I want to blog about Snagit because it's a tool I find myself using at work nearly every day. I think it's a pretty familar tool now, so perhaps it's not exactly "cutting edge" but I heart Snagit. So this is my shout out.
Snagit is a screen-capturing software that allows you to basically take a picture of whatever is on your computer screen and embed it in a document or website, email it, or use it to create a custom graphic. You can try a free trial at the link below. Licenses cost about $50.
http://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.asp
I create a lot of training materials, and my training involves technology that, frankly, is very difficult to explain. Therefore, I do a lot of in-person training so I can SHOW my colleagues how to do something rather than trying to explain in words. This would be just as useful for teachers who want to show (rather than describe) something more complex, or who want to incorporate a lot of images into their units.
Why do I love it?
It's easy to use, flexible, and makes my life much easier. I think I learned how to use the basics of Snagit in about 1 minute. I found it very intuitive.
I don't get fancy with it; I use it to capture an image of whatever it is I'm training on so I can embed it as part of my training materials or even email it to users (like a "this is how your screen should look" type of thing). Snagit creates a frame that you can place over whatever you want to capture. It's great that you can control this, because you can limit the size of what you want to caputre so you're not wasting space. Once Snagit captures the part of the screen you've selected, you can edit the image. I use the highlighting feature quite a bit, but you can also insert text, shapes (like arrows, for instance), and a few other things. This is perfect because rather than explaining something in detail, I can email someone a screenshot with key items highlighted and a few words of text like "enter student ID here". Doing this gets my point across in a very effective but simple manner.
What are the challenges?
Make sure you've brushed up on those fair-use and copyright recommendations. Snagit makes it exceedingly easy to take images from the Internet, and it's therefore also easy to step over copyright boundaries. The positive is that there are plenty of copyright-free images out there to use...so just be careful with what you are copying and how you are using it.
So thank you, Snagit. I no longer have to be on the phone saying "you know that icon thing by that other thing that's called, um, I'm not sure what it's called but it's that bigger thing near that smaller thing?" Now I can just say "let me email you a screen shot." You make my day happier.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Saturday, October 2, 2010
RefWorks
RefWorks is an online research, writing, and collaboration tool. Like Diigo, it helps manage information. Can you tell I'm very interested in research and collaboration tools? Since I teach college English, the bulk of student work is spent in writing thesis-based papers and working in discussion and presentation groups, so while there may be flashier and more fun online tools out there, but I need a workhorse that delivers on helping students with research and collaboration.
RefWorks is a bit limited in that it is not free. You can check out the link and a trial here: http://www.refworks.com. I know a lot of colleges have subscriptions.
St. Thomas DOES have a subscription, so as a student you can make use of this tool for yourself. Or if you teach here, your students have free use of this great tool. You can find the RefWorks link on the UST Libraries home page (you will need to create an account ID and password to enter): https://www-refworks-com.ezproxy.stthomas.edu/Refworks/login.asp?WNCLang=false. I don't know if high schools use this, but it seems like it would be useful tool for any school where students are expected to complete rigorous research.
I completed a training session on RefWorks at the library, and I have my students also attend a training session in preparation for their final research project. RefWorks is one of those tools that make me think "why couldn't I have had this back when I was in college!" It makes collecting and organizing research so easy, and best of all it creates a bibliography for you! There are tutorials that walk users through how to use this tool, and the library staff can provide help as well, so I won't go into details of how to use it. Instead, I'll detail what I consider highlights and challenges of this tool.
Highlights:
RefWorks connects easily with online journals and materials. It's pretty easy to gather materials from online sources. In fact, it's not that different from online shopping, except here you're adding research to your "cart". I personally find it intutive to use. My students, on the other hand, had mixed reactions. Some found it really easy, others needed a little extra help.
They make it pretty easy to hand-enter reserach done off-line...you know, old-fashioned things like books! You fill in online fields to collect book or journal information (title, author, publisher, year, etc.) and RefWorks formats it and adds it to your collection. I found the hand-entering so easy that I used it quite a bit.
You can organize all your materials into different folders, and it's easy to move materials around or use them in more than one folder.
The bibliography tool is AWESOME. You just select what you want in your bibiliography, select the style in which you need it (various versions of MLA, APA, Chicago, and others...I counted there are 23 to choose from), and it will create your bibliography in the chosen style. Like magic, in maybe a minute you have something that would have taken maybe an hour to do by hand.
