FormLogix - Online form maker

Whilst helping my son who was frantically trying to get all his ICT coursework finished over the weekend, I came across this online form maker.

FormLogix is an online form builder tool for creating web databases and web forms. It allows forms to be built easily using a drag and drop interface and the data collected can be managed using a simple database management tool.

But the best thing about it is that it is completely free!

The forms can be embedded into a website, blog or even be emailed. It enables a user to easily create web forms and web databases such as: Contact us forms, Feedback forms, Events registration forms, Surveys, online Polls, Invitations...

We have looked at a number of survey and poll tools but I think this is by far the most sophisticated and easy to use.

Podcasts: Choosing Podcast Aggregator Software

I'm trying to write a document to introduce staff to Podcasting and it's possibilities for use in education. Over the next few weeks I'm going to write some posts covering various topics relating to podcasting - before developing them further and putting them together in an easy to distribute document.


If you want to subscribe to a podcast you need software that automatically downloads new episodes of podcasts that you have subscribed to. This is often called podcast 'aggregator' software, but you might hear 'podcatcher' software too. There are dozens to choose from, but for this post I've looked at 3 popular ones:

• iTunes (version 7.1.0.59)
• Democracy Player (version 0.9.5.3)
• Juice (version 2.2).

If you cannot install software on your work computer, or if you use many different computers at your library - you can use a web based service like Bloglines to subscribe, just as you would if you subscribe to blogs. This allows you to access your subscriptions from anywhere. It doesn't download the files in the background like aggregator software, but it will help you keep track of when new episodes are released.

All the pieces of software have different functions, so you need to choose one that fits in with the way you want to use the podcast files that are downloaded. I have a Samsung MP3 player (512MB) that I listen to audio on and I watch the videos at my PC, so I need a piece of software that organises the files and that makes it easy to copy files into my MP3 player.

While many features are standard between all the choices, the list below details the important functionality that varies:

• Lets me copy and paste files from it's interface, directly into my MP3 player: iTunes
• Allows organisation of podcasts into folders (useful if you are subscribed to many): Democracy, Bloglines
  
• Keeps track of the number of unwatched files from each podcast (again useful if you are subscribed to many: Democracy, Bloglines
• Allows import and export of OPML files for transfer or backup: iTunes, Juice, Bloglines
• Web Based: Bloglines

While iTunes doesn't offer the functionality to organise large number of podcasts, it does everything else well, and I'd recomend this to someone getting started subscribing to podcasts, especially if they own an iPod. Democracy Player is still very new, but looks like it could offer iTunes some competition in the future.

dotSUB: Add Subtitles to Your Videos

dotSUB is an online service that allows you to upload videos, and makes it very easy to add subtitles (closed captions). You can add them in more than one language if required - in fact you can allow anyone from around the world to translate the video.

I've added our most downloaded Web Cats episode, and added subtitles just in English for now. It's embedded below. Click on the up and down arrows on the bar at the bottom of the video to move to the subtitled version.



Is was quite a quick process to add the transcription that I'd already created, as dotSUB allows you to use some helpful shortcuts.

The 'RSS in Plain English Video', embedded below, has been translated into several languages. Again click on the buttons on the bar under the video to flick through the languages.



More information about subtitles and other ways of making online videos accessible are available at webaim.org.

Using Edublogs.org: Questions

As well as my Blogger blogs, I’ve been using an Edublogs (which used Wordpress software) blog to record how a project was progressing . I’ve also had questions about using Edublogs from staff at Edge Hill, and this post aims to answer all the issues and questions that I've come across.

01: How can I filter spam comments?

I’ve had trouble with the amount of spam I get, and it has made it impossible to check through all my comments to moderate them and allow the real comments to be shown. Also the comment notification emails from this blog have filled up my inbox.

However, now the Edublogs Tutorials blog has brought the Akismet spam filter plugin to my attention. It seems to be working well for me.

02: How do I create Tabs at the Top of the Page?

Basically the tabs are links to information pages rather than blog posts. You can choose which you are creating when in your Edublogs admin area by selecting the ‘Write Page’ option under ‘Write’.

Whether the information page that you have created appears as a tab (as with the blog shown below)...

