More than You Ever Wanted to Know about CMS

Course Management Systems (CMS) provide a service to deliver educational courses. There are over 40 providers of CMS, making choosing a CMS an overwhelming task. There is a great web site call Edu Tools that compares CMS products. To view Edu Tools Click Here
Typically, CMS have the same basic components in common. These include:

Course Management: This includes a syllabus, calendar, announcements, and assignments with due dates and grades can be posted.

Readings: Links to course readings along with lists of required course readings.

Content Presentation: Lecture notes can be stores for student review. Links can be supplied for audio and video and slides. PowerPoint presentations may also be maintained in the CMS.

Course Communications: Supports asynchronous (any time any where) e-mail. This can be one-on-one, one-to-several, one-to-all. They also include chat rooms for class discussions.

Group Project Space: The system can allow instructors to assign students to groups and they, in turn, can share documents for discussion and revision.

Student Assessment: Provides tools for tests and quizzes. Some CMS allow the instructor to set the time frames for taking the test and set a time limit once the test is started.

Digital Drop-box for Assignment Submission: Can be provided for student submission of assignments.

Course and System Statistics: A CMS can provide tracking tools to allow the instructor to know when each student accessed the course components, how often, and how much time was spent. It can also provide other statistical information for a broader perspective.

Wikis and CMS can both contain communication and assignment tools. Wikis can be more personalized with pictures, etc. I found the Wiki a lot more fun, but the CMS is easier when having a class discussion. I also don't see a Wiki as being statistically friendly for the instructor.

Most of us who have taken a distance course are familiar with the Blackboard CMS. Someone else prefers Moddle. I would use the comparison tool to start, but ultimately it's just a matter of getting in and using one; and, if if works for you, that will probably be the CMS you stick with.

Web Office Applications

Web office applications can be educational, used for collaborative projects, or just for fun. Because my #2 grandson is into magic tricks, I have dedicated this power point presentation, Magic Cards ,to him. It's just a bit of fun and makes you wonder "How'd he do that!" If you take some time to think about it, you can figure it out.

Now a little about office applications. These applications include spreadsheets, calendars, power point presentations, to name a few. These can be stored on a web site for use on the internet. They can be shared with everyone or limited to invited guests. You can allow the items to be edited, for collaborative purposes, or you can shut off the edit feature. Sharing them on the internet seems so much easier than sending out individual emails. Also, as we become more and more mobile, it just makes sense to have our projects stored on the net so we can access them from anywhere we are likely to be.

Enjoy the magic trick!

How About A Survey?

Healthcare and health insurance is a big issue right now. While you are visiting this site, why don't you take a moment and participate in my very short survey on health insurance. Click Here to take survey

The survey site I am using is Surveymonkey. It is a free site for basic services and is super easy to use. Nowadays we participate in surveys for everything. Students can use them to gather statistics for projects, teachers can use them, and organizations can gather information and input from their members. I only wish I had known about this service when we were surveying our union members before negotiating a new contract. Putting surveys on the computer saves a lot of trees, and all the information gathering is done for you.

Every year my school district is required by the state to survey the parents about their school. Imagine the time and effort an online survey would save. Now, if I can just figure out a way to get all the parents on board.

About Videos

This week was all about videos. I took my trusty sony CyberShot digital camera and headed off to the Disney Resort area. There really wasn't one thing I wanted to video so I started taking short shots. The question was what to do with the little clips. I couldn't have 3 thirty second videos. As usual, this project started to snowball. I googled video joining and found a free site through gold-software (see my links) which allowed me to join my clips into one large one. The directions were super easy, and for me with little patience, it was a blessing. I then went to YouTube opened an account and easily uploaded my video, Disney Plaza, or you can view the video from this blog as there is a feature to insert videos.

Videos can be a great asset to a class. They can add a visual perspective to different places like the Disney Plaza video, or. . . . . . . .




they can be used for demonstration purposes like the video below of my #2 grandson showing off his yoyo skills.

Sharing Photos

When I mentioned that I would be sharing photos on my blog, it generated some interest with #1 grandson. He is very interested in American history and wanted me to post my pictures of Philadelphia. So, this slideshow is dedicated to my grandson. You can view the photos from the photo sharing site bubbleshare or you can view them from the slide show located on the right.

I really liked bubbleshare; remember it's all about being super easy. I downloaded my photos and the program let me rotate them, rearrange the order, pick an album background, and even add some text. The text function did not work all the time as you will notice if you view the slide show on my blog.

This time it was easy to import the html to put the slide show in the blog, but I'm having a bit of a challenge changing the size. It seems to be sort of okay for now.