Challenges:
The collaboration elements of RefWorks seem limited to sharing resources. I think if I were assigning a group presentation I would use a class wiki instead, or even Diigo. RefWorks seems better suited for the creation of research papers, and not online collaboration.
While I love the bibliography tool, it does kind of eliminate the need for students to actually learn a particular style, and I'm not convinced that a basic knowledge of style elements isn't still necessary. I teach basic MLA style in my class, and I can tell that students do wonder why they need to know it when the computer just does this for them. However, I've used RefWorks twice now for my graduate education classes, and have chosen the correct APA style, and in both cases my profs have indicated there was something minor incorrect with my bibliography. So either RefWorks doesn't have the style exactly correct or my profs don't. But I have to say that I've also noticed little issues when students have submitted their RefWorks MLA-style bibliographies. So, I think the bibliography tool should be relied on in the same way one uses spell-check. With spell-check, you still need to have enough knowledge to know if something is spelled wrong because a computer cannot understand context. In the same way, I think you still need to have enough knowledge to be able to proof your bibliography for small issues. Then again, my students say I'm the "only professor" who cares about that (which I do not believe!) and my sister (also back in school) says that she doesn't need to know style because the computer does it now and her professor doesn't care if it's exactly right or not. Perhaps I'm old-fashioned in my concern for overreliance on computers, just as my grandmother insisted that my sister and I should know how to sew, even though we laughed at her: "grandma, you can just BUY clothes now". But I wish I did know how to sew now, and I still think that tools like this RefWorks bibliography are very useful...but one still shouldn't entirely rely on it. Don't neglect your own skills.
That was a bit of a tangent, and probably underlines my over-arching attitude toward online tools like this: they are great tools, but not total replacements.
RefWorks is a bit limited in that it is not free. You can check out the link and a trial here: http://www.refworks.com. I know a lot of colleges have subscriptions.
St. Thomas DOES have a subscription, so as a student you can make use of this tool for yourself. Or if you teach here, your students have free use of this great tool. You can find the RefWorks link on the UST Libraries home page (you will need to create an account ID and password to enter): https://www-refworks-com.ezproxy.stthomas.edu/Refworks/login.asp?WNCLang=false. I don't know if high schools use this, but it seems like it would be useful tool for any school where students are expected to complete rigorous research.
I completed a training session on RefWorks at the library, and I have my students also attend a training session in preparation for their final research project. RefWorks is one of those tools that make me think "why couldn't I have had this back when I was in college!" It makes collecting and organizing research so easy, and best of all it creates a bibliography for you! There are tutorials that walk users through how to use this tool, and the library staff can provide help as well, so I won't go into details of how to use it. Instead, I'll detail what I consider highlights and challenges of this tool.
Highlights:
RefWorks connects easily with online journals and materials. It's pretty easy to gather materials from online sources. In fact, it's not that different from online shopping, except here you're adding research to your "cart". I personally find it intutive to use. My students, on the other hand, had mixed reactions. Some found it really easy, others needed a little extra help.
They make it pretty easy to hand-enter reserach done off-line...you know, old-fashioned things like books! You fill in online fields to collect book or journal information (title, author, publisher, year, etc.) and RefWorks formats it and adds it to your collection. I found the hand-entering so easy that I used it quite a bit.
You can organize all your materials into different folders, and it's easy to move materials around or use them in more than one folder.
The bibliography tool is AWESOME. You just select what you want in your bibiliography, select the style in which you need it (various versions of MLA, APA, Chicago, and others...I counted there are 23 to choose from), and it will create your bibliography in the chosen style. Like magic, in maybe a minute you have something that would have taken maybe an hour to do by hand.
Challenges:
The collaboration elements of RefWorks seem limited to sharing resources. I think if I were assigning a group presentation I would use a class wiki instead, or even Diigo. RefWorks seems better suited for the creation of research papers, and not online collaboration.
While I love the bibliography tool, it does kind of eliminate the need for students to actually learn a particular style, and I'm not convinced that a basic knowledge of style elements isn't still necessary. I teach basic MLA style in my class, and I can tell that students do wonder why they need to know it when the computer just does this for them. However, I've used RefWorks twice now for my graduate education classes, and have chosen the correct APA style, and in both cases my profs have indicated there was something minor incorrect with my bibliography. So either RefWorks doesn't have the style exactly correct or my profs don't. But I have to say that I've also noticed little issues when students have submitted their RefWorks MLA-style bibliographies. So, I think the bibliography tool should be relied on in the same way one uses spell-check. With spell-check, you still need to have enough knowledge to know if something is spelled wrong because a computer cannot understand context. In the same way, I think you still need to have enough knowledge to be able to proof your bibliography for small issues. Then again, my students say I'm the "only professor" who cares about that (which I do not believe!) and my sister (also back in school) says that she doesn't need to know style because the computer does it now and her professor doesn't care if it's exactly right or not. Perhaps I'm old-fashioned in my concern for overreliance on computers, just as my grandmother insisted that my sister and I should know how to sew, even though we laughed at her: "grandma, you can just BUY clothes now". But I wish I did know how to sew now, and I still think that tools like this RefWorks bibliography are very useful...but one still shouldn't entirely rely on it. Don't neglect your own skills.
