This same truism could also be said about the Google search bar. Google’s extreme simplicity (“enter terms/ get answers”) is so simple a child can work it, but it obscures the fact that searching Google is an art and you can use advanced techniques to get much better results. Google has announced Google Search Education– a site with lesson plans designed to teach students how to use the Goog more effectively. They are lesson plans, not complete online lessons (in other words “teacher required”) but they do a great job of outlining specific, attainable search skills that students can learn in a hands-on activity.

Can you see yourself committing class time to using these activities?

Related articles

• Google Launches New Search Education Site with Lesson Plans (blogs.kqed.org)
• Helping students become savvy searchers with our new Search Education hub (insidesearch.blogspot.com)
• Modify Ctrl-K In Firefox To Open Your Search Engine Of Choice (ghacks.net)
• An Innovative Way To Share Lesson Plans With Your Entire PLN (edudemic.com)

Windows

• Chrome– the fastest, most Googly browser available. It’s just staggering how fast, flexible, and easy Chrome makes browsing the web.
• Firefox– dependable defender of the “Open Web”. For a long time this was my main browser (all different flavors of it!) but now I use it mostly when I need to help people on all different platforms have a smooth and consistent experience. I also like supporting them because they alone have the clearest idea of what a free and open Internet needs to look like.
• Evernote– Cloud sync’d note taking. I pay for the Pro version so I can share notebooks with friends, colleagues, and the web. Indispensable.
• Miro– Imagine if iTunes were created by a wise and loving God. Beautiful, flexible, easy open source video & audio playback, conversion, management, and syncing to any mobile device. Also a great way to download YouTube video files for later playback and remixing.
• Executor– It’s no Quicksilver [Mac] or Gnome Do [Linux], but it’s the best file launcher I’ve found for Windows.
• FilerFrog– This is a great little app that puts some very sophisticated file management operations in your right-click menu. Very useful.
• Paint.net– Powerful free open source image editing software is right in the sweet spot where non-designers can do some real design work without learning (or paying for) Photoshop.
• Clarify– My newest software love affair, Clarify is uniquely great for creating step-by-step tutorials with screenshots and text. Your Clarify docs can then be exported as PDFs, rich text, HTML and more.
• Greenshot, and/or Snagit– While open source Greenshot may be all you need for taking and annotating screenshots (it was for me), I’m warming to the many nice features in commercial competitor SnagIt. Now that SnagIt does full length video capture as well as images, it’s become my new at-work workhorse.
• NotePad++–I don’t always use a text editor, but when I do…Notepad++ is the kind of open source, extensible tool that has a rich community of developers who’ve already written every extension you might need.
• BlueGriffon– BlueGriffon is a WYSIWYG web editor designed to create HTML5 websites. Built upon venerable open source HTML editors NVu and Kompozer, it leapfrogs these older tools by fully supporting HTML5 tags and such niceties as Google Web Fonts. Check it out before you buy Dreamweaver.
• LastPass– I’ve gushed about LastPass before, but let’s just say that it safely and easily handles your passwords much better than you can.
• Google video chat– This enables GChat and now Google+ to access your video camera and microphone. A great alternative to Skype if you prefer your chat in a browser.
• Audacity– An audio swiss-army kit. Not always pretty or easy, but free and often handy for quick home recordings or clipping big sound files into little ones.
• CCleaner– De-gunk your machine. It’s Windows. It’s full of gunk. This helps.
• ColorCop– Whenever I’m designing, I like to be able to pick colors from other websites or designs I see with an eye-dropper tool. ColorCop simply does that.
• PeaZip– The benefit of having an open-source file compression/decompression utility is that it can open any compression format. This spot used to be reserved for 7-zip, but I’m giving PeaZip a chance to impress me. It’s definitely prettier.