...or just a link (in the blog shown below they are links under the ‘Pages’ title)...

...depends on the theme you choose for your blog. You can choose themes by going to ‘Presentation’ and selecting ‘Themes’.

03: How do I make the blog (or sections of it) private?

All I’ve been able to find regarding this is a plugin called ‘Edublogs only’ that makes your blog only available to people logged into Edublogs.org. Find it in your Edublogs admin area under ‘Plugins’. This obviously doesn’t give you complete privacy, and after trying a few things including setting the Post Status (below)...

...to private I don’t think Edublogs is the way to go if you want complete privacy. Blogger seems to do this well though.

Experiences of Recording Lectures: Part Two – LNG2104

This Semester (Spring 2007) I’ve been working with Deborah Chirrey in the English and History department to record her LNG2104: Analysing Discourse lectures. We recorded them because there was a student in the group who was hard of hearing, and it was thought that she would benefit from being able to listen again to anything that she missed in class.

The lectures were recorded using one of our Olympus DS-2 voice recorders and an attached clip mic. Deborah would return the recorder after each lecture, and I would edit it and save it as an MP3 using the free WavePad software. I’d then upload it to a new ClickCaster podcast that I’d created. The process of editing and uploading took about 10 minutes per lecture.

ClickCaster is an online service that hosts your files, automatically creates feeds for you and keeps tracks of how many subscriptions and views each episode has had. These are publicly available but I decided that no-one who wasn’t on the course would search for LNG2104, and therefore the benefits outweighed the potential issues.

This week I interviewed the student for whom the recordings had been made, to get an understanding of how she used the recordings:

• She said that the recordings had been useful for her and she used them every week unless she was too busy with assignments. She had a facilitator taking notes in the lecture, but the recordings still helped.

• She listened at her computer (and didn’t have and MP3 player anyway), and was happy listening this way.

• I asked her if she would have subscribed to the podcast if she’d known how, and she said that would have made things easier for her, but it wasn’t a problem going looking for new episodes.

• Transcripts would have been very useful for her.

So in conclusion:

Positives:
Helped student when she missed something in the lecture.
Quick to set up.
RSS feed available.

Negatives:
Recordings and feeds potentially publicly available – might this be an issue for some staff?

To do in the future:
Create training for students on how to subscribe to podcasts.
Look at transcribing recordings with Dragon NS Pro.

Experiences of Recording Lectures: Part One – LIT1000

I’ve been involved with a couple of projects recording lectures to make them available online for students. I’ll make some posts as overviews of what we’ve done in the projects, what I feel we learned and how this might feed into future research.

The first project in the 2005/06 year was for Rob Spence’s LIT1000 class. He wanted to see if recording the lectures and making them available online was useful for the students. We made then available in WebCT as files to download or to stream online, as shown in the screenshot below.

I like that the students had a choice about how they could access the materials, but it did take me perhaps 40-50 minutes a week once I’d received the files to get them all online. This wouldn’t be scalable if more than a couple of people were recording lectures each week, so I talked with Rob about him putting the files online himself. We came across issues that prevented this. These included Rob’s PC not really being powerful enough to be converting and editing large audio files and time issues for him.

We didn’t do any organised research on the students’ use of those lectures, and because we housed them in WebCT there were no stats of their use. Robs conversations with individual students suggested to him that they were used, but not that much. He is talking about recording audio materials to support lectures in the future, rather than recording the lectures themselves.

So in conclusion:

Positives:
Easy access to resources.

Negatives:
Time consuming to prepare.
Not widely used.
Unsure of educational benefit.

To do in the future:
Explore how audio might be used to support learning in other ways than just recording lectures.

[part 2 to follow...]

Using FeedBlendr to Organise Your Podcast Subscriptions

I subscribe to quite a lot of podcasts on several subjects, but iTunes doesn't allow me to organise them in a useful way to me. This means keeping track of my feeds feels very messy.

FeedBlendr is an online service that allows you to combine several feeds into one - this could be used in many ways. For me, it means that I can have one feed for each subject, for example:

Educational Technology

Web Design

General Technology

The above links give you the RSS feeds that you can subscribe to using iTunes or other software. Give it a go! Many people listen to audio podcasts on their MP3 players while commuting to work or at the gym, instead of listening to the radio.

