At PodcampAZ, I had the chance to sit in on a number of talks by educators who are blazing new trails with technology use in the classroom. It was great to be with a group of people who didn’t fear trying new things – figuring out what works and abandoning what doesn’t.

Devon Adams talked about how he communicates with his students and their parents through a mix of Google apps. Students are required to have a gmail account on the first day of class and use it to monitor the course schedule (via Google Calendar) and provide contact information and respond to surveys (via Google Forms). Devon encourages rather than punishes students who use their cellphones in class. They use Google’s mobile search to look up information to add to the material being presented in class.

Shelley Rodrigo, who teaches at Mesa Community College, introduced me to a handful of new tools in her talk about Creative Chaos in the Classroom. During Shelley’s talk, some of us were assigned to surf the web and add bookmarks to Delicious as sites or topics came up. Others were assigned to live blog the lecture as it happened. All of the back channel information was aggregated on a web page she had set up to be a persistent record of what we talked about.

For me, the most exciting tool Shelley brought to the talk was Poll Everywhere, which is a service for posing multiple choice or open-ended questions to an audience and gathering their responses in real time.

How it works

What makes Poll Everywhere exciting is the manner in which the feedback is gathered. Respondents use their mobile phones to send a text message to the service. Shelley started out asking us a multiple choice question. The results were graphed, in real time, on the poll’s webpage. She finished with asking us for one take-away and our sentence-long responses displayed in a waterfall effect with new texts replacing old as the screen filled.

Presenters can choose to embed the polls into their PowerPoint slides or to visit the poll’s webpage and students aren’t limited to texting in their responses. Votes can also be gathered on the poll’s webpage or via Twitter.

Getting Started

You can create your first poll without signing up for an account. The poll will work for two weeks. Registering for an account will allow you to keep your polls and doesn’t required a credit card or answering too many questions. You will want to pick from the tabs for Business / Non-profit, K-12 or Higher Ed before signing up.

Setting up your poll begins with picking from the available types – multiple choice, free text or Goal poll. The first two a pretty self-explanitory. A Goal poll is used to take pledges for event fundraiser. As pledges are recorded, a thermometer moves toward your predetermined goal.

For multiple choice you type in your stem and provide your options. In the free plan the keywords respondents will use is assigned by the system. With a paid plan, you an customize the text your students will use to vote for a particular option.

Save your poll and the system will assign a unique number your students will use when texting in their responses.

Enough talk – Let’s demo

Dollars and Cents

There are different accounts and pricing depending on who you work for. Prices range from free (30 responses to one account and no extras) to $1,400 a month for businesses/non-profits needing 20,000 responses and 50 users. Extras include the ability to identify participants, moderate text responses before they display and the ability to choose your own keywords (what the respondent sends to register their vote).

K12 and Higher Ed have semester and yearly payment options and can have student rosters tied to the service for student-specific results and correlation across polls.

Don’t be scared

Both Devon and Shelley are doing exciting things in their classrooms. Rather than having students turn off the one piece of technology they are most comfortable with, they use those skills to bring a world of information to their classrooms.

Poll Everywhere also leverages a student’s expertise with their mobile phone. For you, the instructor, it brings instant feedback to your presentation and turns a stand-and-deliver talk into a conversation that is rewarding on both sides of the lectern.

A little background

One of the easiest ways to discover podcasts is to use Apple’s iTunes. Once installed and launched, iTunes features a link to Podcasts in the iTunes Store right along side the Music, Movies and TV shows. In the Podcast section you will find traditional broadcasters like NBC, NPR and CNN making their content available for download alongside a new breed of independent content producers like Leo Laporte and his This Week in Tech (TWiT) network of shows.

What is truly exciting for educators, however, is iTunes U – which sits two buttons over from the link to podcasts in the iTunes Store. There are 227 universities and colleges, as well as a number of K-12 schools, who have signed up with Apple to post content on iTunes U. This is an amazing resource for educators. Imagine bringing a portion of a lecture from Carnegie Mellon, UC Berkeley or my own alma mater, the University of Arizona, into your classroom to augment the materials you provide to your students.

But what if you want to learn to create your own podcasts?

