Google Calendar's new "Appointment Slots" feature

Users of the Google Calendar functionality that's built into 1HOPE may want to explore the new "Appointment Slots" feature that was introduced today. It could be particularly well-suited to scheduling student advising sessions, potentially replacing the sign-up sheet on your office door.  Click here for more details.

Web2Pdf

This page allows you to enter any web address and turn that webpage into a pdf. From what I understand, if there are links on the webpage, they remain active when the page is turned into a PDF (clicking on the link will actually open the webpage).

http://www.web2pdfconvert.com/

Enjoy -
Leigh

Apps In Education

I didn't have time to look at all of them, but this blog seems to be a good read for anyone trying to find apps for teaching with the ipad. Enjoy!

http://appsineducation.blogspot.com/

Leigh

Flipsnack

Flipsnack (http://www.flipsnack.com) is an online flipping book software that allows you to convert PDF documents into Flash page flip digital publications. Once created you can embed the book, download them, or share them on social networking sites.

Check it out -
Leigh Sears
Kinesiology

Text mark-up faculty consultation report

Faculty met over lunch on Thursday, April 7 to explore how technology might assist us with that time-honored task of grading student written work. We were looking for ways that faculty can comment on student writing, for students to annotate texts, and for all of us to make the work-flow of collecting, marking up, and returning work more efficient and ecologically responsible. The session was lively and lots of experiences were shared, including the following.

• Lee Forester (DMCL) demonstrated how he uses the free Revisions tool from MSU in his German class to comment on student writing assignments (http://clear.msu.edu/revisions/)
• Barry Bandstra (Religion) demonstrated how his students annotate biblical texts in class using their laptops. The pdf is distributed as a Moodle resource which the student downloads. After annotation, the student uploads the pdf using the "Upload a single file" within the Assignment activity. Mac annotation is done with the free Preview application, which comes loaded with the Mac OS. PC annotation is done with the free PDF-XChange Viewer program (http://www.docu-track.com)
• Other possible ways to annotate text: Track Changes in MS Word and Google docs.

Rumor has it that the iPad might be useful for text annotation, but nobody in attendance brought one to demo. Thanks to Tom Ludwig, here is a link to a short list of useful iPad apps -- http://chronicle.com/article/The-iPad-for-Professors-/126885/ including something called iAnnotate. Some other apps came up in the discussion, though not related to text mark-up:

• Prezi (http://prezi.com) for engaging presentations, free, going way beyond powerpoint
• Jing (http://www.techsmith.com/jing/) for short instructional videos
• iShowU (http://www.shinywhitebox.com/ishowuhd/main.html) for screen capture movies

This was the last of three ACAT sponsored faculty consultations on emerging technologies for the Spring 2011 semester. If you have a topic you would like to see discussed in a future faculty consultation, send a note to bandstra@hope.edu.

Allow Students to Send Text Messages And Use Email to Reply

I think we all want to enable student communication with professors.  We want to enable as much communication as possible.  For example, I'd like to allow students to send me text messages, since that's the easiest way they know to communicate (currently).

However, there are a couple of problems. (1) I really don't want to give students my cell phone number. (2) I hate replying because I hate typing text messages on that little keyboard on my phone.  (3) I really don't want my cell phone to bug me all the time.

The solution is Google Voice.  Google Voice is a free service from Google that gives you a phone number and allows you to direct calls you get to that number to any other phone number you have.  People use this to track them during a day.  By allowing Google Voice to (even automatically) switch forwarding phone numbers, you can give out your Google Voice number and get calls at your office, on your cell phone, or at home -- or all at the same time!

While this forwarding functionality might be of limited use for you (it's not very useful for me), there are several other very useful functions Google Voice provides.  One is that text messages to your Google Voice number can go to the email address you register with the service.  And replying through email sends a text message back to the original sender.  All the problems above are solved: I tell students to text my Google Voice number but I also tell them it goes to my email.  And I can use a nice big computer keyboard to reply.

So go to http://www.google.com/voice and apply for a phone number.  You will need to set up a Google Account if you have not already (I used my 1Hope email address).   Last time I checked, all the local numbers were gone, but text messages can go to any number.  So pick a phone number in your favorite area code.