I can see some educational benefits of photo sharing. They give us historical perspective. Additionally, photos can be our window to the world. They give us an idea of what things are like, but they only capture a particular view. I would hope that viewing photos would peak the viewer's interest to actually go to some of the places to experience what they had seen with all their senses thus making the picture complete.

More on Podcasts

Now that I have sufficiently recovered from my podcast experience, I can now reflect on the educational aspects of this technology. I see the big advantage being that podcasts are portable. You can download them to your Ipod and take them with you on your daily run, or in my case a quick walk with my outdated MP3 player. You can even play them in the car on the way to work.

Another aspect of podcasts is that they can help fill the gap for auditory learners. Being an auditory learner myself, being visually online all the time can be draining. Plus you can multi-task with podcasts, like fold laundry or cook dinner. Then, again, maybe podcasts aren't so wonderful. Wait, I just had another idea. Wouldn't it be great to play a podcast that gave directions to something and you could work along with the podcast instead of having to stop to read the directions at each step?

Podcasts do have their place, and I will probably try creating another one when life is not so hectic.

PodCasts - What a Nightmare!

Making the recording was the easy part. Just did what the text suggested and went to Audacity. Still, nowadays, there are no instructions. Just clicked around until I found record. When I was finished recording I followed the directions to export as MP3. That saved my recording to my flash drive. Now what to do with the file?

Blogger does not support MP3 files so I had to go to a third party host. The thing is, everywhere you visit you have to join up to get in to see the site, and frankly I lost track of how many sitesI visited. I need user friendly so I started with the text's suggestion of OurMedia.org. I got there and couldn't even figure out how to start. Finally, I googled free podcast hosting. I came up with 4shared.com. This sight was something I could handle, and I was able to link to this blog. The link sends you to the sight and then you play the podcast from there. To hear my podcast, you can click here . Okay, so that was basic. But, I wanted the picture of the little machine that you clicked on play and you could see the little line go across the screen.

The text suggested searching "enclosures" under the help section. I found out that it was possible to embed html codes. At this point this project became a collaborative effort. It was, "Okay, family, get on line and start lookin." Finally we hit on Podcastmachine.com. Previewing the site showed you could make your own player. I signed up, yet again.

Podcastmachine.com was more straight forward than some of the other stuff. After I made my player and saved it, I went to blogger layout and added a gadget for html java script third party code. I copied the html code and pasted it into blogger. And voila! There was my player on the side of the blog. But, now it was too big. I went back into the html code in the gadget and it was easy to see where to adjust the width and height.

I'm really happy with how this turned out. I know I drove everyone nuts, including myself. Now it's off to the NLC for residence week and really make myself crazy.

Check out my podcast player on the right side of the page for information on who I am in my other life.

The Hype on Skype

This week's project was to participate in a web conference. As a distance student, I sometimes miss the personal contact that takes place in a traditional classroom, so I decided to try Skype which offers both audio and visual contact.

The Skype experience was easy, and it turned out to be a lot of fun. There are a few confusing parts that take a little patience. First the Skype website doesn't clearly tell you what to click to download the free service. I suppose if you already knew about Skype you could just go to the tab to download the program, but anyone new would probably think that there was a monthly fee. The fee, of course, is if you want upgrades. After that, it was just follow the instructions. There is even a test sight to test your audio and visual equipment. The other part that took patience was to find the person you want to connect in the Skype directory. I hooked up with Keith; and, from the start we had decided to make phone contact with our the first try. This was a good idea because neither he nor I were sure if we had found the right person in the directory. This way we were able to confirm that. When connecting for the first time, Skype asks the person called if they want to be contacted by the caller. You can also choose to have the video turned off or on when you are first answering a call.

Now for the fun stuff. I actually have a face to place with a name. Keith and I were in a class together last term and we will probably be in a class together next term. We had loads to talk about. It was actually Keith's idea, and we both agreed, that it would kind of nice if we had this sort of option when talking with our advisers. Although our advisers do their best to make the meetings personable, they are dealing with many students. This way we know that they know who we are, and it would help to make the experience more personal.

On the education front, I saw so many opportunities. Remember that I work in a elementary school. We have a program for home schoolers, and they are supposed to make contact every week with the instructor. This has proven a challenge for the instructors. What a difference Skype would make. Just put the kid in front of the webcam at home. The instructor could review work, tutor, see answers with the use of a white board, and even proctor tests to ensure the child was actually doing the work.

