Hello and welcome to today’s workshop “Free software tools for the classroom”. Today we’re going to talk about a host of fun interesting apps that you might find useful for your own teaching and research or for your students. Today I’ll be giving this workshop unfortunately my colleague Cameron wills who developed this with me had an emergency he’ll be out today so I’m going solo on this one. If you do have any questions about any of these apps later on while we can’t provide in-depth support for everything that we talk about today some other units on campus may be able to or we always don’t mind talking about best uses and practices with these kinds of things so we’d be happy to follow up later on so you can feel free to give us a email later on. Okay, today we’ve designed the slides to let you know about a number of different apps which are free and have interesting little technical uses so we’ve badged them here if there is any app which is free but may have some kind of upgrade mechanism for more advanced features we have labeled it with the freemium badge here and if there are mobile apps or a web app or it’s available on your desktop or laptop computer we have badges for those too we’ve tried to pick things that are as open and available as possible otherwise we thought that they’re just super outstanding so we wanted to talk about them and then last but not least here is this open source badge one or two of the apps that we’re talking about today actually have the code available for you so if you are very technically inclined you could inspect that and verify that everything is kosher and you could even what’s known as forking it taking a picture or taking a snapshot of it and then creating your own app from it which is very cool.
All right, so first off I want to start with office 365, I’m kind of curious here show of hands who all is familiar with office 365 in any capacity just feel free to raise your little hand here or respond in the text/chat looks like a number of the people here have used office 365. Excellent, okay good, so most people are familiar with this particular app, office 365 is a very useful suite of apps that are available to everyone here on campus. Once you have logged in at a 365.com you’ll notice that you have access to all the standard Microsoft apps like Word, PowerPoint, Excel but you are actually online and you’re using Internet ready versions of all of these things you can also get access to your email calendar and a whole lot of more advanced ones now here I’ve taken a screenshot of my own apps that I have you may not see all of these yourself some are in testing on campus and I’m just helping DoIT kind of work out kinks with some of them so certain things like power BI which is become available recently you may see but other things like teams may not be widely available just yet but we’re hoping that once those are working fine everyone will get access to them.
There are a whole bunch of different things that you may be interested in one of which we’re going to talk about next is onedrive which kind of acts as the glue behind all these different apps. So office 365 just something to kind of know about it is web-based but there are in fact also mobile and desktop apps as you’ll see from that screen that I was just on here above the window with all of the different app tiles is this install office button, so if you do want the full desktop suite of everything once you’ve logged in on your desktop or your laptop you can install them on that computer then you have access to all the different features within the office apps.
However there are as well mobile apps for Android and iOS so if you’ve got a Android actually or Windows Phone as long as it continues to exist or an iPhone or Ipad or anything like that there are full versions of all of these available on your devices so students have no reason not to be able to create a Word document on the train right their research paper from anywhere that kind of thing. It’s useful to note that you can install them on up to five different devices, is it free for Android, yes it is it is absolutely free for all the different platforms most of the apps though you may have to pay to upgrade if you’re not part of NIU if you are a faculty member or staff member or a student here you could access a full office 365 suite it’s just part of the services that the institution provides. One nice thing with office 365 because onedrive kind of undergirds everything you can easily share and collaborate with anyone at NIU, will actually see how to look them up within onedrive which is very slick.
So as I mentioned uses creating and editing documents from anywhere, sharing working on documents together with people it’s just a fantastic feature if people are familiar with Google Docs the Microsoft Office suite now works very similarly and just so everyone is aware you can find that at O365.niu.edu to log into our version of it at NIU and this is a o the letter o not a zero which is and can be a little confusing the first time you see it that stands for office 365. Okay so onedrive I wanted to talk about that as well it’s a part of the office 365 suite and at its most basic it’s a place where you can store files so you’ll see here I have a number of different files and folders that I’ve added to my onedrive I also though have a space for files for that have been shared with me so if Dan or Janet here from faculty development want to work on a workshop with me they can just share their PowerPoint and I’ll be able to go to that shared with me area and find those from them, if you’re part of any groups at NIU as well you’ll also see that you have access to those group spaces which would also have their own onedrive files so here we have our department files which is really nice for again kind of collaborating on all these things.