Text markup faculty consultation and free lunch Thursday April 7, 2011

Faculty/admin and staff are invited to an ACAT sponsored faculty consultation, the third and last one of the semester, on the topic of text markup. This will be a lunch with simultaneous discussion on Thursday, April 7 from noon to 1PM. Who said faculty can't multitask--eating and talking at the same time? Please go through the Phelps cafeteria line and then join the group in the Barber Room adjoining the cafeteria. The gathering will discuss ways to leverage technology to collect student written work, annotate it, and get it back into students' hands electronically. This will include a demonstration of tablet readers and pdf markup tools, and talk of efficient workflow to make our professional lives just a bit easier.

*Please note that this event replaces and supersedes the previously announced April 5 consultation, whose date had to be changed because it conflicted with the Religion Department's Danforth lecture event.

Report of the March 8 e-books faculty consultation

A group of about 15 faculty and staff met in the Granberg Room on Tuesday, March 8 to discuss e-books and e-textbooks. Kelly Jacobsma, director of the Van Wylen library, apprised us of the variety of electronic book resources the library already licenses (see below). We discussed the variety of existing options for readers and file formats, talked about reading textbooks on a screen, annotation issues, and student reception of e-textbooks. We also mused about the role (and responsibility?) of faculty in promoting the use of online as opposed to print resources for ecological and stewardship reasons.

In this same vein, The March 15, 2011 New York Times has a news item As Library E-Books Live Long, Publisher Sets Expiration Date about HarperCollins unilaterally changing its library licensing terms to restrict access to its e-book catalog, because they are becoming too popular. This does not bode well.

Kelly's handout --

Library E-books

There are currently 32,000 e-books in the library catalog
We purchase e-books from a variety of vendors all of which use a different platform for reading the e-book:
• Netlibrary (our earliest collection - currently investigating new platform and portability)
• ACLS Humanities E-book Project
• Ebrary (investigating purchase on demand)
• Springer (almost 19,000 are Springer titles - portable e-book format via pdf download)
• Credo - primarily reference books
• Oxford Reference Online
• Gale Reference Books

Portable E-book formats In the consumer market

• Kindle (Amazon)
• Nook (Barnes & Noble)
• Google Books
• iBooks (Apple)
• BlueFire Reader (supports Adobe DRM standard and allows you to purchase books from a variety of online book stores, including international bookstores for foreign language materials)

E-readers and E-books Collection Guide from University of Michigan - Dearborn
http://libguides.umd.umich.edu/content.php?pid-155250&sid-1315772
Top Ten Reviews, http://ebook-reader-review.toptenreviews.com

E-Textbooks

• Inkling (textbooks for the iPad)
• CourseSmart (A substantial list of textbooks from a variety of publishers including McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Routledge, Wiley, Elsevier, Sage, Taylor & Francis, FA Davis, Jones & Bartlett, Sinauer and Wolters Kluwer etc, Partners with bookstores, Has an iPad app, E-textbooks generally cost 50% of print version.
• Nookstudy (only available on Mac and PC - not portable devices)
• CafeScribe (Follet) (features note sharing among students)
• Cengage Brain (allows purchase of individual chapters or entire textbook)

GLCA.IT.2011 at Hope College March 16-18, 2011

Hope College CIT is hosting the annual Great Lakes Colleges Association instructional technology conference March 16-18, 2011. Detailed information is available at the conference web site. This conference is entitled "Make A Connection & Find Your Niche."

