DS106 Radio (Not Really) Live Show
Welcome to another episode of Pimp My Class. Click the link to listen. Tonight’s show will take you back to old school storytelling. We got a letter from Anna in Cave Creek who wanted to know if there were simple audio tools to use in the classroom for storytelling. Why yes, Anna, let’s Pimp Your Class with some easy to use audio tools.
Assignment Description: Come up with an hour-long, themed show for #ds106 Radio that you both conceptualize and produce, then deliver on-the-air live over. It can be an ongoing show, or a one-time affair.
So I’m taking a stab at radio show hosting. Someone be sure to tell me to keep my day job. I created a radio bumper, 3 mini commercials all rolled into a 5 minute episode of a show I created called Pimp My Class. I recorded in Audacity and added a few sound effects and StackTraxx music which I have a license for.
Links for tonight’s show:
Transcript:
You are listening to ds106 radio with soul4real broadcasting live from Phoenix, Arizona.
Welcome to another episode of Pimp My Class. Tonight’s show will take you back to old school storytelling. We got a letter from Anna in Cave Creek who wanted to know if there were simple audio tools to use in the classroom for storytelling. Why yes, Anna, let’s Pimp Your Class with some easy to use audio tools, but first…
Old school storytelling is all about the story and the storyteller. A good story was conveyed through words, and often by improvisation or embellishment.(Much like I’m doing now) Stories have been shared in every culture as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation and in order to instill moral values. The same is true today, but storytelling has certainly changed. Today’s storytellers have so many other tools other than the spoken word or movement of the body to convey the story. Today we have endless types of media, including a ton of Web 2.0 tools that can create everything from a still photo to mashups of video to help us tell a story. It can all be quite over stimulating. However, there are many purists still out there that believe storytelling should be only about the narrative. Just sit down. Unplug. Listen. Just like in the old days when we would all gather around the radio to listen to an episode of the Lone Ranger. SCRRRRRR! Okay, okay. Yeah, I wasn’t alive in the 1930’s, and I’m not buying this purists crap either. Gimme a good old fashioned Web 2.0 created story any day. In fact, let’s get right down to my top 3 super techie story telling audio tools.
First is AudioBoo. There’s nothing better than telling a story around a picture, but who has time to take a picture, go home, transfer it to your computer, pretty it up, and then upload it to the web? Then you’re only half way done. You still have to record the story. Back up there a sec. Snap a picture with your fancy smart phone, open up your AudioBoo app, record your story about the picture you just took, attach the photo and send the whole thing to AudioBoo with the push of a button. AudioBoo then posts your story for the whole world to see and hear just like magic. Truly awesome sauce, don’t you think?
Okay, number two on my list is iPadio. Again, who has time for old technology. That would be desktop computers and uploading photos and stories to the web, in case you forgot. iPadio is another tool that lets you use your mobile phone to create audio. iPadio gives you a toll free number to call, so just dial the number and start telling your story. When you’re finished, hang up and your show is live on the web. In fact, if you wanted to actually be live, you can do a live storytelling broadcast. Totally rad, right?
Finally there is AudioPal for those time when you are stuck in a boring textbased discussion forum reading endless boring diatribes about whatever the teacher has assigned. Let’s assume you are not the teacher. That would be bad. But anyway, why not bust out in story right in the middle of that boring discussion with AudioPal. AudioPal lets you record audio directly to the web browser using a microphone or your telephone. And if you’re truly lazy, you can use text to speech. Any way you choose you get your story recorded, and AudioPal will email you the embed code to your story. You can then embed your story right into the discussion, so when all the other bored students get to your post, they get a surprise story to brighten their day, and all is right in the world once again. Okay, well, maybe not, but anyway, Anna you can pimp your class by introducing any of these storytelling methods into your class. I hope that helps and good luck to you.
Okay, that’s it’s for tonight’s episode of Pimp My Class. If you would like to get some tips on how to pimp your class, send your email to dr.coop at yahoo.com. Until then, this is soul4real signing off. Have a great evening.
Random Assignment for DS106 – Playlist Story
As I was scanning through the DS106 RSS feed reading posts and listening to lots of content, I came across an assignment that had to do with writing a story using your music playlist. I couldn’t find the “official” assignment anywhere on the ds106.us website. I’m still trying to figure it all out. Anyway, this assignment was a bit less academic than the one I was currently working on (reading and reflecting), so I thought I’d give it a whirl. It looks like someone named Colleen created her own assignment. The jist of it is:
Using Windows Media Player*, construct a playlist of songs (using song titles only) that can go together to form a sentence, a poem, a new song, etc. When you are done, print your screen, paste it in paint and upload it to your blog, flickr, etc., tagging it.