Once you are in any of the Microsoft Office apps, you’ll notice here I’m in the a 365 Word online version, I can begin creating my document just as I would has most of the same controls here at the top and there’s this handy-dandy share button when I click that this dialog box pops up and you’ll notice I can invite people to share documents with so here I’ve looked for Stephanie Richter our assistant director I just type in her name I click on her name and then I decide whether or not she can view or she can also edit, if I want to make sure that being from NIU she always logs in before typing on it to make it as secure as possible I can require her to sign in and then hit the share button and we’re off to the races, if you did want to collaborate with someone off campus like you have a co-author on a research paper from another institution you can as well get a share link for them one that doesn’t require them to sign into an NIU account which is also very very handy, it is of course less secure if someone else gets ahold of that they can edit as well so you want to be a little careful just let your co-author know about that but that’s fine you know most people also can handle a little bit of internet security.
Zoey asks what is the individual capacity, are you asking for the number of people you can share with if so I believe it’s a few dozen for what capacity for files ah that is a good question I want to say it goes up to a gigabyte of files I’m not exactly sure though I could definitely look that up later on I’d be happy to follow up with that later because ideas handy to know especially if you’re giving like a multimedia class if you upload a lot of the files those can take up a lot of space, otherwise for standard documents it’s essentially unlimited. Excellent! Okay so as with one drive I was mentioning the basic features is just backing up your files since they’re in the cloud they’re available everywhere you have a device and there are not only the web-based apps but mobile apps for all of your phones or tablets or anything like that as well so you can get access to files everywhere all of your changes are saved everywhere it’s super convenient.
As I mentioned this is kind of the glue between the different office apps allowing you to start a word document on your desktop, open it up on a phone, share it with a collaborator and work on the documents at the same time which is highly highly useful for when you’re wanting to do some kind of authorship together you could set aside a time on your calendars with someone else and you could both log in and work on the same research paper presentation what all else together which is very very handy. Alternatives for that I already mentioned Google Drive and Google Docs again that works very similarly, it doesn’t have the plug-in to NIU system though so you’d have to let each other know what your emails are to be able to share documents, if you’re looking for something that that’s just a very robust file sharing program though I also would highly recommend looking into Dropbox. I myself have used Dropbox for years I pay for their premium service to get access to a lot of extra space I find it’s very robust solution the versioning features of Dropbox have now been integrated into onedrive though so if you save everything there anytime you make a major update to any file it saves that new version for you too which is very useful if you’re looking for going back to an older version in case you make some kind of mistake and that’s also available again at o365.NIU.EDU or for any of the mobile apps you can just go to the app stores on your phone or your tablet and look them up by name there.
All right diving into a few multimedia things one common test that we have in our classes maybe posting a picture maybe you’re at a conference and you meet up with an author of the paper that your students read or some what you’re talking about or you’re taking picture on location in the field so to speak we often have some need to take in touch-up pictures one that I wanted to mention here is Pixlr, it is a very simple web app although there are now mobile versions available it looks a lot like Photoshop except without all of the crazy fancy features, it’s free, it’s available on the web all you do is upload your photo and then you can do things like oh crop it select pieces out draw over it erase all the kind of standard features we’ve come to expect from basic and slightly more advanced photo editors but it can also do things really fancy like layer images on top of them and manipulate each one independently.
So it is a very powerful still you wouldn’t have to necessarily get an extremely advanced suite of tools like the Photoshop suite. So it’s still very sophisticated but it’s very accessible, it’s simple to use and easy you can use it right from the web which is very handy as long as you have access to a computer you can just take your files your photos upload them and work on them there, there is an optional account you can make if you actually want to save your photos in the cloud again most of us have access to some kind of cloud storage already so maybe that’s not the most necessary and they’ve just made mobile apps available so if you do like the tool on the web I definitely recommend checking their mobile apps out also, different uses that you may have as I mentioned if you’re going to a conference maybe you meet someone that’s kind of academ famous out there, top author in the field or some that you are talking about in your classes that can also always be really cool to like bring the outside world into your class, any other uses people have for photos in your class, zoey says that Rockstar moment.