Well, there are podcasts for that too:

• David Jackson’s School of Podcasting
  
• Richard Harrington’s Producing Video Podcasts
• Jason Van Orden’s Mastering New Media

Or, if you are anywhere near Tempe, AZ November 14-15, 2009, you could attend PodCamp AZ. The “Relevant Media Unconference” will take place at the University of Advancing Technology (2625 W. Baseline Rd.) from 8:30a – 5:30 both days. The conference is open to anyone with an interest in New Media including blogging, podcasting or webcasting.
In addition to talks on getting started with podcasting (Podcasting 101 – The Technical Side by Kevin Kittredge) or improving your existing podcast (5 Reasons Your Podcast Technically Sucks by Evo Terra), there are also a number of talks of interest to educators:

• Learn on the run: A study of instructional design practices in podcasting by Lisa Young
• Teaching math with technology by Sue Glascoe
• Creative chaos in the classroom by Shelley Rodrigo

Dollars and cents

PodCamp AZ is free to attend. A $25 donation is suggested to help the organizers defray the cost of putting on the event. You should register to help the organizers know how many are planning on attending and to vote on the talks you will be attending.

I want your comments

If you are an educator and listen to a podcast you think is great… Post it in the comments below. I would love to hear from you.

Small businesses and schools have been using Mac Minis as servers long before this release  because they are a cost effective solution. One of the challenges has been the need to hang additional hard drives off the box to bring the required redundancy to the game. With this release, Apple has officially sanctioned the practice and has delivered a custom edition of the Mac Mini to better meet the need.

The Specs

Officially called the “Mac Mini with Snow Leopard Server”, this mini comes with two 500GB drives, 4GB of RAM and gigabit ethernet. The second internal hard drive comes at the cost of the SuperDrive found in the standard Mac Mini.

Classroom Server

The thing that makes this exciting for the classroom teacher is Snow Leopard Server.  The server edition of the operating system comes with a built-in web server ready to deploy student blogs or collaborative wikis.  Imagine team-based assignments where the students work on a single document which automatically tracks their changes.  Teachers could make writing more interactive with student blogs and the built-in commenting system.

Two of the most exciting features are Podcast Producer 2 and the new Podcast Composer.  The new tool beings a graphical interface worthy of the Apple name to the process of creating workflows – the steps the server takes to compress, publish and notify viewers of new podcast episodes.

Students can create and post their own podcasts – including video podcasts and screencasts – to the class blog automatically.  After recording their audio or video with Podcast Capture – which is included with every copy of Leopard and Snow Leopard – the server takes over to compress and post the podcast.  Workflows can be crafted to publish to the server’s internal websites or to Apple’s iTunes.

Dollars and Cents

As mentioned above, the Mac Mini with Snow Leopard Server is education priced at $949.  AppleCare, Apple’s global repair coverage plan, will cost an additional $99. Apple offers a USB SuperDrive as an accessory for $99.

Getting Started

Evernote is cloud-based storage for the bits and pieces of digital detritus we all accumulate.  Need to remember a Web site you found, a phone number or a menu at the local take-out that you snapped a picture of with your cellphone?  Evernote can do that. Best yet, the text in that picture of the menu becomes searchable after the Evernote servers work their magic on it.

Once you have signed up, you download the application to your computer.  Evernote works on Windows and Mac. For mobile note taking there are apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch, Blackberry, Palm Pre, Sony Ericsson X1 and Windows Mobile devices.  Some of the magic of Evernote comes from installing the application on every device you use.  I have it on the Macs at work and at home as well as on my iPhone.  That means I am never far from my notes and I don’t need to have different systems for storing different kinds of information.

Our eMail system is capped at 250MB per account – not bad for the average user – but what about the very real need to archive messages for the long term?  On the Mac, I can print a PDF directly into Evernote and delete the message knowing that I will have it forever.

Tags

If you have read even the first few pages of David Allen’s book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, you know one of the techniques for regaining control of your world is reducing the number of in-boxes you have.  Evernote allows you to avoid the hundreds of folders in your Documents folder that lay dormant years after their useful life has past.  You can create notebooks in Evernote to keep your notes organized the way that makes sense to you.  The power really comes, however, from tagging your notes as you make them.  I tend to use notebooks to differentiate work and personal notes and then let my tags – keywords that will help me find the note later – do my organization.

Two things that I discovered while researching this article are the ability to group tags in a hierarchy and to sort tags by the number of notes.  The first is great for organizing my projects and sub-projects.  The second lets the topics that I have a lot of information on (and therefore are likely the topics I use the most) float to the top of the list.

Dollars & Cents

Signing up for Evernote is free.  The free account allows you to upload up to 40MB per month and accepts images, audio, ink and PDFs.  I started out as a free account holder and ran that way for about 3 months before upgrading to the Pro account.  The Pro account is $5/month or $45/year and gives you 500MB of upload a month and accepts any file type up to 25MB per file.  Transferring your notes is SSL encrypted for Pro account holders.