Mac

• Chrome– the fastest, most Googly browser available. It’s just staggering how fast, flexible, and easy Chrome makes browsing the web.
• Firefox– dependable defender of the “Open Web”. For a long time this was my main browser (all different flavors of it!) but now I use it mostly when I need to help people on all different platforms have a smooth and consistent experience.I also like supporting them because they alone have the clearest idea of what a free and open Internet needs to look like.
• Quicksilver– The gold standard in desktop app launchers. The deeper you learn about this tool, the more useful it becomes in your workflow. Highly recommended.
• Evernote– Cloud sync’d note taking. I pay for the Pro version so I can share notebooks with friends, colleagues, and the web. Indispensable.
• Right Zoom– This is a nice little tool that re-creates the Windows “Maximize” behavior on the Mac. Press the green button and your window fills up the screen, just like it should.
• iWork– Keynote, Pages, Numbers. Sure, they’re an office suite like MS Office, but they really shine as graphic layout and design tools. Most of my design projects are created in iWork, not a fancy Adobe product. These three apps are the reason I can’t leave the Mac (not that I’d want to).
• Picasa– As easy and feature-packed as iPhoto without the patronizing “dummyproofing”, Picasa is a full featured photo management app that’s paired with a now-limitless free cloud storage and sharing service called Google Plus. They’ve also added several hipstamatic-style filters to their already great photo retouching tools.
• BlueGriffon– BlueGriffon is a WYSIWYG web editor designed to create HTML5 websites. Built upon venerable open source HTML editors NVu and Kompozer, it leapfrogs these older tools by fully supporting HTML5 tags and such niceties as Google Web Fonts. Check it out before you buy Dreamweaver.
• HexColor– HexColor is a color eyedrop sampler that’s modeled after the default Apple color picker tool found in iWork. My favorite tool of this type.
• Miro– Imagine if iTunes were created by a wise and loving God. Beautiful, flexible, easy open source video & audio playback, conversion, management, and syncing to any mobile device. Also a great way to download YouTube video files for later playback and remixing.
• Audacity– An audio swiss-army kit. Not always pretty or easy, but free and often handy for quick home recordings or clipping big sound files into little ones.
• The Unarchiver– It’s great to have an open-source file compressor utility that can open all of the various compression types found online– ZIP, RAR, 7z, and all the others. The Unarchiver is simple and dependable. Just set it and forget it.

Trello is a to-do list manager and project management webapp that’s based on the metaphor of index cards pinned to a board. The cards each flip over, giving you a workspace where you can discuss the task, create smaller checklists, assign responsibility, or add other notes. To change the status of a task, move it to a different list on your board!

I’ve been living with Trello as my main to-do list for the last three weeks, and its strength is definitely how easy and enjoyable it is to work with your tasks. Picking up a task and moving it to the “Done” list is very satisfying and sensible. I also love the many tools you get on the back of each card– I’ve been using the checklists to break my tasks into manageable, single-sitting objectives that I can easily knock out. I also love being able to put status updates on the back of each task so I can associate URLs, conversation notes, and memos to myself to help me get things done.

It’s refreshing that Trello doesn’t tell you how to work– you can come up with whatever system makes sense with your brain and the project you’re trying to manage. My understanding is that the tool was developed to help Fog Creek Software manage bug tracking, product updates, and feature requests in a transparent, public way. They even have their own software development board publicly available so you can see it in action!

Each Trello board generates an activity stream (Facebook style) that tells you each time one of your collaborators interacts with a card. As a project manger, I would find this feature incredibly useful so I could see the project getting done, piece by piece. I may be a micro-manager type, but I find it comforting to see a lot of little activities getting done and leading to the overall project’s completion.

Trello as a Classroom Management Tool?

The intuitive nature of Trello’s interface might also make it an excellent tool to introduce students to project management in project-based learning activities. As PBL grows more influential, I am often surprised that we aren’t teaching students about software tools that can assist in managing projects. Trello would be a great entry into that field that is even manageable for school-age students.