Yes, exactly you met them now you’re famous now all of your students are two degrees from that famous person. Never wash your hand, yes of course few alternatives to Pixlr one that you may want to consider, gimp is an open source alternatives it is available for pretty much every operating system out there because it’s open source people have taken it and forked the code and built it for all the different systems it’s another somewhat advanced lightweight suite of tools very useful. If you’re looking for alternatives on phones or tablets though I recommend either Photoshop Express or VSCO cam, VSCO cam. VSCO cam has become kind of a leading industry standard for mobile photo editing out there very handy very easy to use and powerful app. If you’re interested in Pixlr that’s just @PIXLR.com or PIXLR in the app stores. Moving on to a different kind of media audio here occasionally we’ll have need of creating some kind of audio for our courses whether or not it’s answering a question that our students email us and just it’s a lot easier to kind of answer it just by talking through an issue than by typing out an email or creating a narration for a document or a set of slides anything of that sort audacity will serve people really well again these are free software tools, so simple easy use they’re free out there you don’t have to worry about paying any extra fees or subscription cost unless you want to upgrade sometimes, it’s very very simple as you’ll see from the interface here there are only so many buttons it looks a little complicated but it’s a lot simpler than it looks since it is free and it’s supported by its community of users it doesn’t look the nicest but it’s very useful.
All you need to do is just hit the record button and then you’re off to the races and it’s recording everything that you’re saying while you’re doing so you’ll see this nice little waveform here, form at the bottom, once you’re done you can just hit stop or you could hit pause and keep going if you want to take a sip of water, things like that. Once you’re done you can replay everything start, stop all that good stuff and then you can actually edit the audio as well so here in this screenshot we have the Select tool available you could select audio and then say delete everything else it’s not that if you want to cut off the beginning or ending or you could slice it up and cut out some of the middle portions, in this particular screenshot you’ll notice that this waveform is also very very tall so it’s someone here was talking perhaps a little bit louder than they meant to you can also adjust the speaker and microphone output in case you recorded yourself, play back the recording and realize, ooh I’m a little loud let me go ahead and adjust that very very handy.
You can as well import audio from another source so if you did save it from something else you could then bring it up in audacity make your changes that you want to and then export it to whatever version would best suit you. As I mentioned it is open source it’s available on PC Mac Linux pretty much anything out there, easy to record audio and exports to pretty much any format you can think of we definitely recommend exporting to mp3 because it’s been around for so long any kind of device can play mp3 files and now mp3 itself has just been made more or less open-source as well you will have to install just a slight extra package with audacity if you want to record to mp3 I’m hoping because it’s been made more or less public domain that’ll become part of the standard install but right now it’s very easy to export it to mp3 so I just recommend looking into the extra plugin for that and of course just basic audio editing, something you won’t get easily in most other voice recorders on a desktop without paying a whole lot of money for that kind of thing.
Uses, audio explanations or tutorials I mentioned if your students have a question sometimes it’s just the easiest to record yourself video or audio and upload that back into your course, narrations for presentations I’ll talk about another narrated slide possibility in a bit but this is one way of going about that that’s pretty simple you can step through your different slides record yourself talking about each of them giving your standard lecture and then place those in your course it’s also very good for universal design in this specific instance so you have your slides that you’ve uploaded your course if you expect your students to review them you may people you may have people with visual impairments in that case narrating with slides it’s very good idea and audacity serves that purpose very well.
Other alternatives, other than audacity pretty much everyone has a phone these days and most of them have voice recorder apps, they usually don’t come with as nifty features and sagacity so you may save down the audio record from them and then upload into audacity before putting in your course but certainly don’t forget that these are available on pretty much any device everyone has these days. And audacity is available at the largest open source repository on the net audacity.sourceforge.net. Any questions about any of the multimedia stuff so far, Where does anyone else use them for anything that they’d like to share, again if people would like to you can use the text chat to talk or if or feel free to talk over the microphones as well, always nice to hear people. Jacki says audacity is a good one excellent glad to hear that you’ve enjoyed that and from Janet might be correct office 365 home personal or university subscribers no longer have unlimited storage, oh good to know effective immediately subscription to those services will only include a terabyte of onedrive storage.
So a terabyte is a lot of space so you pretty much don’t have to worry unless you’re doing something like a multimedia production course in which case that might fill up though it’ll take quite a while, so I was wrong it’s not a gig it’s one terabyte which is actually very substantial for most people’s purposes. Bill Goldberg says, use audacity often as musician. Oh yes music production courses very very useful for those obviously it’s mostly based around audio. All right! Jackie asks “is one terabyte applied to students”, yes I believe everyone here on campus does get that amount of space, they’ll feel free if anyone finds differently just as Janet did feel free to type in the text just to correct me. So, as far as narrated slides office mix is a plug-in to PowerPoint available from Microsoft which does exactly that, here I have the presentation from today, I loaded my slides up in PowerPoint as usual, but there is this new bar up at the top which lets me once I’m done creating my presentation, begin recording my narration over these slides and here’s a zoomed in view of this bar here.