That was a bit of a tangent, and probably underlines my over-arching attitude toward online tools like this: they are great tools, but not total replacements.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Diigo - Useful Tool for Education?
I don't use too many Internet-based tools when teaching my English courses, so there's a plethora of new (well, "new to me") tools to explore for this assignment. I did a basic Google search for "internet teaching tools" and came across one that seemed like it would be useful. Diigo is an information management tool that allows you to (as their website says) "collect and organize anything" from docs, pictures, bookmarks, screenshots, notes, etc. A big plus is that apparently you can easily access and share this information between computers and smart phones.
You can find the link here: http://www.diigo.com/
This thing looks amazing, especially for the kind of collaborative work I'd like to be doing in my classes. It seems like it would be helpful for students to remotely work together to create presentations (sharing photos, links, bookmarking websites, and contributing to notes), and allow students to better research for their formal papers as well as some of the more creative class projects. Diigo apparently allows students to share and manage bibliographies as well. I'm not sure how useful that would be, since UST already has a darn good tool for bookmarking online research and creating bibliographies (I think I'll introduce that in another blog posting).
Still, managing information is, I think, the first step for using technology in the classroom. In fact, as instructor I could see myself using a tool like this to help me manage and share different articles, photos, websites and so forth that contribute to whatever text or topic we are discussing in class. Finally, it's my experience that students in general do not seek out information online. Or, at least they are not proactive in doing so for MY class! I'll email to my students links to useful information and websites, especially online style manuals, and find that students rarely make use of that information. I can barely get my students to use the Blackboard component of my class. I think incorporating something like Diigo into the structure of my class would compell students to go OUT there and find information for themselves, to explore, and to become more self-directed in their learning. It would be especially useful, perhaps, to get a computer classroom and spend class time collecting information and working with a management system like Diigo so I can additionally assist students in being critical selectors of information. With so much information available, how does one determine what is the BEST information to use, what is academically solid and what is biased or misleading? These are the kinds of questions that a Diigo component may help address, since this is an increasingly important skill that directly ties to the critical analysis goal of my English courses. In that way Diigo can both enhance students' critical skills as well as giving them a fun tool to complete future assignments.
I watched the Diigo tour, which gives a pretty thorough overview of how Diigo works. I'll mention some of what I feel are the most useful features within the three main functions of Diigo (research, share, and collaborate):
Research:
* You can annotate and/or highlight websites, documents, etc. and those annotations will be saved. This is a HUGE benefit, at least for me. I find myself tied to paper simply because I want my notes and highlighting. If I can do the same thing to online documents, that frees me from paper and makes it easier to share information. I think students will find it just as useful.
* You can tag and organize information you've uploaded. Again, very helpful.
* You can create reports or slideshows based on the websites, photos, documents that you've bookmarked or uploaded. I'm not entirely sure how useful this would be, but it may prove helpful during basic student presentations or if I want to share something without doing, for instance, a whole PowerPoint. It seems like it would be most useful when sharing images.
Share:
* Diigo has different privacy settings and options for sharing information. Some ways to share include an RSS feed, sharing a "collection" of material, or sharing via widgets...and I'm not sure what that means.
* Diigo has a "follow" feature that, in the demonstration, looks a great deal like Twitter, where a group of users (like a class) could follow each other and receive updates. I'm not sure if users can send each other messages this way, like questions. If so, this would be a really handy feature.
* You can also share with non-Diigo users via an annotated link.
Collaborate:
* Collaboration looks easy...you can set up groups, and group members can make comments on each others' materials and even have threaded discussions about the group materials.
Remaining questions....
*One thing I did not see was a way to determine which group members are contributing and how often. I'm assuming this is a feature...it seems like it would be necessary simply for the commentary and discussion features. However, if there is not a way to determine who is contributing what, it would be difficult for me as instructor to have an assessment based on this element of collaboration.