You might assign each group their own board to manage, or you might prefer to have the whole class’ progress visible on one big board so you can see at a glance how the project is coming together. For teachers doing the same project in multiple sections, this might be the best way to work.

Gripes and Quibbles

Trello’s flexibility might also be a liability– at least in my workflow. One thing I demand from a to-do list manager is that it obnoxiously get my attention when something is close to due. While Trello has due dates, it doesn’t have a way of knowing whether the task is done or not. Since you just move completed tasks to a different list, Trello doesn’t know that your “Done” list actually means ”done”. I would love it if it would somehow integrate with my Google Calendar so I get a big noisy update when I’m about to have something due! I think it would be much better in an organization where everyone is checking Trello constantly to make sure everything is on track.

The other thing that’s keeping Trello from overthrowing my current to-do list manager DoIt.Im is its lack of an Android app (which I understand is coming!) However, I think once that Android app is in place, the sheer joy of using Trello to knock my tasks off will make it my #1 choice. It would definitely be my first choice if I wanted to get several people working on a detailed project together!

Find out more about Trello >>.

Related articles

• Trello – A Unique, Simple & Powerful Project Management System From A Good Home(makeuseof.com)

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• 7 Tools Students Can Use to Manage Group Projects(freetech4teachers.com)

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• Manage teams with this easy web service(cbsnews.com)

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• My new favourite software(mikeclayton.wordpress.com)

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• A+ for Trello Online Project Collaboration Tool (Progress Board)(project-pro.us)

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• Trello : A solution in search of a problem(rvenugopal.wordpress.com)

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• Trello and cards for more then one departments + large backlog(stackoverflow.com)

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Everything I’ve heard is that badges are designed to take the place of the diploma– but a diploma is just a way for an educational institution to confer its reputation upon an individual who has successfully proven mastery of content. The whole system is based on faith that the institution knows what mastery looks like, and it has done due diligence to ensure that its graduates have mastered the skills. While employers couldn’t actually see evidence of what students learned, they trusted the judgement of the learning professionals who “supposedly know these things”.

So the question that badges are meant to answer, I think, is
“How can an employer believe that you’ve mastered content if there’s no accredited institution willing to put their reputation on the line to say that you did”?

Even if a site gives you a badge– does it really mean that somebody has done the due diligence to ensure that you really learned your stuff? If the answer is no– badges will become useless right quick.
The only answer I can give for that is if you have an ePortfolio of mastery-level work to show them. You can say that you know HTML5, you can have a badge that says “Mozilla thinks you know HTML5″, and/or you can build a website that shows your well-rounded understanding of HTML5. Which would you trust more?

Related articles

• How Will Mozilla’s Open Badges Project Affect Higher Ed? (hackeducation.com)
• Badges to Motivate Life Long Learning (LLL) (psipsychologytutor.org)
• ‘Badges’ Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional Colleges… (adafruit.com)
• Digital Delights for Learners – Web 2.0 Badges – Useful collection of stylish web 2.0 badges and badge generator. (web20badges.com)

Image by xcode via Flickr

I would like to register my support for the practice of jailbreaking of smartphones, tablets, and game systems on the principle that these devices are fully-functional computers and should not have their functionality crippled to promote monopolistic business practices by their manufacturers. I believe that “jailbreaking”– or “freeing personal electronics to function properly as the computers they are”– is an essential condition for teaching and learning of 21st Century technological skills.

I was one of the enthusiastic Apple users who went out to buy the first iPhone in 2007. Though the iPhone has since brought the term “apps” into the popular consciousness, the first iPhones did not have an app store and could only run basic apps that were installed by Apple at the factory. A community base of enthusiasts started jailbreaking iPhones to allow that revolutionary hardware to perform new and useful functions that Apple had not built into it. This is what computers are supposed to be used for—enabling users to write and run programs that perform valuable functions! The first iPhone apps were all written by jailbreakers, and those of us users who jailbroke had access to a vibrant entrepreneurial community of people pushing the limits of the iPhone’s capabilities. The law-abiding normies had a crippled phone that couldn’t do many of the functions that we now consider “standard” for a smartphone.