So once I have gotten everything done I’ve maybe made a transcript for what I want to talk about what I want to narrate over the slides I just click my slide recording button and again I’m off to the races and I can record over my slides, I can get through my slides it still preserves all of the animations, videos because it’s just PowerPoint itself, so whenever I get to one of those slides I can let it do its thing and then begin talking pick up from that point. You’ll notice there are also a number of other features here, inserting different kinds of things, more video or audio anything else you may want to add to the presentation itself, then once you’re done you can play it back to make sure it’s exactly as you want and then you can export the video or you could save to the o365 video using onedrive if this is for an online class in blackboard I would highly recommend exporting the video and then uploading to the medial the media library within blackboard that’s an extra multimedia suite that we have here at NIU for streaming video much like YouTube it’s kind of like YouTube for NIU, that way everyone gets access to the videos from any device you don’t have to worry about someone not being able to play it back because they don’t have a device that can play that a particular file type those kinds of things so this is very versatile and useful for everyone, again it’s a simple plugin for PowerPoint, right now it is PC only but we have heard they are working on a Mac version, recording slides, narrating over them, exporting video for use anywhere, super simple, very handy to use, you can use it for just standard online lessons your lectures, one other thing I thought up if you ever can’t make a conference presentation not a bad idea talk with the other people on the panel and see if they wouldn’t mind you just kind of recording your presentation maybe putting that out on the web for them, using the office 365 video making it open in public and then just sending in the link to it that they can play for everyone there, they wouldn’t be able to ask questions but at least you’re still kind of presenting if you couldn’t otherwise.
Cynthia asks what is the video file output, that’s up to you there are a number of different ones but we do recommend the mp4 file type that’s the most universal if you’re here at NIU again if you’re teaching a class I recommend the medial library known as Medial, uploading it there then transcodes it to like half a dozen different file types so no matter what device people are using to view that content they’ll be able to get a streaming video source output for them which is super handy. You’re very welcome, other alternatives to this if you’re looking for more advanced features, Adobe presenter is a very useful one it also allows you to build in quizzes, that kind of thing or if you’re looking for a very advanced video editing suite on top of that you could export the vo from office mix or just originally record it within something known as Camtasia that’s used by a lot of professionals in the field we do have access to these here in faculty development we have a small multimedia production suite we have soundproof room with a few computers for recording these kinds of things and again I’d recommend reaching out to one of us we can work with you sit down and show you how to use some of these tools which can be very handy.
If you’re looking for office mix you can find it at mix.office.com and it’s a simple download and takes like two minutes to install again it’s just a small plug-in to PowerPoint itself. If you’re looking for an alternative though if you don’t want to record just PowerPoint lectures here at faculty development we often use what’s known as Jing, it is a lightweight free photo and screen capture tool so once you’ve installed it you’ll see this cute little sunburst thing here at the top when you mouse over it you get options to take a screenshot or to record your desktop some people use Jing instead of office mix because it’s available for both Mac and PC, once you start recording video you can record any part of your screen so here I am I actually cut a small tutorial on using audacity at one point so I’ve booted up audacity and I began running through how to use some of the different features, once you’re done you can also upload it to the web or save a copy down then you can use that flash file video output placing your course send it to someone the link to it in an email that kind of thing.
Again it’s just screen capturing but again you could record over your slides using it this way pretty simple and easy for the free version you can record up to five minutes so it does have to be tight and snappy. Zoey says jings, used it in the past forgot about it loved it very easy to use yes glad you got you really liked that. It is free for output in flash video format only so again it’s freemium you can upgrade for more advanced features if you want to save it in different file formats or you want to be able to record screen tutorials longer than five minutes you could pay for those features otherwise for most purposes you know five minutes is usually kind of a sweet spot for video anyway people begin to tune out when it’s longer than five to ten minutes so it’s always good to kind of keep things shorter, you can take a longer lecture and cut it up into chunked 5 min sections perhaps.
One thing to note is that there is no caption feature so once you’ve output it you’ll probably want to add your transcript as well again good for people with different kinds of impairments and if you want to keep everything private if you’ve uploaded it to the web you can upload it to screencast.com up there people can search them if you make them public otherwise you can keep them private and people could only access them with the link. We use them here at faculty development all the time just to show how to do something within blackboard they’re very good for just demonstrating new concepts, tools, software that kind of thing, if you’re talking about using a piece of software in your own course maybe you cut a quick Jing video on how to use that for all of your students especially if they’re online students for an online class and you they can’t come to class and have you show it to them this is a really good way to demonstrate that. Alternatives as Jackie mentioned yes screencast-o-matic is an excellent alternative again just kind of recording short video tutorials online this one though does let you publish to a variety of different formats so depending on your needs this may be another good one to look into and Jing is available at techsmith.com/Jing.
