What are clickers?
As part of the new “Quick Tips for Effective Instruction” series, Olga Urban provides NIU faculty and staff with a brief introduction to the clicker technology and quickly outlines a few of the instructional benefits of using this technology in face-to face classes. She specifically refers to eInstruction’s CPS personal response system in her presentation.
Additional full-featured presentation formats, including text transcript, are available here.
Sample Ustream Video - Redesigning Course Materials for Online Delivery
As I mentioned previously, I’ve been experimenting a bit with streaming video using Ustream. Here’s the archived video from a recent workshop I gave entitled, Redesigning Course Materials for Online Delivery.
This was my first attempt using Ustream and while rather rough around the edges, I learned a great deal and I look forward to continue using this great tool for allowing those who may not be able to attend a face-to-face presentation the opportunity to view online either in real time or via an archive.
Those interested in another example of how Ustream can be used, here’s yet another example and the description of the conference environment in which it was recorded.
How might you use Ustream?
Flickr photos backup utilities
I’ve recently been looking to organize and backup my photo libraries from Flickr. Unfortunately, Flickr has no built-in batch downloading of photos. But, I did come across several great free utilities that do allow for batch downloading of photos from your Flickr account.
- FlickrDown [PC]
- FlickrBackup [Mac]
- FlickrEdit [Mac]
Since FlickrDown was the first utility I came across, I gave it a try and it worked like a charm on my home PC. I haven’t yet tried the Mac utilities but the next time I backup from Flickr, I’ll definitely give them a try.
Anyone come across any other Flickr photo utilities worth sharing? I’d love to continue building my collection of Flickr utilities.
Blogs in Plain English
Ever wondered what exactly a blog is or why someone would want to use one? The folks over at CommonCraft have put together a great video called “Blogs in Plain English” that explains in 3 minutes the premise for and power of blogging.
If you like this video, you might find some of the other “Plain English” videos helpful, like:
- RSS in Plain English
- Social Bookmarking in Plain English
- Wikis in Plain English
- Social Networking in Plain English
- Google Docs in Plain English
Masie’s Review of the Kindle
Elliott Masie shares this perspective and video review of the new Amazon Kindle: http://www.masieweb.com/kindle
He also references a more in-depth review [PDF] from one of the MASIE Learning Fellows, Tom King.
I concur that e-reading will be a staple of the future of communication is something that instructional designers interested in online learning should be aware of. Beyond a single device, the day is coming when users will be able to electronically read a book or other piece of content in a mobile fashion on any device of their choosing (phone, portable media player, etc.). Thoughts anyone?