The eBeam Whiteboard, made by Luidia Inc., has been an amazing tool for group meetings and brainstorming sessions.

What’s in the box?

The heart of the system is the eBeam receiver which is available in USB-only or Bluetooth connectivity models.  It sticks to the corner of your whiteboard using one of the three provided mounts – magnets, suction cups or adhesive. I have never had the guts to permanently attach the mounting clip with the adhesive and, in truth, I don’t think I would want to. One of the really nice features of the device is the ease of setup, so being able to move it from room to room is great.

Also in the box are four electronic marker sleeves. Pop the top of the sleeve and add your standard dry erase marker – I recommend the bullet tip instead of chisel. Each sleeve is color coded so matching marker to sleeve is the hardest part of the process.  To go with the markers, there is an electronic eraser so that when you erase the physical board, the electronic version will follow.

Finally, the box has a reasonably long USB cable and, in the case of the Bluetooth edition, the wall power adapter.

Getting Started

I have found the USB version to be the easiest to set up but, when you work through the first-time connection issues with Bluetooth, it is really nice not to have to worry where the computer is in relation to the device.

The first time you use the eBeam, you will need to install the software from the included CD or download it from the Luidia site. Once connected to your eBeam, you will need to go through the calibration for your whiteboard. Successful calibration is a matter of telling the software which corner of the whiteboard you stuck your receiver in and clicking two other corners as directed so that it knows the boundaries of the whiteboard.

At this point, your now-smart whiteboard is ready to use.  You can, however, go one extra set up step to get some extra functionality.  The eBeam has a small plastic strip with two icons – a printer and a new page.  The strip is statically held to your whiteboard.  Select the control strip’s calibration option in the software to tell the receiver where it is.  Now you can print to your default printer everything you put on the board just by clicking the icon on the control strip.  You can also instantly save a full board and get a new electronic page by clicking the new page icon on the strip.

“Did Anyone Take Notes?”

Whether giving a lecture or working collaboratively to generate the Next Great Idea, the product of a meeting can easily be lost depending on the note taking skills of the attendees.  The eBeam is going to save everything written on the whiteboard, in the color that it was written in, to its software.  It can even record the whiteboard and play back the entire session as a movie, including the audio if you have a microphone attached to your computer.

You can then output the pages you created as a powerpoint presentation, jpeg, tif or bitmap images or as a PDF.  You can also send the native capture file to anyone else with the eBeam software.

The eBeam also has the ability to create a virtual whiteboard that is hosted on the Luidia servers so that, even in distance education, you can share the board with your students.

Dollars and Cents

The USB version of the eBeam Whiteboard retails for $750 while the Bluetooth edition comes in at $1200.  A quick search shows the street price to be about $675 and $1080.

Update

I had a problem with my System 3. For some reason, I wasn’t able to connect using BlueTooth. It has worked in the past but not on my current machine. I followed the instructions on the support pages at Luidia but didn’t have any luck so I used their contact form. Two things happened.

1. I was contacted by support on the SAME DAY. Now, I did send my eMail during business hours but still… Impressive. Luidia promises one business day response.
2. The support tech (Steve P) didn’t treat me like an idiot. This was SUCH a pleasure. He recognized that I was comfortable finding and deleting plist files and whatnot and gave the appropriate directions without the need to give me step-by-step instructions that would have slowed us both down.

My eBeam receiver will be going in for a check up to see what it going on with the bluetooth module. I wish that other companies backed their products and customers so well.

As an undergrad, I was dutiful about attending lectures.  I much preferred going to class than reading the book and it was a method that worked for me.  I would sit, always in the second row, and take notes.  Early on this was done using pen & paper and later straight into my laptop.  The thing that frustrated me about taking notes into my laptop was it wasn’t easy to add a diagram on the fly and, let me tell you, Dr. Wells economics course was full of diagrams.  |X

Enter the Pulse

The Pulse Smartpen is an amazing device from a company called Livescribe.  At around 5/8″ thick, it is larger than your normal pen but, for me, fits comfortably and isn’t hard to use continuously during an hour-long meeting.

What makes the Pulse the perfect tool for students is that everything you write into its special notebooks (more on those later) is captured by a tiny camera in its nose.  The result is a perfect digital copy of your notes – words, diagrams and everything – ready for download into your Mac or Windows machine as soon as you dock the pen.