TechSmith also makes a number of other advanced multimedia production tools, if you’re looking for screencasting on-the-go though we mentioned Jing for desktop screencasting where you record your screen you can also do the same thing or at least a similar thing with lensoo, this is an app that lets you add a number of different slides whether it’s ones that you create from scratch you take pictures and upload those into it or you add a PDF you can then take those and then record yourself annotating over the top so here’s one example from a chemistry course where they’re balancing two sides of an equation and figuring out if these chemicals are interacting and how, so that’s kind of neat they went through and they talked about these different interactions what’s happening and why that sort of thing, useful for pretty much every class though and if you’re looking to demonstrate something but you’re out and you’re not at you don’t have access to your own computer can fill that niche very well, if you’re familiar with Khan Academy it’s a similar kind of thing you’re recording handwritten narrated tutorials.
Lenzoo is freemium it lets you save up to I believe five videos any more than that and you will have to pay but if you’re just looking to use it to fill a little niche once or twice or you don’t want to keep the tutorials around forever it may be just perfect for your for your purposes you create your you add your photos diagrams PDFs of slides, write or sketch on top of them and then as I mentioned you can upload to the cloud and then get a link and say post it into your class, very easy to use visually demonstrating problem solving, I also knew other people who are interests did for sports program talking about sports plays you could upload a picture of say a line of scrimmage for football and then draw where the different players are going during a specific play or for Bill Goldenberg here composing music maybe you upload a picture of a musical staff and then talk about some component of musical theory or actually sitting down and composing your own original score, very useful very neat.
A few alternatives to these again mobile alternatives Educreations is another one that’s available on both iOS and Android, very similar features to lensoo, showMe is one that’s iOS only, all these companies are competing very very heavily so they pretty much all have the exact same features but feel free to check them out maybe one gels with you a little bit better than the others. Lensoo is available at lensoo create on the App Store’s, once you’ve uploaded any of your videos, so you can find them at Lensoo.com. Comment from my colleague Dan here. Ah! Okay, thanks Dan take care any questions about screencasting or the apps I’ve mentioned so far? All righty, let’s move on to a couple of alternatives presentation tools. Here we’re talking about an alternative to PowerPoint itself known as Prezi now I’m kind of curious show of hands how many people have used Prezi before or at least know about it. Zoey, Janet, John excellent! Okay, a few have and a few haven’t. Cool, Prezi is a nifty one where instead of a standard slide deck you create a number of spaces here as you can see there are these like different boxes on the slide.
In one giant slide or canvas you then decide how your students flow through the presentation so here you can envision moving from communication to content to assessment and even within them moving from the main banner or header into sections of the sub canvas as well. It’s a more interactive flowing, visually engaging presentation style than PowerPoint is where it pops in one slide at a time instead here you’re kind of moving through the canvas so it can be a little bit more interesting and engaging than PowerPoint is in some ways, takes a little while to kind of get used to its metaphor but once you do it’s a really nice way of presenting content especially if you’re talking about visual things themselves. Again it’s kind of doing away with the slide deck metaphor and instead using a canvas that you draw your audience into with this particular one it’s very good in representing hierarchical structures too so we have our main concepts and our sub concepts even those may have sub content associated with them so building this up and take your your audience from top to bottom left to right can give a good sense of the overall logical structure of your presentation instead of the standard PowerPoint content where we may have headers and then on the slides we may have like bulleted lists or things like that.
You create presentations from the web and once you do they do have iPad, iPhone apps available for present if you’d like to present on the go everything is web-based so you will have to use a browser from the desktop computer, but if you do and most people do and it’s a very nifty way of making a different kind of presentation. One thing to note is as well because it’s web-based cloud-based you can collaborate with people very easily on this just as you might with PowerPoint through office 365.