By passing the Windows Media Player for iTunes (does anyone use WMP anymore?), I got started making my story. Interestingly enough my story ended up being quite a depressing love story. I recall someone else making a similar comment on his on music playlist story. I guess writing poetry is easier if there is a sad story in it.
Assignment #4: Dailyshoot Redux
This is an easy one. I started doing Dailyshoot over a year ago but grew bored when the assignments seemed to repeat. As a result of not participating, my photo production dwindled to almost nothing. Every time I wanted to take a picture of something I had to go searching for my camera. Before I would always have one with me. So I’m enjoying getting back into photography mode. I’m going to try to not be so obsessive about this time though. 🙂
Some other cool places to participate in daily shoots are on Flickr 365 Project and 365project. There are lots of great photographers out there, and participating is a great way to practice your own skills. Below is a slideshow of my 199 Dailyshoot photos on flickr.
Experimenting with WordPress Plugin to Stalk My Students
I’ve been blogging for years, and I have well over 10 blogs on WordPress.com, self hosted WordPress and Blogger. No, I do not try to update them all, just as I would not try to wear all my clothes on the same day. They are there for when the mood strikes me to post about xyz; I go to the blog that applies and post. But recently I began teaching my online courses out of WordPress blogs. I started with WordPress MU (multi-user), which was pretty close to a nitemare, but recently when WordPress updated to 3.0 the networking and multi-user features were built. Well, sort of. There’s one little step that needs to be done to activate it, but that was a lot easier to do than setting up WordPress MU.
Setting this all up as my course management system to replace Blackboard required a lot of experimenting. In fact, in this second semester of using it for my online classes, I’m still experimenting. For instance, with my ENG101 course last fall I installed BuddyPress to add more networking features, but in my ENG102 and ENH295 courses I did not.
BuddyPress: Social networking in a box. Build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community all based on the power and flexibility of WordPress.
I decided I liked the added social networking features of BuddyPress, but I wasn’t comfortable with using it or the look of it just yet, so I put that on hold. Instead I’ve been experimenting with some other plugins to add similar features.
One of my favorite plugins is Who’s Online. I have 72 students in 3 sections of ENG102, and it helps to know who has logged in recently. With this plugin I can add a widget to the sidebar that displays all 72 students’ pictures, names and last logged in status. Or if they are currently online, it will display that. I love looking at all the avatar photos of my students, and it’s easy to take “online roll call” with this feature. What would really be cool is if I could click on the photo or name and be taken to a profile page to read more about each one. Oh wait, that’s what BuddyPress does. Ah, I’m not ready for that just yet. Maybe next semester.
So I’m not really stalking my students. That was a pretty good attention getter though. Don’t you think? If you’d like to see a pretty good WordPress site running BuddyPress, you should check out @Teach42’s Fit42 Challenge. Not only is he running BuddyPress, but he also installed the Achievements plugins that allows him to award badges to users for completing various tasks. It’s really cool. I’ll save more on that for a later post.
Coop Here: Going Old School
The first assignment is to do a short introduction and tell a story about something that happened to you recently. So I made a video in iMovie, as I was trying to learn how to do green screen in iMovie ’09. I wanted to be able to teach a colleague how to do green screen movies for her class and she only has a Mac. I’ve never done it in iMovie, as I use Pinnacle Studio 12 on a PC and not my Mac for movie editing. I was not successful, as you will see, but I have a story none the less. #ds106
Not Your Grandmother’s Storytelling
Okay, I’m jumping in the water. Giving this open course thing a test. I thought: storytelling, hmmm…, I can handle that. But after having a quick look at this storytelling, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. What the heck are these people talking about? What happened to throwing some pics together in iMovie and laying down some narration. That’s the storytelling I know. But crowdsourcing, mashups, cyberinfrastructure, fan fiction? WTH? Okay, I can handle this. Calm down.
I’m still not clear what I’m suppose to be doing. The Reverend preaches: “Now let’s create some art, damn it!” Okay, okay, I’m going. I’ll figure this out. You’ll see.