*I'm still curious to find out how Diigo interacts with, for instance, a wiki tool or even Power Point or some other presentation software. I'm also still thinking about how this tool could be used in the context of producing a formal research paper. There is a bibliography tool, but it was not demonstrated. Also, might this be something I could incorporate on my own into a type of "media used" bibliography? In short, how can Diigo be used to create a final project? And how can I use Diigo as a tool to increase and document students' skills in selective, critical research?
Diigo is FREE...so I just signed up. This coming week I'm going to practice using Diigo for a sample assignment in my poetry unit, and I'll post an update with my experiences and recommendations!
You can find the link here: http://www.diigo.com/
This thing looks amazing, especially for the kind of collaborative work I'd like to be doing in my classes. It seems like it would be helpful for students to remotely work together to create presentations (sharing photos, links, bookmarking websites, and contributing to notes), and allow students to better research for their formal papers as well as some of the more creative class projects. Diigo apparently allows students to share and manage bibliographies as well. I'm not sure how useful that would be, since UST already has a darn good tool for bookmarking online research and creating bibliographies (I think I'll introduce that in another blog posting).
Still, managing information is, I think, the first step for using technology in the classroom. In fact, as instructor I could see myself using a tool like this to help me manage and share different articles, photos, websites and so forth that contribute to whatever text or topic we are discussing in class. Finally, it's my experience that students in general do not seek out information online. Or, at least they are not proactive in doing so for MY class! I'll email to my students links to useful information and websites, especially online style manuals, and find that students rarely make use of that information. I can barely get my students to use the Blackboard component of my class. I think incorporating something like Diigo into the structure of my class would compell students to go OUT there and find information for themselves, to explore, and to become more self-directed in their learning. It would be especially useful, perhaps, to get a computer classroom and spend class time collecting information and working with a management system like Diigo so I can additionally assist students in being critical selectors of information. With so much information available, how does one determine what is the BEST information to use, what is academically solid and what is biased or misleading? These are the kinds of questions that a Diigo component may help address, since this is an increasingly important skill that directly ties to the critical analysis goal of my English courses. In that way Diigo can both enhance students' critical skills as well as giving them a fun tool to complete future assignments.
I watched the Diigo tour, which gives a pretty thorough overview of how Diigo works. I'll mention some of what I feel are the most useful features within the three main functions of Diigo (research, share, and collaborate):
Research:
* You can annotate and/or highlight websites, documents, etc. and those annotations will be saved. This is a HUGE benefit, at least for me. I find myself tied to paper simply because I want my notes and highlighting. If I can do the same thing to online documents, that frees me from paper and makes it easier to share information. I think students will find it just as useful.
* You can tag and organize information you've uploaded. Again, very helpful.
* You can create reports or slideshows based on the websites, photos, documents that you've bookmarked or uploaded. I'm not entirely sure how useful this would be, but it may prove helpful during basic student presentations or if I want to share something without doing, for instance, a whole PowerPoint. It seems like it would be most useful when sharing images.
Share:
* Diigo has different privacy settings and options for sharing information. Some ways to share include an RSS feed, sharing a "collection" of material, or sharing via widgets...and I'm not sure what that means.
* Diigo has a "follow" feature that, in the demonstration, looks a great deal like Twitter, where a group of users (like a class) could follow each other and receive updates. I'm not sure if users can send each other messages this way, like questions. If so, this would be a really handy feature.
* You can also share with non-Diigo users via an annotated link.
Collaborate:
* Collaboration looks easy...you can set up groups, and group members can make comments on each others' materials and even have threaded discussions about the group materials.
Remaining questions....
*One thing I did not see was a way to determine which group members are contributing and how often. I'm assuming this is a feature...it seems like it would be necessary simply for the commentary and discussion features. However, if there is not a way to determine who is contributing what, it would be difficult for me as instructor to have an assessment based on this element of collaboration.
*I'm still curious to find out how Diigo interacts with, for instance, a wiki tool or even Power Point or some other presentation software. I'm also still thinking about how this tool could be used in the context of producing a formal research paper. There is a bibliography tool, but it was not demonstrated. Also, might this be something I could incorporate on my own into a type of "media used" bibliography? In short, how can Diigo be used to create a final project? And how can I use Diigo as a tool to increase and document students' skills in selective, critical research?
Diigo is FREE...so I just signed up. This coming week I'm going to practice using Diigo for a sample assignment in my poetry unit, and I'll post an update with my experiences and recommendations!
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