When looking for a beach in a remote, street sign-free peninsula of Rhode Island, nothing beats Google Maps. Yet Google Maps can be used for much more than finding places. Google Maps (and its three-dimensional sibling, Google Earth) is configured specifically to allow users to post their own data to the maps, or to pull…
Author: Fred Zinn
On the Horizon: Digital Storytelling
During our audio and video workshops this June we’ve seen several faculty give demonstrations of how they have their students produce short video or audio projects as assignments. In some cases, these are simple personal statements (several based their assigments on the format used in the NPR “This I Believe” Project), others had their students…
On the Horizon: New Devices in Classroom
(excerpt from Emerging Technologies Workshop : June 2007) Devices that let all students respond to questions These devices (like small television remotes) allow students to respond to questions posed by the instructor. The results are collected and tabulated by a computer and can be displayed immediately to the class or used for evaluation later. The…
Learn More: the 2007 Horizon Report
The Horizon Report from the New Media Consortium is a great place to go if you want to see what is coming up that may impact learning and teaching. The consortium looks at the technologies that are being used and talked about and selects a few for further analysis. The final short list is sorted…
Collecting Content in Collaborative Tools
(from the March 2007 Emerging Technologies and Pie Presentation) Del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, and similar services, allow users to store their collections (of bookmarks, photos, videos, etc.) online. These files can be shared with individuals, groups, or the world. Each item can also be tagged with keywords supplied by the poster (or other users). This “folksonomy”…
Classroom Radio: Podcasting Course Content
(from the May 2007 Emerging Technologies and Pie Presentation) Audio Episode: Classroom Radio (1 minute) A podcast is a series of audio or video files that the audience can subscribe to in order to receive, or be notified of, new episodes as soon as they are posted. The first part of the process involves…
Syndicating and Subscribing to Course Content (RSS)
(from the April 2007 Emerging Technologies and Pie Presentation) Audio Episode: RSS (1 minute) RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”, among others) is a process that allows people who want to keep track of new content on a site to “subscribe” to the site and receive updates automatically when new information is posted. RSS also allows content…
Blogs for Courses
This February, OIT introduced a Blogging service to the campus in a low-key beta release (meaning that we didn’t advertise it and we tell all users that policies and features may change by the time it is officially released.) In the first month we had over 500 blogs created. Most seem to be “hello world”…
Purpose of this Blog
This blog is about teaching. Specifically teaching while using some sort of “technology”. For some people, this can mean just about anything that was invented since they left college. For others, it means the latest widget or thingamabob that has been on the cover of Time Magazine. We plan to cover all of these, but…