Online Quizzing in the Absence of a CMS
I survived my first semester of online teaching sans Blackboard. Overall I felt as if it was a success, but there were some things that I just wasn’t happy with. The biggest being the lack of a good quizzing feature. Now I’m not saying quizzing in Blackboard was any treat, so this is by no means a negative on my switch to WordPress for my online classes. In fact, I think if I were still using Bb, I’d more than likely start using my new quizzing solution with it as well.
So here’s the run down. I like to give reading quizzes to keep my students on their toes and hold them accountable for the required reading in the class. These quizzes are not major and usually consist of about 15-20 questions. I’m not a fan of “multiple guess” questions, so I like to be able to ask questions in a variety of ways. My favorite quiz question types are fill in the blank and matching. My solution last semester was to use ClassMarker to create and deliver my quizzes online. It’s actually a fairly good tool, but I had two problems with it. First, I couldn’t write fill in the blank and matching quiz questions. Well, I could do fill in the one blank, but no multiple blanks, and no matching at all. I was bummed, but I made do. The second problem was that I couldn’t embed the quizzes into my WordPress site. Students had to visit the ClassMarker site, log in with a username and password, and then take the quiz. This doesn’t sound like much of a problem, but it just creates one more username/password for students to remember. They already have email, the class site, and the online gradebook, plus we used Diigo and Bibme for our research projects. I did simplify things my making everything I set up for them use the same student ID for username, but I still felt guilty about the number of required logins students needed.
So for this semester my goal was to try to simplify things for them, and my first solution was to retire ClassMarker and find a better quiz solution that would allow me to create flash quizzes that I could install on my own web server and then embed right in the course site. I don’t really need anything fancy for storing or analyzing quiz results. This is not real assessment for me. I just want a score. I was surprised to find many tools available, but I narrowed it down to two. What follows are my thoughts on the two products.
Wondershare QuizCreator
Wondershare QuizCreator is a powerful Flash quiz maker that enables trainers and educators to make quizzes with multimedia objects for online testing.
I like QuizCreator because it is easy to use. I can create 9 different questions types, and I can create questions with images, audio and narration, and embed videos. But best of all I can publish a flash quiz to the web that sends student results to my email address. I created an orientation quiz in QuizCreator. I was able to create the kinds of questions I like: True/False, Multiple Choice, Multiple Response, Fill in the Blank, Matching, Sequence, Word Bank, Click Map and Short Essay. But one downfall is I couldn’t create fill in multiple blanks questions. Also I didn’t like that you couldn’t easily award partial credit for a question if students got part of the answer correctly. To do this, I think I would have to make each part of the answer worth at least 1 point and then go in individually and designate each part of the answer as worth 1 point. That makes the question worth too much then. I would like to have partial points (1/4, 1/2). I like how I could add images, videos, and audio. I can either upload or record audio right in the question, but videos have to be in the flash format (swf or flv). That was a bummer.
In quiz properties I had the option to collect name, email and other information about students or even create accounts for students. That was a nice touch. The default was to ask for a username and email address. I would love to have it ask for a real name instead of the username. I could also create a one password entrance to the quiz and set it up so the student results are emailed to both me and the student. You can buy a QuizCreator educational license for $99.95, and I certainly think it is worth it.
iSpring QuizMaker
iSpring QuizMaker: Create interactive and fully customized Flash quizzes with 10 different question formats and results based feedback.
QuizMaker is also very easy to use, but right off the bat I noticed that QuizMaker has a much nicer look on the published quizzes. I’m not sure what the difference is, but it just looks nicer. It also has different question types: True/False, Multiple Choice, Multiple Response, Type In, Matching, Sequence, Numeric, Fill in the Blank, and Multiple Choice Text (Choose one correct answer in each drop-down list). The Fill in the Blank can have multiple blanks (Yay!), and I’ve never seen the Multiple Choice Text question, but I already love it. Questions can be marked to score with partial credit without having to figure out the scoring on your own. It does it for you. I can add photos, videos and images. I can’t record audio directly into the question, like with QuizCreator, but for videos I could upload all the major formats (avi, mpg, mp4, wmv). I’m guessing it converts it to flash for you, saving you the extra step.
In the Settings, I don’t have as many options for collecting student data. Default is to request real name and email address. Quiz results are sent of my email address by default, but there is no option to send results to the student as well. You can buy a QuizMaker educational license for $150, although I think that is just a tad bit high if I have to pay out of pocket. Interestingly enough if you buy a User Pack of 10, the price is $98 each, so it’s cheaper if you get your school to buy it for you and 9 other teachers.