For example: It was a minor scandal for the first two years of the iPhone that it didn’t have two basic and very useful features, Copy and Paste. While Apple put out two phones that didn’t have it (2007’s iPhone and 2008’s iPhone 3G), the jailbreaking community solved that problem in under a year and brought a fully-functional copy/paste feature to the iPhone. This is just one of the many examples where independent developers added value to the iPhone just because they could. It’s unfortunate that they had to violate their Terms of Service and invalidate their warranty to do so.

While Apple’s desktop operating system (OS X) has always allowed users to write, run, and fully own the applications they create, Apple have taken a much more restrictive and user-hostile stance with their smartphones and tablets on iOS. I believe that these excessive restrictions are less about security—they are designed to “lock” users and vendors into having to use Apple’s App Store for all commerce that involves these devices. Once Apple decided to allow user-created apps in 2008, they only allowed them to be sold through Apple’s own store, taking a usurious 30% of all profits from these sales. They rigidly control which apps can be sold in the app store and have developed a reputation for rejecting apps for questionable and contradictory reasons. While these monopolistic practices may be great for Apple, they result in higher prices, less innovation, and less choice for consumers.

I want to stress again that no desktop computer operating system like Windows or Mac has ever attempted to prevent its users from running third-party programs. We have never needed to “jailbreak” a device before because no company has ever been so brazen as to deny users the right to leave one internet service provider (AT&T) and use another one (T-Mobile). Now that Apple has crossed that threshold, other device manufacturers are following suit, hoping that they too can limit their users’ economic choices via technological means so they can squeeze greater profits from their captive users.

Please understand that Apple’s practice of “jailing” technology signals a historic shift—from computers serving humans’ interests to computers serving corporations’ interests.

I think it’s a negative development and I wholeheartedly oppose it.

As an educator, I am interested in empowering young people to actively explore technology. I have seen that open source tools and jailbreaking make it possible for students to “look under the hood” of technology so they can understand how it works. I encourage students to learn how open source tools like Linux, Android, and WordPress work because they are the materials from which a new world is being constructed. Closed and jailed technology tools separate consumers from creators in a way that hammers, nails, wood, and steel do not. Just as lumber producers should not be able to dictate who can build a house with their wood, a hardware manufacturer should not be able to dictate who can write a program for their system. Please continue to preserve people’s right to self-determination with the technology tools they buy. Please preserve our right to jailbreak our devices and learn to master them so we can actively participate in this new world that is coming into being.

Sincerely,
Ted Curran

Oakland, CA

If you’re interested in contributing your voice to keep jailbreaking legal, go to the EFF’s page and get involved!

Related articles

• EFF petitions to extend legal iPhone jailbreaking (tuaw.com)
• Could Jailbreaking Your iPhone Become a Crime Soon? (readwriteweb.com)
• The EFF needs your help to keep rooting, jailbreaking legal (androidandme.com)
• Jailbreaking to Become Illegal Again this Year (techcular.com)
• Like iOS 5? Thank A Hacker (wired.com)
• Untethered Jailbreak For iOS 5 is Coming Any Day Now (readwriteweb.com)
• Is iOS the Future of the Mac? (mac.appstorm.net)
• The iPhone 4S has been jailbroken (geek.com)

There are lots of situations where a screenshot of your computer can communicate much more than words. From giving students detailed directions to helping your tech support people (ahem) solve issues you’re experiencing, screenshots can make it easier for people to see what you’re talking about.

Screen capture software lets you take an image or a video of your computer’s desktop, annotate it with text, arrows, shapes, and more, and then post it online or email to friends. There are many great free and low cost options for screen capture software for Mac and Windows.