But as I said, FeedBlendr could be used to do other things, such as easily combine feeds from several blogs that are relevant to your subject. The feed could be then displayed (perhaps on your WebCT area) using some of the technologies and techniques we've mentioned before, e.g:

By email

On a timeline

Displaying recent post titles

Setting up a Webcam Feed

You may want to set up a webcam up so that people can watch a live event, or watch something develop over time.

This is a very easy thing to do with just a webcam and Windows Media Encoder software, which you'll probably have on your PC anyway.

There are simple instructions on Tech.Blorge.com which will talk you through setting up the feed from Windows Media Encoder.

We set up a FishCam(TM) below to demonstrate. For the next few days you will be able to check the 'Grow Your Own Fish' demo, running in my office. Be amazed as the fish grows!

Jake Ludington's MediaBlab blog supplied the code to set the above viewer up if you want to set one up yourself.

If you cannot see the FishCam pilot (and note that it'll be a bit hard to see at night):

-Open 'Windows Media Player'.
-If you cannot see the menus, right-click the top bar and Choose 'File' > 'Open URL'.
-Type in: http://193.62.1.35:1651/

Putting DVD Content Online Using HandBrake

We're occasionally asked to put DVDs online, when the original video files no longer exist to work from.

Usually we'd create the video file to put online by connecting our DVD player to a PC with Premiere Pro on, capturing the DVD with the Premiere Pro software and then exporting the video to the file format we want.

There is free software that can do the same thing in one step, without the need for expensive software like Premiere Pro. HandBrake is an example which is quite easy to use. I've used this to convert a one hour 40 minute DVD to MPEG, and it took my PC about 45 minutes to complete the task.

I tried the convertion with a few settings and not all worked (when I saved it as an .avi video, it was upside down), but it provides a solution without you spending any money.

For help with using the HandBrake software have a look at the links on it's Wikipedia page.

Using Instant Messaging to Help Support Staff and Students

I've heard of library helpdesks having Instant Messaging accounts to allow easy access to support, and thought this interesting because it's more immediate than email.

Lindsey blogged about Plugoo which is a service that allows people to communicate with your IM account direct from a web page. I've created an example that links to my personal account below.



I like this because it lets users know if you are available and allows you to chat with them, without any barriers to them at all (e.g. logging on to email). On the other side it is impossible to identify people so you couldn't accept requests to change account details through this, and while you were logged on to IM you'd potentially be interupted all the time.

Even so it is an interesting use of IM technology.

The Use of Blogs at Edge Hill

There are a few blogs that I know of being used at Edge Hill, and I thought it might be interesting to take a look at what they are being used for. They are not all official Edge Hill blogs, but they show different ways in which the technology might be used.

Information Resources
The information resources team in Learning Services have a blog which seems to work primarily as internal communication within that team.

Mister Roy's Musings
Roy in marketing has a blog in which he talks about various things - like marketing. It is interesting as a perspective on Edge Hill University, for example the Are Students Customers? conversation. There are other blogs on blogs.edgehill.ac.uk but the others aren't currently being used very much.

hi.edgehill.ac.uk
hi.edgehill.ac.uk is a site aimed at those who are thinking of coming to University, and several students are blogging their experiences for the site.

EHU E-learning
There is a blog in the Faculty of Health managed by Brian Smith. It is basically a collection of bookmarks rather than original content.

Cakes: Learning Technology Blog
And while we're at it - what is this blog for? The aim is to share knowledge and experiences of using technologies in education with other people who are interested in using them.

Web Cats: Episode Six - Using the Olympus DS2 Voice Recorder

In this episode, Peter Beaumont demonstrates how to use the Olympus DS2 Voice Recorder. This voice recorder is used a lot at Edge Hill University to record lectures and interviews by both staff and students.

The video is also available below in sections. in streamed .wmv format.