Overall Impressions
I really like both, and both do so much more than I mentioned in this post. I just tried to touch on the differences. For instance, they both have customizable players, integration with Blackboard and SCORM compliance, offer an online LMS to manage quizzes, testing time limit, pass score, shuffle questions, question pools, custom feedback, and self grading. Both are fairly inexpensive and offer a free trial so you can try it out. I could live with either, but iSpring QuizMaker almost makes it feel like I’d be choosing a Mac over a PC. They both work great, but it seems to work and look just a little bit better. And just like a Mac, it costs more. I have 30 days to decide, or better yet, beg for some money from the college. I haven’t tried that yet at GCC. Wish me luck.
Why WordPress is Better than Blackboard (Video)
So I’ve been writing about my escape from Blackboard to WordPress for my online course management system. Some people were wondering what this looks like. I can’t just give you the link because the classes are live and are in locked down mode (private), so I create a screencast so you can see an what an online course in WordPress might look like. I also talk about the feature I like best in comparison to Bb.
Saying Goodbye to Blackboard – Part III: Missing Essentials
The hardest part about doing away with the standard LMS is replacing the essentials like gradebook, quizzing, and assignment dropbox. The assignment dropbox feature is used to collect assignments from students. I’ve tried using email for this in the past, but I’m not organized enough or consistently organized enough to make that work. Besides I’m a stickler about submitting assignments on time, and if your email inbox is your dropbox, you can’t simply turn that off or lock it down when the due date has passed. So I had to come up with a solution for this, as well as a gradebook and quizzing function.
Increasingly book publishers are replacing standard LMS services with new companion sites that come packaged with textbooks. Last year we adopted both the McGraw-Hill Guide with Connect Composition Plus and Cengage’s A College Writer with Enhanced InSite. Both offer online textbooks and companion sites that provide lots of resources for both faculty and students. I chose to use the McGraw-Hill text with Connect Composition Plus.
Connect Composition Plus provides comprehensive, reliable writing and research content that is searchable, assignable, and inviting. It includes a fully integrated eBook with exercises, peer review tools and editing skills diagnostic tests.
With this new tool, it’s easy for me to assign custom assignments for students that provide detailed instructions and then gives the students a place to submit the assignment. Connect Composition, as well as Enhanced Insite, have built in grading features. I can quickly annotate student assignments and post grades for students to see.There are also features in both that allow for students to peer review essays.
This is a great setup as it gives me one place for all submitted work, and one place to go to grade submitted work. I can create as many assignments as I want and set due dates. The down side is that their is no internal gradebook attached. There is a gradebook, but you can’t add outside assignments or exclude ebook assignments or grammar exercises you might assign students for extra practice. Basically you don’t have any control over the gradebook – weighting grades and assigning point value. Everything is just graded on a 100% scale. Ultimately I would like to see a gradebook built into this system, but in the mean time, I’ve decided to use Engrade for my gradebook.
Engrade is a free set of web-based tools for educators allowing them to manage their classes online while providing students with 24/7 real-time online access. It’s private, secure, truly free, and unbelievably easy to use.
It was very easy to set up all of my classes in Engrade. I just created rosters with the FirstName LastName IDNumber (MEIDs for Maricopa) and Engrade creates an access code for each student. I just emailed this access code with instructions to all students along with instructions on how to access their grades.
Engrade just recently added a feature that allows you to create quizzes, although it is a bit limiting at the moment. You can only create multiple choice quizzes. That doesn’t work for me, so I’m using Classmarker.com for my quizzing needs.
The ClassMarker online testing website is a professional, easy to use, online quiz maker that marks your tests and quizzes for you.
ClassMarker has educational pricing at $24 for the year and I’m able to create quizzes with different types of questions, including fill in the blank and essay – my favorites. It keeps track of all the scores and I can provide feedback on the quizzes. Initially I wanted to use ClassMarker because they have an external quiz feature that allows you to embed quizzes into your site. I couldn’t figure out how to make that work, but that is ultimately what I want to see on my WordPress site, quizzes embedded directly into the site.
So those are the three essentials that I had to replace when I made the move from Blackboard to WordPress. I’ll discuss more about the social aspect of WordPress over Blackboard in my next post.