To be clear, the software included with the Pulse doesn’t convert your writing into typed text.  It displays exactly what you wrote – how you wrote it.  But the LiveScribe desktop software does do handwriting recognition and so your notes become searchable.  Even with my chicken scratch, the software is regularly able to find terms using the search.

What Did She Say?

Ever taken a look at your notes before an exam and wonder what the heck the instructor was saying when you wrote them?  The Pulse eliminates this problem forever with its built-in audio recorder.  Here is the scenario:

• Walk into class, open your Livescribe notebook and click the record icon located on the bottom of every page.
• Take your notes, draw your diagrams and basically forget that your pen is anything more than a writing device.
• At the end of class, click the stop icon.

When it comes time to review your notes, you can click anywhere on the page and it will start playing the audio from when you wrote that portion of your notes.  It is an immediate index of the entire lecture.  If you have docked your pen to your computer, both the notes and the audio are available in the application that comes with the pen.  Click any where in the notes and the audio starts playing in sync with when you wrote that note.

Dot Paper – How The Magic Happens

Included in the box when I bought my Pulse was a standard 1-subject notebook like those used on every high school and college campus.  The paper that makes up the notebook however is not so standard.  Printed lightly across the entire page are micro-dots.  The pattern of the micro-dots is so unique that the Pulse knows what notebook, page and line I am on when I write.

Livescribe offers 1-subject notebooks in a four pack for $20 and the black journal edition in a two pack for $25.  The journals are similar in design to another favorite of mine, the Moleskine notebook.  Notebooks and journals are numbered, with 1-8 currently available in both styles.  Remember that the micro-dots identify the notebook the page is from, so you don’t want to be using two #1 notebooks at the same time.

The Windows version of the Livescribe software allows you to print your own micro-dot paper, so you aren’t beholden to the company for refills.  I am a Mac user, so I haven’t had this option.

The battery is built-in and rechargeable.  It charges on the included dock.  They really thought each piece of the design through – the dock is magnetic so the pen snaps into place right on the contacts for sync and charging.

Dollars and Cents

We have already talked about the cost of the paper.  Like a printer ink cartridge refill, you need to have it to make the device work.  The company seems to have regular specials – buy the pen, get 4 free notebooks, buy a notebook get a ink refill and so on.

Amazon has the 2GB pen for $170 and the 1GB edition for $130.  I was cheap and bought the 1GB edition and haven’t run out of space yet.  I don’t use the audio feature a whole lot so most of my notes are just the capture of what I wrote.

Your recurring costs will be the notebooks or journals and pen refills.

Final Thoughts

I can’t imagine walking into a class with an ordinary pen & paper now that I have used the Pulse.  That technology is dead to me.  I like my notes available to me in a form that I can search and the audio capability is great when I use it.  There is a point of etiquette that needs to be noted however – especially if you are using the Pulse in a meeting rather than an open classroom.  You need to let folks know that you are recording.  You can pause the recording if you want to take the meeting off-the-record and the pen makes appropriate noises to show that you have.  This thing isn’t a spy gadget.  It is an amazing productivity tool that should make the Number 2 pencil very nervous.

One of the challenges during that time was picking the spot for a team meeting.  Eller’s own computer labs were full of our fellow students and their teams.  We would occasionally sneak off to some other college’s lab – Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering has a really nice one – only getting glared at occasionally by students as they worked their equations while we talked about profit margins.

Today many coffee shops have “Free Wi-Fi” signs plastered next to their doors but the $4 coffee and, like any public access wi-fi, the security concerns make this a usable but not ideal choice.

The Verizon MiFi

The MiFi™ is made by Novatel Wireless and is available on both the Verizon and Sprint networks.  I am a Verizon customer so I will limit this post to talking about that specific implementation of the device.

So… What is it?  The MiFi is a portable wireless hotspot.  Walk into a room without Internet connectivity, push the power button and, as Emeril would say, Bam! you’ve got a wireless connection to the Internet for yourself and up to four of your teammates.  Better yet, the device supports WPA2 encryption so your bits are safe as they fly through the air.

I have used this device on the road to California (No! I wasn’t driving) and maintained a connection for a vast majority of the trip.  I have used it in meetings held off-site where I don’t have access rights to the building’s wireless and needed to do a Web site demo.  Most recently, I have used it to make the deadline to turn in an assignment for ETCV560 and my Comcast-provided Internet connectivity was down.