One note of caution though it is good to ask your class or your audience if anyone does have any kind of motion sickness I have known one person before who did who wasn’t able to sit through a Prezi with a lot of different motion so making sure to kind of keep it to a minimum or not having a whole bunch of swooshes back and forth between things, minimizing too much visual movement is a good idea. Prezi is available from Prezi.com and if you do have an iPhone or iPad you want to present from with it present with it on the go you can look for Prezi in the iTunes App Store. If you’re looking for that kind of mobile presentation though one thing to note is that there is the PowerPoint mobile app again available on all mobile platforms and it can be used to present your slides, which is really useful so here’s a screenshot I took from my iPad with just a dummy lecture from Microsoft just to play around with things, here is my main slide this is what all my students would see projected from the projector in the classroom I then also see the next slide and if I had notes available for me I get to review those here so I could have my prompts on these this can be a little bit nicer in some ways than walking around a classroom just with a clicker while the clicker allows you freedom of movement around the classroom now I also get access to all of my notes so I can review those hear from my lecture if I’m using the notes capability within PowerPoint.
So again using a mobile device to create and present is super useful and because it is PowerPoint itself it keeps all of the animations, specialty fonts, graphics, videos or whatnot that you embedded in your PowerPoint slides which you might not get from other mobile presentation apps which can also use PowerPoint slides, again keep slide notes in front of you which is sometimes extremely useful again presenting on-the-go just be able to walk around the class more highly recommend looking at that if you’re if you have a more active class that you want to get up and walk around in it can be very handy.
Other alternatives to this if you use Google Docs heavily you can import, export powerpoints and you can present from them if you have a way of casting from your device to the projector and if you’re a user of the Evernote note-taking app they just added a presentation mode a few months ago so there is a way of making really basic slides and presenting from Evernote too. Again all you need to do is just look for a PowerPoint on the different mobile app stores. All right, so I want to switch switch things up a little bit instead of multimedia and presentation talk a little bit more about academic day to day life, Zotero is a citation index app it allows you to collect all those citations for different projects and then easily export reference lists to word or other document formats, so here we have, zoey gives a little heart emoji I see, someone uses it and loves it yeah Mendeley, Zotero these are all really great apps to look into if you do a lot of heavy research you’ll notice here we were recently working on a research paper ourselves at faculty development and we added our co-authors to it and then we could begin searching JSTOR, Google Scholar or whatever else for different citations around the topic for the research paper so we could build our literature review so here we have an LMS research folder for our group a number of different topics and themes we were looking at and all the different papers that we’d found on the web, there is a browser plugin for Zotero so once you find any of these papers whether it be in one of the main repositories or Google Scholar you click a button at the top of the browser and it extracts all the journal article information so it saves all of that for you and you don’t have to worry about saving it to a document having in the correct format as long as you’ve got Zotero here it strips all of that information out on the web and then you can tell it or using MLA, APA etc and then export all of these citations out to whatever format you want for whichever document you’re using.
Super handy saves a lot of time and it automatically can back everything up for you so you won’t lose any of this if you lose if you instead like lost a document you don’t have to worry about that here. Here’s another screenshot, you’ll notice a citation and timeline tracker so you can see who’s cited what over time which can be really fun and useful as well. So features of it again basically it’s it compiles your references for research papers saves references backs them up to the web for you and allows you to share them with your group collaborators so it’s not just stuck with you or you having to email out versions of files don’t have to worry about any of that stuff you just create your Zotero account it syncs across all your devices and keeps everyone else’s reference list as well. Web-based so as long as you’ve got an access to a browser you can get access to Zotero but there is also a more fully featured desktop app if you would like to use that as well and that is available from zotero.org, again we highly recommend this one alternative to that would be the Mendeley citation tracker I have some people swear by one or the other we’ve just standardize on this one here but all these are excellent options.
Switching things up a little bit again project management if you’ve ever looked for a good way to manage your own projects or an app that you can recommend your students for their own kind of group work or their own projects whether personal or group stuff highly recommend Trello we’ve been using this one here at faculty development for the past couple of years and we like that because it has a number of different features that work well with the way that we think of working on projects, here’s just one instance where we created a team this is just case out on the web that I found they want to take a screenshot of some of our own stuff but here’s just one case you can look at we created our team so there’s this Travie ducks team here in this example and then for this team we have any number of boards whether it’s one board to track multiple projects or one project per board on this board it’s much like a bulletin board where we can break things down into different kinds of tasks and then within those have the very discrete tasks themselves assigned to people with checklists with attached files, there can even be due dates on these kinds of things as you’ll notice here on the side it’s very useful for kind of group work or even just kind of keeping track of your own project workflow highly recommended again free front of software so it’s very nifty because it’s well web-based all of it is saved for you and there are a ton of different apps available again from the web from your mobile device so pretty much wherever you are you can have access to all of your project management stuff, you can check off things as you’re going and as we saw you can go anywhere from very simple project tracking to much more complex ones as that previous example showed us where we had multiple team collaborators assigning different people of pieces of the project that kind of thing, due dates, calendar support is a big one as well if you add due dates to things there is in a calendar built into Trello, but you can also export the calendar to be able to use those calendar events those due dates on your mobile device or say an Outlook here at NIU keep track of things from pretty much any calendar app that you have is very very useful.