Whole video (10:41 minutes)
1. The Olympus DS2 voice recorder (00:17 minutes)
2. Removing the cover (00:14 minutes)
3. Switching it on (00:16 minutes)
4. The Batteries (00:31 minutes)
5. Starting it recording (01:21 minutes)
6. Stopping it recording (00:30 minutes)
7. Setting the quality and file type (01:30 minutes)
8. Deleting old files (00:43 minutes)
9. Organising your files and folders (00:49 minutes)
10. Positioning the mic (01:03 minutes)
11. Listening to your recording (01:02 minutes)
12. Changing the volume while listening (00:14 minutes)
13. Navigating your own recording (00:28 minutes)
14. Putting the file onto a computer (02:11 minutes)

Scribd: YouTube for Documents

Mark pointed me in the direction of Scribd today. Scribd describes itself as a "free online library where anyone can upload.".

Mark described it as YouTube for documents. I think YouTube succeeded because it removed the need for people to worry about what format video was in - different file types could be uploaded, and they were all just coverted to Flash which nearly everyone has the plugin for.

Scribd in a similar way lets you upload multiple file types, and you can access the documents as Flash paper, but also as PDF, Microsoft Word, or MP3 files as you require.

I've uploaded our WebCT guides to it, which can be accessed at my page, or individually like the uploading a file to WebCT document.

Not sure if there are many situations where we could use this for students - perhaps if lots were having trouble accessing some files we could upload them to here and create links to them from WebCT?

Subscribing to Feeds by Email

I'm noticing more services that are enabling people to subscribe to web feeds by email. This is great for people who aren't following enough sites for it to be worth using an aggregator such as Bloglines.

We've already posted about FeedBlitz. Subscribe to Cakes using the form below to see what the user experience would be using this.

---

Enter your Email





Preview | Powered by FeedBlitz

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R|Mail is another similar service, and from what I see it looks easier to use. Subscribe to Cakes below to see what the users experience would be.

---

Email:

R-mail powered

---

Both these services provide extra functionality, such as subscribing to all the feeds in an OPML file, so if you want to do more you might want to explore them. Also there are other services out there that allow this, for example if you use FeedBurner to create your feeds, that supports subscriptions by email too.

As Kate Trgovac says on her blog, you've got to deliver content in the form people want to read - otherwise they probably won't.

Fast Forward Resource Creation Screencasts (22 minutes)

As staff are starting to create Fast Forward course materials. I thought it would be worth posting these screencasts on how to use the templates.

The templates are designed so that I can use the Course Genie software to convert the templates to Content Modules for use in WebCT. Also the templates mean that the members of staff who create the materials can easy makes changes to the course materials during the time that Fast Forward runs.

The screencasts were designed to be distributed via CD, but they are available here in case we have trouble getting the CDs to anyone. They were also created last year, so they use the old logo and refer to "the college", but I've not got time to re-record them.

01. Introduction to Training - 1:19
02. Managing Files and Using the CD - 3:38
03. The Template Layout - 2:32
04. Text and Tables - 2:42
05. Images and Diagrams - 4:31
06. Copyright Issues - 0:56
07. Linking to Web Pages and Files - 4:07
08. The Final Result - 2:44
09. Video, Audio, Quizzes and Animations - 1:09


If you want a copy of the template it is available for download.

The Optivote Video

Meg and Peter are creating some training materials for staff who are using the Optivote system, so I thought it might be worth re-posting the video of Phil Stanley's presentation.

If you want to skip to different sections, the contents are:

Part One: Setting up - 0:00 to 8:31
Part Two: Start Up Wizard - 8:32 to 12:51
Part Three: Setting Up Classes - 12:52 to 28:07
Part Four: Lessons - 28:08 to 32:24
Part Five: Questions - 32:25 to 1:31:04
Part Six: Using PowerPoint with Optivote - 1:31:05 to 1:49:12
Part Seven: Question Time - 1:49:13 to 2:03:25

There are other materials on the Optivote web site such as a quick start guide and screencast videos. These videos don't work for me in Firefox, so if you have problems try using Internet Explorer.

Sony Reader: Ebooks made readable

We've mentioned the Sony Reader before, and I think it is going to be released (in the US) soon.

It sounds like it really will make reading onscreen easier, however the £300 price tag will probably prevent it from becoming the 'iPod for text'.

I like it though and I think I'd like to use it when travelling. Visit the Command N podcast #82 and skip to 4 minutes 50 seconds to see it.

Perhaps this sort of thing is going to be important in the future of learning?