Nerding Out

Let’s talk specs for a moment.  If this isn’t your interest, you can skip to the next section.  It won’t hurt my feelings.  …sniff…

The MiFi™ 2200, the official designator for the Verizon device, supports both 802.11 b & g.  802.11b has an average throughput of ~5 Mbps while 802.11g sports a speedy ~22 Mbps average throughput.  What this means for the student team is that, if you are just sharing files among yourselves you can do that at zippy-fast speeds – not worrying about bandwidth limits or going out to the Internet and back.

If you do need to post something to the Web, the EV-DO Rev. A version of the MiFi offers up to 1.8 Mbps upload and 3.1 Mbps download.  Note that “up to.” I haven’t seen that kind of speed here in Tucson but I haven’t been frustrated with its speed either.

Since it is a normal 802.11 wireless device, any wireless-capable laptop, pda or refrigerator could potentially use it.  Officially Mac OS X 10.3 and later, Windows Vista & XP and Linux are supported operating systems.  That may have to do with the need to plug the device into a computer the first time you use it in order to set it up.

It has a rechargeable Li-ion battery which is charged using a USB cable provided in the box. There is also a wall charger.

For all the specs, you can download the datasheet (pdf).

Dollars and Cents

The MiFi currently costs $270 without a contract.  There are three plans available depending on your needs.

1. If you don’t mind paying the full purchase price for the device, Verizon offers a pay-as-you-go plan that operates much like a hotel’s Internet access.  You can buy access for 24-hour periods whenever you need them.
2. A 1-year contract knocks the price of the device down to $170.
3. A 2-year contract gets you the MiFi for $99.

If you are on the 1-year or 2-year contract, you will need to pick either the 250MB ($40/month) or 5GB plan ($60/month).  If you don’t need to use it more than a couple of times a month, I would start out with the 250MB plan.  You will want to avoid watching YouTube videos but for eMail and other text-based needs, it is fine.

Verizon allows you to change your plan as needed without affecting your renew date.  Twice during my contract so far, I have called my rep and had him move me to the 5GB plan for a month when I knew I was going to need it.  This is a much better approach than paying for the overages are $0.10/MB on the 250MB plan.  The 5GB plan overage rate is $0.05/MB.

Summing It Up

With the focus on building leadership and team skills continuing to grow in our classrooms, the ease-of-use of the MiFi enables us to focus on the learning and not on the technology.

Available from http://getdropbox.com, the service allows you to keep any files you drag into the Dropbox folder in-sync across all your computers. Files are also available via the Dropbox website, so if you are away from your own computer, you can download a file, work on it and upload it again.

Getting Started with Dropbox

Dropbox is more than just a Web site. The best user experience comes from installing the Dropbox application. When the app first launches it creates a folder inside My Documents on Windows and in the Home directory on a Mac. The app then monitors that folder for new files which get uploaded to the Dropbox site as soon as they are added.

If you have more than one computer, you can install the Dropbox app on each and all your files are kept up to date on all your computers.  Great for people with a desktop and a laptop.

Dropbox is ideal for students and teams

One of Dropbox’s strongest features is its ability to share files. Here is how it works:

• Create a folder inside your Dropbox folder and give it a good name – something that will remind you who it is shared with.
• Right-click on the folder and select Sharing Options from the contextual menu. This will take you to the Dropbox website.
• In the right column of the website, you will see a box for “Invite more people” – type in one or more email addresses for the folks you want to share the folder with and click the invite button.
• Each invitee is sent an eMail inviting them to the shared folder.

Now everyone who is shared on that folder, assuming that they have the Dropbox app installed, will have the files on their computer.  If you are on a team for a class project, you could use this as a central source to store your team files.  Unlike emailing documents around, you don’t really have to think about the sharing.  Open the file, make your changes and save it.  It is automatically sent to all your teammates. If you and a teammate work on the same file at the same time, Dropbox will notice the conflict and will save both files so that you can resolve the conflict.  Finally, if you delete a file, Dropbox keeps a copy for 30 days, so you can get back to it if you need to.

Dollars and Cents

Signing up for Dropbox will get you 2GB of space for free.  This allows you to try the tool and use it in real world situations.  The company even has a referral program – refer a friend to Dropbox and you both get 250MB extra space.  It took me about three weeks to reach the maximum 5GB of free space, sharing it with my friends and colleagues.

If you really use it, you are going to want more space. The company sells two plans – a 50GB plan for $100 a year or 100GB for $200 a year.  There are also monthly payment plans for a little bit more.