I’ve used this for my own personal research before especially when I did some editing for a journal just keep track of all the different papers that were coming in and what stage the progress they are at but I do highly recommend it looking into it and recommending it to your students as well because it may help them keep on top of different pieces that they have their own group work it’s very easy to get up and running with, add people too, all you need is an email to add someone else to it and share things with and then you can easily assign different tasks to people and stay on top of all your different pieces.
That’s available at Trello.com and the mobile apps are available in the different app stores just by searching Trello, any questions about that. Alright, if no questions hopefully everyone feels interested and thinks it’s useful. An alternative to different kind of group collaboration here is RABBIT, RABB.IT. If any one is familiar with Skype, this is a lot like Skype unlike Skype however it’s based around sharing different media on the web or just whole websites, very useful if you’ve ever had a group project where you want to do some kind of brainstorm here I’ve booted up a YouTube video where I’m talking about flipped classroom, me and my collaborators could be sharing the space and talking about different aspects or avenues for our research, browsing the web together talking about how we may want to design our class anything like that so like Skype for business that we have access to at NIU, you could use rabbit just to kind of collaborate using video chat features but it’s also very useful to keep everyone on the same page so here much like with blackboard collaborate ultra where I’m sharing my PowerPoint slides we’re all in this same space and we’re able to share different resources that we’re finding out on the web.
So you can use video, audio, text chat just as we’re doing here today and then share any kind of web content that you might find I’ve used this one for watch parties for things like the presidential debates get a few of my colleagues together and analyze things as they’re happening in real time, it’s very handy because it does stream the same video content to everyone at the exact same time unlike Blackboard Collaborate where you can’t always watch stuff in the moment together rabbit will do that perfectly. Up to 15 people on video at a time so it is smaller classes that this would be useful for or again kind of group collaboration or collaboration with a partner but sharing these kinds of things easy to get up and running you don’t have to have a Skype account or you don’t have to be affiliated with NIU if you were thinking about using a Skype for business.
Alternatives to this you may be familiar with Google Hangouts and of course as we’re using today Blackboard Collaborate ultra and that’s available again at RABBIT, RABB.IT out on the web. Last but not least want to talk about a few collaborative technologies one of them is telegram, so everyone has access to text messaging these days but sometimes people don’t want to share their phone numbers with everyone else in the class but you still want to be able to talk with everyone in real time a good app that we’ve used for a number of years is telegram it’s just a simple text communication piece of software you can have group chats so here we can see this is the Deathstar group chat and apparently they’re discussing building of the Deathstar in this particular instance but I can also have a private chat with anyone else on the service if I know their phone number or their email address or however they want to connect with me, very easy, simple, intuitive and you can also share pictures, video or even files with people so this is a good alternative for students who are looking at being able to collaborate with one another may not be comfortable as sharing phone numbers with everyone else but do want to be able to have real-time communications and very securely.
Telegram has some of the best security for any of these kind of texting apps out there. Again very good for group collaboration, it is anywhere anytime so if you’re thinking about using it for your own class I would definitely recommend setting a some kind of policy around it, there are features to tell it not to communicate with you after a certain time of day or before a certain time of the day too which is very handy it’s kind of like a do not disturb mode, if you’re thinking about using it for yourself other alternatives I know become very popular recently here on campus among students is Group.Me, but a classic one would be whatsapp, if you’re looking for something more full-featured for team communication, slack is available that’s also free and there it has a lot of plugins for different services like Trello if you’re looking at being able to not only talk with people but create and assign tasks within a communication app as well which can be very interesting and handy or of course Skype for business here on campus. That’s available at telegram org from the web or telegram in any App Store.
