Join.Me -- free desktop sharing

Posting twice in one day has to be some sort of a record, but today I found the coolest free tool for sharing your desktop and holding a video conference and couldn't resist. I have two screens and tried sharing with myself. It seems to work reasonably fast and smoothly.


There is no registration and it can handle up to 250 people together in one meeting. You can also have a Join.Me icon on your desktop if you like to set up meetings on the fly. The person who calls the meeting uses the Share Button to get the meeting code. One the others in the group receive the code, they can join the meeting. Control can be passed around. If you're showing a video, the sound is not broadcast from your computer, so you'll have to hold the phone up to the computer speaker.

Participants can communicate via phone or chat box. Join.me provides a free conference line, but it's not toll free so you may be charged for a call, but you can use your own conference number by changing the audio setting.

Finally there's a mobile viewer for iPhone and iPad now available and there'll soon be one for the android phones. From Digital Inspiration: "the apps are free, incredibly easy to use and also supports text chat so you may not just watch the presenter's screen while on the go but also interact with the meeting participants."

Free text-to-speech program -- Balabolka

""Balabolka is a Text-To-Speech (TTS) program. All computer voices installed on your system are available to Balabolka. ... The program uses various versions of Microsoft Speech API (SAPI); it allows to alter a voice's parameters, including rate and pitch. The user can apply a special substitution list to improve the quality of the voice's articulation. This feature is useful when you want to change the spelling of words. The rules for the pronunciation correction use the syntax of regular expressions.

Balabolka can save the synchronized text in external LRC files or in MP3 tags inside the audio files. When an audio file is played with players on a computer or on modern digital audio players, the text is displayed synchronously (at the same way, as lyrics for songs)."

There is also a portable version so Balabolka does not have to be installed on your computer. For second language teachers, it will also read in a number of other languages including French and Spanish so your students can listen along as they read text passages.

Maria Andersen -- Prezi master

Maria makes wonderful use of Prezi as an engaging presentation tool. (Note to self -- she doesn't do her own artwork. Don't be so hard on yourself!) I found this one here in her blog, Teaching College Math. That blog name is something of a misnomer because there are wonderful ideas there for all levels of math teaching and this one abpout future-proofing your education speaks to all educators.

Future-Proof Your Education on Prezi

I have two observations. The first is about Prezi. It seems at first to be a tool that affords people the opportunity to explore non-sequentially, but the more I look at it, the less I think this is the case. Yes, if you have a great illustration to work within, you can get a visual big picture that complements the thoughts, but the viewing pathway is really established by the creator. The viewer goes along for the ride.

The second is about Maria's ontent. I think a great way to begin any class would be to set up something like this as a way to measure progress and keep teacher and students together constantly assessing how well they are doing. The more deliberately we measure ourselves and our work against a series of sign posts, the more we'll internalise the message, appreciate the value of our education, and take on the responsibility for ensuring our education has no 'best by' date.

It's also interesting to note that none of her suggestions require radical changes to what we've been doing for a long time in most classes -- with the possible exception of math especially at the secondary level. Here's a summary of the Prezi list quoted from her blog post with the same title:

• ANALYZE … think critically, interpret data, predict, solve problems, make decisions, scrutinize information sources

• EXPLAIN … convey ideas in writing, depict data visually, speak so that others understand, present ideas digitally

• FOCUS … observe critically, read with understanding, be self-directed, listen carefully, set and meet goals

• EXPLAIN … convey ideas in writing, depict data visually, speak so that others understand, present ideas digitally

• LEARN…find information quickly, reflect and evaluate learning, manage information, leverage tech to learn, metacognitive

• INTERACT … guide others, lead, collaborate, advocate and influence, resolve conflict and negotiate, share

• FLEX … be able to adapt, be creative, innovate, think across disciplines and cultures, design/usability

Google Art Project -- Stunning

"Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces. ... Simply select a museum from the homepage and then either chose ‘Explore the museum’ or ‘View Artwork’. Once you are in the main site use the drop-down menus or the side info bar to navigate between artworks and museums. Finally create and share your own collections online." (quoted from their website)

The images used to introduce galleries participating Google Art Project are stunning.





Links for Facebook viewers: my art collage in Vuvox; video about the project)

P.S. I'd forgotten how quick it is to build a collage in Vuvox if you don't get fancy -- but the creative possibilities are a lot of fun.

Great Tool offered free for the next 24 hours on GIveaway of the Day -- iSpring Presenter

Giveaway of the Day is a website that offers one free tool each 24 hour period. If you choose to download, you must install and activate the Giveaway license inside that 24 hour period before the deal expires. Usually this means you'll have a forever license for the product. Scrolling down the page takes you to the comments of those who've tried the product that day. They're a good guide about whether the program does what it says, if there are other free alternatives, and if there are any downloading issues. When you unzip the downloaded file, open the "Read Me" instructions first and follow them exactly. That will ensure you don't end up with a trial version, but get all the information needed to register your copy correctly.