Pointing students towards useful resources on a subject

We've looked at a lot of ways that web feeds can be used by yourself and your students to keep track of information on topics. This has included supplying students with OPML reading lists of blogs and web sites that they could quickly and easily subscribe to.

Another way that you could supply students with a selected range of sites to explore would be to create a Google 'Custom Search Engine'.

You'll need to create a Google account, and then you can add a list of sites related to your subject that students might find useful. Of course they could still search the internet in the regular way, but this could help them by focusing their search initially.

Once you have created the search engine, you can add all the sites from an OPML file (perhaps downloaded from your Bloglines account) to it and then delete those that are not relevant.

I created one that searches some useful learning technology sites:



Try searching on a technology like blogs or podcasts, to see if there are any articles that interest you.

New Guides: 'Recording Audio' and 'Linking to Electronic Resources'

We've produced two new guides for Edge Hill staff, available on the Learning Services guides page.

Firstly 'Recording Audio' is a very basic 'demystifying' type guide. It covers the steps that a member of staff would take to record a lecture or session and put it online.

The 'Linking to Electronic Resources' guide details how the electronic resources, available from the Library Catalogue, can be linked to from a WebCT area.

RSS Feeds - Display Tools

Further to Pete's recent posts 'Create Quick Links to Web Feeds' and ‘Visualising Events in Time: SIMILE Timelines’, I have also been experimenting with different RSS display tools:

(I have created a couple of examples which are available to view in the Developers Community WebCT course. )

1/ A Timeline - created with 'My Timelines Beta'
http://www.mytimelines.net/

As their website states, "My Timelines let's you easily add an AJAX based timeline that displays your most recent blog entries."

I really like this tool. The timeline provides a chronological representation of changes that are made and it's interactive too! You can pan the timeline right/left with your mouse, and click on markers for more info.

It is a straightforward process generating the timeline and there are some styling options included at the time of generation such as the size, time display etc. You cannot, (as far as I can tell) restyle the actual timeline but you can embed it into a webpage and style that as you like.

As well as using this tool to create a 'Blog Timeline', I have also created a 'Wiki Timeline'.
Changes to the Wiki appear displayed on the timeline by page title, so multiple changes to the same page make the timeline appear a bit repetitive and messy but the individual markers provide additional info/ specifics of the changes.

It will provide an overview/ history of edits and notification of changes to the wiki. I think it could be a great alternative means of tracking activity on a wiki.

2/ ‘Grazr’ is a tool which allows you to display feeds for browsing (Podcasts can also be listened to within the tool!)
http://www.grazr.com/

At first glance this tool appeared to be suited to large websites which provide multiple feeds - to enable the creation of ‘feedmaps’ which make browsing (or grazing) all the available feeds on a site possible without the hassle of subscribing

For more information read James E. Lee's Blog posting - 'Create a feedmap to help people find, preview, and subscribe to your feeds'.

However…

I like Grazr and think that it has the potential to be very useful in an educational setting.

It is a very easy to use tool.

At a basic level you can use Grazer to display one feed, either as an embedded ‘widget’* or with a link. You just follow 3 simple steps and are then provided with a range of install options.

• According to Wikipedia [Feb 2007]
  “A web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are akin to plugins or extensions in desktop applications. Other terms used to describe a Web Widget include Gadget, Badge, Module, Capsule, Snippet, Mini and Flake. Web Widgets often but not always use Adobe Flash or JavaScript programming languages.”

With a little more understanding of OPML files you can display multiple feeds with Grazr.

This could be a really good way of providing regular, dynamic and current information within a course as well as introducing students to blogs and podcasts as sources of useful information.

3/ A Basic Text Update - created with 'Feed 2JS Build JavaScript and Preview'
http://slashdemocracy.org/xml/feed2js/build.php

This feed generation allows you to present changes/updates in text form.

Again I like this tool because I think it is really simple to use, it can be styled and the resulting script can be cut and pasted directly into a WebCT text block or HTML page.

To style the resulting feeds I have used the text block editor within WebCT (to create a simple two column layout, one for New Posts and one for Comments). For more sophisticated styling, I have used CSS and then uploaded the files.

This is another great way of introducing dynamic content to your online course area.