Saying Goodbye to Blackboard Part II – Student Blogs & Privacy
In my first post I explained how I am using WordPress as a course management system, and in this post I will explain how I was able to easily add students to the class and set up their blogs. Keep in mind that my new course network is completely private, so only registered users can see who users are and participate in activities. To achieve this privacy, I installed a plug-in called Private WordPress. “Private WP will make sure people can only read your blog after they log in. Already logged in users will see no difference. Users who are logged out will get the login page, and only that.” I like to keep my options open, so although we are completely private, I still set up the students so they can have an option to use an alias.
First I added every student as a user to the main “hub” blog using their MEID and their Maricopa email address. This information is easily accessible in both Blackboard and SIS so I can do this before the semester begins. After I add them to the network, students are sent an email with log in instructions and a password to access the site. When they log-in they are instructed to edit their profiles to add their real name and a photo. At this point they can choose to display their first name only, first and last name or just their MEID. They can also use a chosen alias instead of their real names if they want. Students cannot change the initial username given (MEID), so no matter what they provide for their names, I can always identify them on the back end by the MEID. So far, all of my students have chosen to use their real names or stick with the MEID as the display name.
Next I create a blog or site for each user. You are given the choice between sub-domains or sub-directories in Step 4: Installing a Network. This means each additional site in your network will be created as a new virtual subdomain or subdirectory.
- Sub-domains — like
site1.example.comandsite2.example.com - Sub-directories — like
example.com/site1andexample.com/site2
I wanted to try them both, so ENG101 uses sub-domains and ENG102 and ENH295 both use sub-directories. I think I like sub-directories better so. To add a site I need a site name, site title and an admin email. For the site name I used MEIDs again because they will be easily identifiable by me, and if students neglect to make their site private, they are not automatically identifiable to the world. For site title I use the student’s first name temporarily, and then I add their Maricopa email for the admin email. Once I add the site, students are sent another email with log in instructions. They are then instructed to either leave their blogs public or make them private by using the same plug-in I used on the main site. If they choose to go private, I instruct them to choose the option to “Allow all feed access – Guests may continue read your blog via feed readers. “ This is essentially the same option we would have in Blackboard if our district had the balls to turn it on. The blogs are not accessible by search engines, and you have to have the feed url in order to see the posts. So it’s still private, but I can still access it via a feed reader. This makes me very happy. 🙂
Students are also instructed that they can change the title of their blog to whatever they want, thus removing their names. So they can change Mary’s blog (default) to MJ’s Hangout if they want. I don’t really need to have their name in the title because when I set up the blogs initially I created a blogroll for each class using their real name and subscribed to each blog using the real name. This blogroll list is only viewable by logged in users from the main site, and my Google Reader list is private as well. When I want to grade Mary’s blog, I either click on her real name or visit my GReader. And if I ever get confused I can just look at the URL: http://eng102online.com/mar1234567 (fake) and the MEID on the end will identify the student. My initial impression is that either students don’t care about privacy or they’re too confused to care. Not one student has changed the name of their blog, and I haven’t check to see if any have gone private. I’ll do that soon.
Blogroll at the bottom of the main course site.
Students have most of the same controls over their blogs that I have over mine. When I add and install plug-ins to the main blog, I have the option to activate site wide meaning students will now have access to the plug-in on their site. I can even control what themes are available to students, so if I want for their blogs to all look the same, I could just provide the one option. Or in the future I like to create a custom theme built just for writing portfolios for my ENG101 class. I could have all the pages prebuilt to make it easier for students. It can be a little confusing at first for students because they have two sites, the main class site (hub) and their own blog. When they click from the main site to go the dashboard, they end up first in the main site’s dashboard and there is not much there. They have to then click on the My Sites to see their blog and to be able to get to that dashboard.
Students cannot add themes or plug-ins to their site on their own. They can only activate themes or plug-ins that you have activated sitewide. The only problem that I can see so far is with the spam filter Akismet. I activated it sitewide so that all the student blogs could be protected, but it prompts all students to add their API key that you get by signing up for WordPress.com. I didn’t want to have students go through all of that, so at the moment all their blogs are exposed to spam. I like how the Private WordPress plug-in reminds students to activate privacy on their blog in case they missed my instructions to do so.
Overall, I’m pleased with how it’s all working out. I created lots of screencasts to help students, and I haven’t had too many questions about how to do things. I haven’t had too many complaints yet either. Only time will tell. In my next post I’ll talk more about how I’m collecting assignments and doling out quizzes and grades.