Today's Giveaway is iSpring Presenter which is a great tool if you use PowerPoint. From the website: " iSpring Presenter works as a PowerPoint AddIn. It transforms your PowerPoint into a high end tool for creating engaging and interactive Flash based e-learning courses that can be viewed on virtually any computer or platform." It comes bundled with iSpring quizmaker. [Note: it does not work with the Open Office alternative to PowerPoint.] Here are links to a sample video and their tutorials.

Turning PPT into flash with all the animations preserved is a great way to display student's work without going to something like Animoto. You can publish it to Slideboom (keeping the account private if you wish) and pull in the embed code from there needed for students to display their work in their blogs or on a class website or wiki. The Slideboom Shop which has PPT templates is offering an 80% discount until Feb.3. They're still on the pricey side, but the graphs and charts might be good if students are integrating math or statistics into projects. There's also a free set and a weekly sample you can download free.

Finally, if you're into travel, KLM has a contest called "Pack Up Your Pals" where you can win a free trip by getting friends to validate your invitation. If you have long lists of Facebook or other friends, you can get multiple contest entries.

A Cool Tool -- Cohere

This one comes under the heading of 'sensemaking'. (Image link for Facebook view.)

Cohere is a visual idea mapping for "trying to construct coherent patterns from the ocean of information" available online. It goes way beyond familiar social bookmarking tools and tag clouds and makes possible the development of idea clouds which can have one or more websites associated with each individual idea.You can also install a Firefox plugin so you can add to your web of ideas as you browse.

Cohere allows you to weave relationships among the tags and phrases. As you build the connections a large web grows that can be viewed as dynamic a big picture. As the web grows, you can focus in on just one 'corner' or hub and filter the kinds of related ideas you want to see. The ideas can be viewed as a list, a timeline, or by geographic location on a Google map. Click the 'Connections' view to see the dynamic web.

This seems to be a sister project of the downloadable dialogue mapping tool -- Compendium.

I haven't tried it yet, but I've been thinking about how this could surpass Twitter as a conference backchannel tool because the ideas are archived and connected. I'm going to work on my own math wiki page and see if I can create a new web of ideas and websites for my next presentation. I'll post it here when I've finished. In the meantime, here's the link to the video introduction (link for Facebook view).



Here's a sample about what climate sceptics believe based on this BBC article by Richard Black (2007). It may load a little slowly, but it's worth a look.

Life after EDIM

On the weekend I received an email from Karena asking me to reach out to a prospective student who wanted some information about the EDIM program. I fired off an email asking what he'd like to know and he sent back some questions -- how I'd rate my experience and the rigor of the program and whether I found my learning useful. The most interesting one for me, however, was: "Is there life after the program?" This is a double whammy because I've also taken early retirement, so I didn't just go back to my old school life after I finished the EDIM program. I'm really trying to catapult myself into a life that still involves teaching but not the day-to-day responsibility of secondary classroom work. I thought my shiny new M.Sc. would give me access to lots of university level jobs, but alas, you now need a Ph.D or Ed.D to do a lot of that work and I'm not sure at 59 whether I'm up for 3-5 years more training and research before those doors open. So for now I peruse the online data bases of post secondary jobs weekly looking for interesting opportunities that don't have as a minimum requirement the completion of a doctorate.

Part of this process has required the polishing of my CV -- and I've had to ask myself repeatedly what I really have to offer and how can I wrap up a career of over 35 years into a few pages that will convince the screening committee that I can do the job. It's an interesting process -- rather like backwards building (yes -- Wiggins and McTigue are my new heroes!) a unit or a lesson. I have to start with the end in mind and try to sandwich the direct explanation of my skills and experience between layers of material that will connect to the recruiters in an interesting way.

Another thing I've discovered on this journey is that while many K-12 schools are bogged down by the effort to standardize learning so that all students exit with the same skills and knowledge sets, at the university level institutions and departments are coming together to map out the real learning outcomes for students and then to find the intersection between teaching content and reaching learners. I wonder how students who are now growing up in schools where the emphasis is on ticking off the standards as they progress through the grade levels will manage when they get to post-secondary training where they are expected to become partners in the management of their learning and must shoulder a large part of the responsibility of ensuring that they meet the outcomes.

The video that follows is from Royal Roads University in Victoria, BC. It's long but if you listen behind the details of the discussion to the intention of why this new work of curriculum mapping is being done, it makes for an interesting listen. Perhaps the most interesting questions are: "What questions you will ask to determine whether the program outcomes were met?" and "How can we know that the actions we're taking are making a difference?" But in the 21st century, these questions I think should be asked not only by us educators, but also the students. Wolf puts forward idea that we need to make space in the curriculum for the students to reflect on all they've learned -- to look back in order to move forward. If the students of today become the education critics of tomorrow, it may behoove us to grow learners who take away from their years in K-12 not only skills and knowledge but also an overarching appreciation for how much they have learned and how earlier learning was always the platform for new learning.

Watch live streaming video from royalroads at livestream.com