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Technology Tuesdays: Lecture Capture From The iPad


On the 25th July, 2013, I gave a one-hour session on "iPad Lecture Capture" as part of the monthly Technology Tuesdays. Above is an abbreviated video that shares some of the essentials of the presentation, outlining five strategies to capture and share lecture material on and with the Apple iPad.

Presentation Resources


Sansa Clip
Guerilla Lecture Capture

Five Methods of iPad Lecture Capture


1: Jailbreak and Display Recorder
2: Screencasting Apps
3: Epiphan VGA2USB converter and Camtasia/ScreenFlow
4: AirPlay Approach
5: AVerMedia - C875 LGP

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2013 The Kellstadt Marketing Center Distinguished Professional Educator Award For Excellence in Teaching

The Kellstadt Marketing Center Distinguished Professional Educator Award For Excellence in Teaching

On Friday, Jan Gollins and I were presented with the 2013 Kellstadt Marketing Center Distinguished Professional Educator Awards For Excellence in Teaching. I love teaching for the Kellstadt Marketing Center, so the award means a great deal to me. I have learnt much from watching how others at DePaul teach, and if i do something well it is because I have had so many great people demonstrate what works well in the classroom. Congratulation Jan!

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IBM Academic Initiative

I was lucky enough to participate in the IBM Academic Initiative’s Teach the Teacher (T3) Training last week. The IBM Academic Initiative is free for DePaul faculty to join, and opens up a wealth of resources to use including software. I highly recommend this to all.

More information here.
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LaunchPlan

LaunchPlan

I had a quick look at LaunchPlan this Monday. The CEO and co-founder (Ray Di Nizo) was good enough to provide an overview of the functionality and purpose. The site operates as a collaborative environment in which students can work together to create a comprehensive business plan. The process is templated, with milestones and checklists. Much of this could be accomplished with tools like GoogleDocs, but there are some robust financial modeling functions that help students avoid tactical missteps in creating the plan.

LaunchPlan does not currently integrate with D2L, and I did not see an easy way to export grade information. With the right instructor this could be a powerful teaching tool – the critical element would be demonstrating to the students how LaunchPlan could facilitate collaboration. However, without that element students are likely to gravitate towards tools that they are currently comfortable with.

Cost is $60 per student.

Faculty interested in exploring can contact LaunchPlan for review access.

The company seemed to be very responsive to suggestions for improvement.

Update


Roger Lall suggested looking at Mplans and Bplans. The sites contain sample business plans that can be of value to faculty and students.

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Online Classrooms (Blackboard Collaborate)

Blackboard Collaborate

Josh Lund and his colleagues in FITS have some useful advice for those of you using Online Classrooms (Blackboard Collaborate) in Desire2Learn:

When you are running an Online Classrooms session, there is a command to copy breakout whiteboards to the main room. This will bring them in as separate areas under the pull-down box that usually says "public room" in the upper righthand corner of your screen.

For example, you might create three rooms, and the participants each drew on the whiteboard. When copied them back in, they showed up in the menu as Room 1-1, Room 2-1 and Room 3-1. This also means that if they had created additional pages in the whiteboard, they would have been copied in as 2-2, 2-3, etc.

It may be that you have to copy the stuff back in before you close the rooms and bring participants back, so here's the order FITS suggests:

  1. When participants are ready to return, copy the breakout whiteboards to the main room.
  2. Then bring back the participants to the main room.
  3. Finally, close the empty breakout rooms. You should have access to all the whiteboards now.

Josh Lund and his colleagues had an interesting experience trying to get recording files from Online Rooms, as they had assumed that it would generate a downloadable, playable video file like Wimba does. This is not the case, however. The upside is that the archives can be viewed online through a native player by anyone who has access to the room, so they can't be downloaded, which might be good for students viewing group presentations, etc.

There is software available to download that will let you generate a video file and transcripts of text chat, etc. if you do need to. It's available for download free
here:

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New Pen Tool - Ideal for effectively communicating key concepts

FITS has recently purchased a Wacom Cintiq tablet. The Wacom is essentially a high resolution monitor with pen input. The model that FITS has purchased is connected to an Apple Mac running Screenflow (with professional microphones, webcam, and second monitor). We use it to create lecture videos for online and hybrid classes.

The setup allows us to create exemplary screencasts, in which faculty can annotate and draw on top of anything displayed on the computer screen. Possible examples would be:

  • Showing how an equation could be solved / Time Value of money / T-accounts, etc.
  • Annotating an Excel spreadsheet
  • Annotating a PowerPoint presentation
  • Drawing lines of connection on top of a website, video, architectural plan, etc.
  • Sketching the construction of a graph
  • Annotating economic forecasts
  • Constructing a project plan

I talk more about the table here.

Josh Lund (of DePaul FITS) and I have been experimenting with the Wacom Cintiq tablet. Three programs were used to present and annotate the material (PowerPoint, Open-Sankoré, and OmniDazzle. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages. ScreenFlow was used to record each of the videos.




PowerPoint is a familiar tool to most faculty. The annotation option within Powerpoint is fairly basic (red felt tip pen or ballpoint pen) but it works. PowerPoint allows for dynamic transitions and animations. The annotation option needs to be activated on a slide-by-slide basis, but this can be activated by one of the buttons on the tablet.



Open-Sankoré is a free tool. It is not quite as stable as PowerPoint (it crashes occasionally), but has a richer set of annotation tools. The animations and transition that might be used in PowerPoint presentation are lost, and individual slides are imported as a folder of images. However, Open-Sankoré has a rich set of annotation tools (pen, highlighter, line, zoom, etc.) with the option to change pen color and nib thickness. In most cases this would be the best tool for faculty to use. The ScreenFlow recording can be cropped to remove the tool interface from the exported recording.



OmniDazzle is another free tool that can be utilized in annotated videos. The Scribble mode allows faculty to draw on top of any element displayed on the computer screen.
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