … and again, as I typically do, I grab content that exists and re-imagine it within the construct of a new platform."

Brad Kozlek, programming manager with TLT, takes another look at the time-honored computer file and folder concept; he has many thoughts on it, including how search functions make files and folders less necessary for him. 

"I personally don’t get into filing things away hierarchically, and I don’t really find any value in folders for the most part. I use search for everything, and it has not failed me. Much easier than trying to figure out what folder I should put something in."

Are you an introvert? Dave Stong explores the introvert at work in his latest blog post that includes links to several articles. 

"These links are here for my easy access. If you want, you can read the articles too, but my experience so far is everything I would expect: Discussions have been predictable. I have found that most people see team work and collaboration as a way to improve their work."

That's all for this week's BuzzLion. Thanks for reading!

There are several reasons to caption videos:

What are some of the software options? 

What are the advantages of using software for captioning (as opposed to having people do it)?

The advantage of using software would be the cost savings. It costs roughly $160 per hour of video to have a transcription company create captions for your video. Although it takes a lot of time to do it via software (about 8-10 hours per hour of video), you would save much of that transcription fee even if you paid a student to do it for you.  

What are the disadvantages? 

The biggest disadvantage is the time spent creating the captions (it's quite tedious), and the expense if you paid someone to do it using software. Sometimes it is much quicker to send a video out to a transcription company rather than do it in-house if it is needed quickly. Many of them can turn the project around in a few days or even faster for a premium fee. 

What's the best way for a faculty member to caption a video they are using in a course?

That will depend on how long the video is, how soon they need it, whether or not they want to do it themselves or send it out, and what resources (money and time) they can throw at the project. Longer videos and/or those that need to be turned around quickly might be better done by a transcription company, such as 3PlayMedia or AutomaticSync Technologies if you have the financial resources, but shorter videos and those that do not need to be done quite so quickly could be done in house using the software. We hope to someday create some type of service for Penn State where faculty can send a video and have it captioned, where the decision to do it in house or outsourced would be made by the service.

"For students, it is not always clear that the return on their investment will be positive, as a degree no longer guarantees a job. If education is both expensive and has a low ROI, the demand for traditional education is likely to fall."

"There is something about composing your posts with a text editor, and generating a static site from the collection of files that is just wonderful to me. I know it has no business for the mass of people, and the web had become so rich due to ease of posting. But for someone like me, I am so intrigued by cutting out all the complications of databases, scaling, using web-based editors. At the same time, I also like some dynamic components on my site – like comments."

Next, we have yet another must-read post about design, art, and technology from Dave Stong, TLT graphic designer. Dave shares with us a layout experiment that combines his artistic skills with software. 

"I'm looking for the right format and layout for a Plato dialog I've been wanting to illustrate. I wrote about it once before when I was first fishing about for a delivery method. Web based now seems fine. I have three pages roughed, but the standard strips on standard pages just don't seem too interesting."

Next we have Ken Layng, TLT training specialist, who offers steps for captioning Adobe Connect meetings and recordings. This is a good read for those concerned with accessibility issues. 

Keeping with the accessibility theme, Elizabeth Pyatt, TLT instructional designer, has a helpful tip on how to determine if a piece of verbage is text or an image of text. 

"Within a PDF or even stylized text on a Web page, an important accessibility question is whether a piece of verbage is really text or is an image of text. For accessibility, this is important for determining whether you need to worry about the ALT tag or not."

Finally, we have a blog post about a change you may have noticed on the Penn State home page - the psu.edu site is being redesigned (in steps). Robin Smail, TLT disruptive technologist, gives us an insider's look at what exactly is going on with this mammoth undertaking. 

"Actually, today's change is a relatively small one, and only the first of several changes that will be made over the next several months. This effort, which started last September, is an amazing process, and unlike anything I've seen here at Penn State on this scope. We're talking about taking web design to an entirely new level, and doing things the right way. Research. Usability studies. Focus groups. Iterative design."

That's all for this week's BuzzLion. Thanks for reading.