Create Your Own Diagrams

I took this screenshot of ZygoteBody.com (formerly Google Body) and then added the numbers in my screenshot program so I could draw students’ attention to certain areas. When you have the power to capture images of everything you see on your computer, the possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

Share, Not OVERshare

Many good screenshot tools have a blur tool to help you obscure sensitive information. The benefits here are clear (not blurry!)

There are a number of great tools for taking screenshots. Let’s look at the best of the best:

Windows: Snagit

Snagit is a full-featured tool for taking, annotating, and sharing your screenshots. I could list off the features but it’s better if you just read about them here. Basically, if you want to do it with a screenshot on Windows, Snagit has you covered.

Mac: Skitch

Mac users can use the built-in Cmd+Shift+4 for basic screen grabs, or use the fun, free Skitch for full featured annotation and sharing tools.

Once you master the art of taking screenshots you will find opportunities to use them everywhere you look! These great tools, which can be summoned with a single keystroke or click, will free you to communicate visually in a way text just can’t convey.  Happy shutterbugging!

Just a note– I wrote this article for work, promoting tools that would be easiest for our faculty to adopt. I actually created this post using a different screen capture program that I’m just trying out called Clarify. It takes a novel approach to screen capture, allowing you to write full articles as a series of “steps” of images and text. This fits my needs beautifully as a tech support and blogger who often writes step-by-step documentation guides for people. As I say, I’m just trying it out but I can see Clarify becoming my new go-to screenshot tool.

Related articles

• Did You Know: Skitch for Visually Telling a Story (evernote.com)
• Presentation Tools – Create Great Screen Instructions With Clarify: The Screenshot Editor (bluemangolearning.com)
• 7 Good Screen Capture Tools for Teachers (freetech4teachers.com)

Image via Wikipedia

2011 brought us the buzzword craze of “gamification” in education, or the quest to make learning online more like a video game. Inspired by FourSquare‘s achievement badges as a way of motivating users to check in to location-based services and Mozilla’s promise of outcomes-based badges in lieu of diplomas, we ed-techies went a little nuts for gamification this year. In my post about “The Angry Birds Guide to Online Lesson Design“, I tried to distill what makes video games so motivating, challenging, and fun to see if we could use those insights to enhance online learning. I’m now working on a “proof of concept”, helping a faculty re-design his course to be more student-centered and leverage the tools we have built into our Learning Management System.  I hope to prove that online can match the motivation of video games without trying to “mimic” them with leaderboards, badges, and the outward trappings of games. Instead, we need to look at what works in games and use that to think critically about the way we approach delivering instruction online.

I have been focusing on helping a faculty re-design his course to make it more student-centered using some of the insights I documented in the Angry Birds post. These are not as technically involved as setting up an achievements system, but they use the existing features of our learning management system to reinforce good lesson design. There are many tools in the LMS that enable courses to feel like games, if not outwardly look like them. I think that badges are great for motivating students, but so are grades! The hard part is motivating students to do the readings, master the material, and think critically about material. A lot of this is caused by outdated and debunked thinking about teaching and learning itself.

As in the best video games, students need a safe place to try and fail until they succeed. To that end, we are putting formative reading assessments in the LMS using the Blackboard Tests tool that students can re-try until they’re satisfied with their score. These are really meant for a reading comprehension check and to make sure students understand the assigned readings. We are also using the “feedback” feature in Blackboard’s tests tool so we can give students “clues” after they get a wrong answer– showing them where to find the correct answer in the book. These tests will also inform class meetings, as the faculty can see which concepts students had problems with and address those during the class meeting.

We started designing this course with Bloom’s Taxonomy in mind after I read a great paper on student-centered learning techniques in health sciences ed. It found that over 91% of questions asked of undergrad and graduate level health sciences students are limited to the “Knowledge” and “Comprehension” domains– the two most basic levels of cognition. [annotated link][original article].

We recognize that comprehension questions are essential to ensuring that students have a basic grasp on the content, but that they’re not the be-all, end-all of instruction. As in games, students need to take the basic skills they’ve mastered in one context and apply them to other situations.