Remind.com is another really good one yes it used to be known as remind101, it’s an excellent idea if you’re looking at getting people together in the same space or just for like mass communications with your students and again it’s somewhat private in that you don’t have to give them your phone number. Excellent choice, okay if people are looking at doing polling from within their class one option you may want to look into is poll everywhere it does really really simple polling only up to about 40 people are so but if you have a large class maybe you just want to say take the temperature of the room or get an idea about what your students are understanding or misunderstanding within that, super easy you just create your poles and then you give your respondents the URL to go to or they can even text their answers into the service so people have an old feature phone they can still communicate with the class very nice way of just again kind of taking a read on your class keeping people engaged that kind of thing so here’s just one very simple point where I asked how are you feeling about the basics anywhere from I’m confused to hurry up to the hard stuff and most people had texted in or chosen option D here loud and clears they got it but there are some people who are lagging behind about 20% of the class so I may want to slow down a little bit to allow them to catch up a little bit more.
It allows you to create simple polls on the fly in your class you don’t have to pre create them in your PowerPoint slides for instance so it’s very useful and students get to respond from as from anywhere as long as they have either an internet or a phone connection, again it is available only up to 40 people so if you do want more than that to respond you’ll have to pay for the service but as long as you’re just looking for this kind of quick comprehension check from your class or just keep your students attention this is an excellent way of just pulling your class very quickly and simply, that’s available at polleverywhere.com and there are those mobile apps available in the App Store.
A little bit more complex of a polling app, round out today’s list of apps is TRICIDER, this is a really fascinating poll app you, don’t just ask a question, you ask a question and you allow your students to respond with answers they think may be correct or reflect on the question and ultimately vote on which one they think is the top answer.
They can if they want even post their own discussions and argue about which answers are the best so here they’re listing pros, pros or cons what they think of the pros and cons for each of the different answers for the question you posed and then they can begin discussing them within themselves kind of like the threaded discussion boards within blackboard, so this is an excellent tool you might consider this as an alternative if you’re looking for some kind of reflective, discursive activity and you ultimately want your class to come to some kind of consensus or maybe use this as a jumping off point for reflective papers later on, it’s a really neat little web app here. You could too, if you wanted as well pose some kind of open-ended question and list responses that you anticipate your students may have and then let them discuss it so it’s very useful in a number of different ways so again you you pose your question, you collect ideas your students and their arguments and discuss amongst themselves and ultimately vote on which they think is the most logical best correct answer anything like that, incredibly interesting as an app I have not used this one yet but we came across it and we thought that this could be very very powerful in classes for different kinds of activities, you can use it for simple polling of course or if you want recommend it to your students if they’re looking for some way of like resolving disputes or doing some kind of group analysis on some topic and there is a feature to time the discussion as well so if you want to stop it on a specific day and time maybe you have your students read the material on Monday and Tuesday reflect and debate amongst themselves on Wednesday and Thursday and stop at Thursday evening and then come back as a class to have some kind of debate on Friday you could go through this activity and have some kind of discussion online where you might otherwise have it in class if you’re transitioning from a face-to-face to online class and that’s just available at TRICIDER.COM.
All right so I know we are at our time right now but I was curious um from today’s, what have you seen one of your favorites been, do you think you’ll use any of these. Websites for poll everywhere, so thats just polleverywhere.com or at least I hope it is. I’ll verify this just to make sure, yes, good, excellent. Yeah, so what are everyone else’s favorites everyone should have microphone ask access if you want to sign in. Cynthia says officemix ah interesting yeah and we’d be happy to follow up if you have any questions on it.
I think we may be giving a workshop on that later. Bill says rabbit sounds useful so he likes officemix too. Excellent and Jackie you’re very welcome for sharing software. Yes we love polling the open Internet and seeing what’s out there and trying to figure out what may be useful for people here on campus. Alright anyone has questions about anything I introduced today? Otherwise thank you again for joining us, always feel free to follow up with us on any of these tools here again we can’t be full tech support for all of them for all the little questions but we’d have to be happy to play around with them with you and answer kind of the basics and get a little bit more feel or intuitiveness with them and I hope to see you next time, we have a number of different workshops coming up you can always check for new ones at facdev.niu.edu/fsprograms, we will be talking about breakout rooms in Blackboard collaborate tomorrow we’ll also be looking at play in classrooms the following day and next week we’ll be having a much more deep dive into zotero’s reference management so if you’re interested in that haven’t yet seen it in like a little tutorial feel free to come to that.
Otherwise we will be sending out a survey for everyone so please let us know what you thought of today’s workshop that always helps us figure out what to offer in the future. .
0 Comments