2011 ACAT Instructional Technology Innovation Fund recipients and their projects

Mark Husbands (Religion) Digital Note Taking & Lecture Capture Project
with “Pear Note” -- a license for software to facilitate in-class student notetaking. Check out a description of the proposed project here.
Tom Ludwig (Psychology) Tools for Efficient Delivery of Online Instruction -- hardware to facilitate the development of instructional modules. Instructors planning blended courses or adding online content to standard classroom courses need efficient ways to develop online instructional materials and to deliver them to students in formats that can be viewed on laptop computers and on mobile devices such as smartphones. Although the technology is already available to deliver simple content tutorials through narrated PowerPoint/Keynote presentations or QuickTime movies, it's not easy to make this type of content interactive in the sense of assessing student learning within the tutorials themselves. This project will produce a set of software tools that Hope faculty could use to create interactive instructional tutorials with embedded quizzes. These tutorials could contain text paragraphs, photos, graphs, animations, and video clips. Once the faculty member had assembled the media elements for a tutorial, the tutorial could be created in a text editor, using simple "mark-up" tags to specify the content to be displayed on each tutorial page.The software tools would read the text file and generate an interactive tutorial that could be displayed within the Flash player on laptop computers and some smart phones, or be displayed using HTML5 technologies on iPhones and iPads.
Becky Schmidt (Kinesiology) Tablet Technology in Health Dynamics -- tablet devices to facilitate faculty-student contact in a blended version of Kinesiology 140. In this new model, the bulk of student personal contact will take place during physical activity periods. I and my two TAs will circulate around the cardio room, the weight room, and the track area of the Dow Center giving encouragement and advice, and we will initiate discussion around issues arising out of the online materials. As we maintain contact with students during their activities, we will need to be able to access their records in order to monitor and discuss their progress, and keep a record of personal contact, including notes and observations. In order to do this we will need fast, efficient, and ready access to their data. Handheld tablet devices connected to Moodle via the campus wi-fi network may accomplish this.
Leigh Sears (Kinesiology) Attendance System for Health Dynamics -- a card swipe system for health dynamics class attendance. With multiple sections of health dynamics each semester, each containing roughly 60 students - much time is wasted in the sign in and sign out process. There is limited time to work out and some of this time is wasted standing in line to sign into class and time has to be set aside at the end to check everyone out. Class time could be more effective if the students simply had to swipe a card on their way into the workout facility. Also - this would ensure that students are not signing in or out for each other.

Educause Learning Initiative "Seeking Evidence of Impact" April 13-14, 2011

Hope College has registered for the "Seeking Evidence of Impact" Educause event. You are invited to join a Hope College faculty/admin team that plans to attend this webinar event; if you are interested, please contact bandstra@hope.edu. The following information was gleaned from the ELI website.

The 2011 ELI (Educause Learning Initiative) Online Spring Focus Session is entitled "Seeking Evidence of Impact." It will be held online April 13-14. ELI will engage the teaching and learning community in exploring initial questions around seeking evidence: do our innovations accomplish our desired outcomes, how do we define "impact," and how do we measure it? Through plenary sessions and various institutional case studies, we will attempt to answer these questions.

As the pace of technology change continues unabated, institutions are faced with numerous decisions and choices to support teaching and learning. With many options and constrained budgets, faculty and administrators must make careful decisions about what practices to adopt and about where to invest their time, effort, and financial resources. As critical as these decisions are, the information available about the impact of these innovations is often scarce, scattered, or both.

The Liberal Arts Online audio conference March 17 at 2PM, LH113

The Association of American Colleges and Universities (www.aacu.org) in cooperation with Inside Higher Ed (www.insidehighered.com) is organizing an audio conference on the topic "The Liberal Arts Online." Hope College has registered to join the one hour online conference. Faculty and staff are invited. We will together tune in to the live conference Thursday, March 17 beginning at 2:00 PM in Lubbers 113 (the first floor conference room near the elevator). A special invitation is extended to summer online course faculty, faculty interested in blended learning, and anyone else who is interested in exploring the use of digital courses in higher education. Please rsvp bandstra@hope.edu if you plan to attend: I need to get a gauge of interest in case we need to secure a larger room.

Here is the description of the event from the aacu.org website.

Distance education and hybrid courses continue to attract more and more students, and many educators fear that a focus on the practical and professional in these offerings excludes the liberal arts. In fact, some educators and colleges are devoting considerable attention to applying the latest technology to expand liberal arts offerings.

On Thursday, March 17, at 2 p.m. Eastern, Inside Higher Ed presents, “The Liberal Arts Online,” an audio conference featuring Rebecca Davis of the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education. The presentation will cover the best existing models for offering such courses online, the latest technology, a guide to developing an institutional strategy for launching programs, how to gain faculty support, and how to preserve the style of liberal arts instruction in a new format.

A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change

EDUCAUSE is offering a free live web session Monday, March 21 at 1:00PM ET with John Seely Brown, entitled "A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change." Registration is required in order to subscribe to the live feed. You can register using this link.

John Seely Brown is a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California and co-chair of the Deloitte Center for the Edge. For years Brown has been a leading analyst and writer on the subjects of invention, innovation, technology and change. He is the author of many books, including The Social Life of Information (2000), Storytelling in Organizations: Why Storytelling is Transforming 21st Century Organizations and Management (2004), and most recently A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change (2011), which, obviously, will be at the core of this presentation.

His book The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion (2010) is available in a Kindle edition. Kindle has a fascinating service that aggregates the book's passages that Kindle readers of the book have highlighted, and anyone can view these snippets. Check out highlights of the book here and a video summary here.