Note to family: Grandsons in Alaska and Arizona, you will be getting webcams soon. How could I have let time slip away without the use of this wonderful technology?

We All Need An Aggregator

A what, did you say? Yes, an aggregator so we can take advantage of RSS feeds. So many new terms. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. This technology enables someone to subscribe to the content created on a particular blog so they no longer have to visit the blog itselft to get it. Now, that's something I could sure use about now. Up until now I only visited a few family member blogs, and that was when I thought about them. Now, as a class, we all have blogs. Visitng everyone's blog was getting time consuming; technology has a way of doing that, don't you think? And, just when I was getting whinie about all the effort it was taking, along came the assignment on RSS.

The catch is you need an aggregator to collect the RSS feeds. Very simply, it's a site that retrieves the individual posts of information. I chose to use Google Reader because it's already a part of Blogger. All I had to do was click on the bottom of the screen in blogger and it sent me right to the reader. All I needed to do was follow the directions and simply subscribe to the various blogs I was interested in. I was able to organize my blogs in folders. One for class and one for family. I just check peirodically and voila all the new posts come up in one place. Note to family following this blog: You gotta try this.

As a student, I am seeing immediate advantages as I am taking another course dealing with the political system. Tracking the Sotomayor nomination process just got a lot easier. The down side is that there is so much information out there that it's hard know which blogs are valuable to subscribe to. I had a little bit of trouble unsubscribing to a site I thought I wanted until I finally recognized that the symbol I was looking at was a trash can.

As an instructor, how great is this for keeping track of your students' blogs? Only having to go to one site is sure to be a time saver. The text mentions that parents could also keep track of their child's classroom blog. The kids probably wouldn't appreciate this aspect of the aggregator.

There is still so much to explore. I'm sure I will discover more uses for the aggregator as time goes on.

Maybe A School Website?

As my classmates know, I am an elementary school office manager. The district is very small, approx. 3,000 K-8, with limited technology and finances. In our readings, I was very excited to discover information regarding school websites built from Weblogs. As my first experience with a blog has been relatively easy, I mentioned this idea to a few parent volunteers. They so liked the idea that they decided I should be able to design one and get it up and running for the beginning of school in September! No matter that I'm taking classes and have other obligations during the summer. A school website is now certainly on my radar, but maybe not until October or so. If anyone can direct me to more information on school web sites, it would be greatly appreciated.

From the readings, I can also see that the biggest hurdle will be to map out the various stakeholders' expectations. For example: Parents might want homework on the blog. Most of my teachers will not want the obligation of updating that. And, from my front office experience, parents will use the excuse that the homework wasn't updated so it's not the child's fault if it wasn't done. Where's the student's responsibility in all this? I'm sure there are many other philosophies that will need to be worked out ahead of time.

In the meantime, I will continue to discover the advantages of different technology as the course moves on, and I will be ever observant as to how they could be used in our future school website.

Building an Elephant?

Lately the election news in Iran has been getting a lot of attention. With the news agencies shut down everyone is depending on blogs, twitter, or whatever for information. This reminds me of the story of the blind men and the elephant. Each blind man could only describe one piece of the elephant and relate it to something else. My question is: Is it possible to build a complete elephant from the little bits and pieces, and at the end is it recognizable as an elephant?

Joining the Information Highway

Setting up this blog was fairly simple. The biggest challenge was following the directions. Just don't attempt it when you're tired. I kept saving my blog and nothing was happening. I just never paid attention to the "publish post" button. Having accomplished this, it was off to bed for me. I'm learning I do my best work in the early mornings.

As my newspaper keeps getting smaller and smaller and keeps sending me to the web, I worry about the validity of what I am reading. I can see how blogs are beneficial in confirming or debunking the news. I can also see how the blogs could manipulate the news. Interesting world.

My daughter moved to Alaska gettingbyinalaska.blogspot.com and many of my co-workers, as well as myself, have been interested in life there. We've certainly enjoyed her blog. I have also read blogs that probably contain too much personal information. I guess it's up to the reader if they want to continue reading those blogs or not.

I can certainly see the educational value of blogging. Wouldn't it be fun to have a classroom of students each have a blog and blog on the same experience? As everyone would have a different experience we would probably get a better picture of that experience.

You Can Teach An Old Dog New Tricks

Well, I never thought I'd have a blog, and here I am. I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks. Even my 89 year old mother is learning about email. The thing is that while I'm racing to keep up with the kids and grandkids, I sometimes don't see the value in a lot of what they are doing. So, because I am attending the National Labor College and this is a technology class, I can at least look for the potential educational value of having a blog.