Related articles

• What is Gamification? and Why it Matters to L&D Professionals (learningcircuits.blogspot.com)
• Learning Technology – Assessment Tools Needed in Every Classroom (scoop.it)
• 2012 – The Year of the LMS (elearndev.blogspot.com)
• Students report improved grades via Technology/LMS use (moodlenews.com)
• This Time Its Personal (thejournal.com)
• Broadening the Definition of Gamification for L&D Professionals (learningcircuits.blogspot.com)
• 7 Things You Should Know About Gamification (educause.edu)
• Breaking Up the LMS: K-12 District Selects Part of LoudCloud Systems’ LMS (mfeldstein.com)
• Is Gamification Really a Bad Word? (edstuckinthecloud.com)
• What You Need to Know about LMS Alternatives (thecorkboard.org)

Image by Casey David via Flickr

As long as I’ve been interested in WordPress for Education, CUNY Commons has stood as the example of what’s possible when you mash up WordPress, WPMU, BuddyPress, and MediaWiki with some special, custom goodness. Built on open source tools, it has enabled the dedicated team at CUNY to build it into exactly the tool their community needs.

I have been trying with very limited success to create a similar tool at InterLearn.us, but now I might not have to….

The project has announced that they will be offering Commons in a Box, a version of CUNY’s customized social network that can be freely installed at any educational institution to provide a social network of blogs, wikis, and collaboration tools.

This is exciting news for those of us who want to free our users to collaborate at a higher level using open tools. What I don’t fully cogitate is how the Box’d version will differ from a Buddypress install with the full list of CUNY’s custom plugins and MediaWiki integrated.

I’m waiting with barely-contained excitement for “Step Two– Put Your School in the Box“. Are you? How does your school facilitate online collaboration?

Related articles

• I develop free software because of CUNY and Blackboard (teleogistic.net)
• Why “Commons in a Box” Matters (hackeducation.com)
• New BuddyPress plugin: BP Better Directories (teleogistic.net)
• Creating New Academic Networks With ‘Commons in a Box’ (chronicle.com)

Image via Wikipedia

“So, the ‘limiting context’ I am interested in is how the decision to acquire an open source or a proprietary LMS is determined – is it cost, functionality, usability, easy to implement, requires little training, etc., etc. ”

Professional Hosting and Service– Whether You’re Open or Closed

Extensibility: A World of Tools

Is it the same for K-12 as it is in Higher Ed?

Image by Dru! via Flickr

Related articles

• Open Source vs. Proprietary Software (pcworld.com)
• Freeing the LMS (downes.ca)
• The Battle For Openness In The LMS Market (downes.ca)
• Blackboard: Now More “Open” (hackeducation.com)
• Why Sakai Rocks! (dr-chuck.com)
• Linux, Open Source Still ‘Money’ in Financial Services (linuxinsider.com)
• Open source is winning where it counts, so where to next? (technollama.co.uk)
• Emerging Trends in LMS / Ed Tech Market | e-Literate (mfeldstein.com)

Through social networks, email, video, and online chats, learners can connect with and learn from a wider range of people than ever before, yet building a successful PLN that doesn’t overwhelm you can be challenging. With so much information out there, it can be hard to know whom to follow, what to read, and how to fit it all into your daily schedule. Here, we offer some tips that can help you not only build and grow a better PLN, but also get more out of the experience and give more back to your online community.

http://www.onlinecollege.org/2011/10/26/50-great-ways-to-grow-your-personal-learning-network/

Related articles

• Learning Technology – 50 Great Ways to Grow Your Personal Learning Network (scoop.it)
• PLNs Aren’t Limited to Twitter (freetech4teachers.com)
• 8 Ways To Build Your Personal Learning Network With Twitter, Google Plus, And More (fastcompany.com)
• Why Teachers Should Join Twitter (learningwithtechs.wordpress.com)
• Developing a Personal Sharing Network (freetech4teachers.com)