Cristian Opazo, a Senior Academic Computing Consultant at Vassar College, recently posted an interesting article on the blog, RAIL:  RECIPES FOR ADVANCING INFORMATION LITERACY.

Cristian’s post is about how Google drawing tools can be used to create concept maps.  At Colgate, we have had several professors use the Webspiration Concept Mapping tool with their students with some success.

Because all faculty and students now have the full suite of Google Apps at their disposal, the idea of using the Google drawing tools is very powerful as students would be able to collaborate both in class and out of class on the same concept maps.

Below is an excerpt from Cristian’s post.  Click here to see the entire post.

“The drawing tools provided by Google Docs are very intuitive (think of a simpler version of Illustrator) and they allow you to do most anything you need as far as creating 2-D illustrations: stroke-and-fill shapes, freehand lines, inserting external images, etc. The library of shapes is generous (it features, for instance, 26 different types of arrows), and objects can be arranged into layers and grouped, masked, reordered, etc. The beauty of it all is that since it is natively generates vector graphics, you can create illustrations of arbitrarily large sizes that could be printed out poster-sized in all their vector-based glory. As a consequence, not only you can export your drawings as raster graphics (JPEG, PNG), but also as vector-based PDFs or SVGs. One particularly useful feature is the ability to insert links on your illustration, which takes you to the next level: creating hyperlinked images. This way, for instance, you can associate a URL to every concept in the map, so that when you click on the “Newtonian Mechanics” label, you are taken, for instance, to the respective page on Wikipedia (so you can read it, learn from it, and improve it!) In the best Google Docs tradition, of course, you can review the files history, so you can revert to a previous version just like that, and share your drawing with your collaborators for viewing, commenting or editing. Simply publishing the image file to the web is also possible, and very easy. “

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by Jon Brodki

German data protection officials today accused Facebook of “illegally compiling a vast photo database of users without their consent” and demanded that the social network destroy its archive of files based on facial recognition technology, the New York Times reported. Facebook says that it uses face recognition software to match users’ photos to others and suggest friends to tag in those photos.

A user can prevent friends from seeing tag suggestions when they upload photos that look like that user. But this requires opting out through Facebook privacy settings, which Germany notes is a violation of European law.

Full article here…

While i understand that this is not related to teaching, time after time, one reads warnings about privacy erosion in this day and age. In reality, online privacy doesn’t exist, and anything uploaded to these social media sites belongs to them. In other words, any information that you have on these social networking sites is a product that you provide to these companies. The terms of service clearly state that your data is theirs to use, for whatever reason they and their corresponding governments see fit.

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Did you know you can create video narratives with even just a smartphone? iMovie is just one of the apps available for iOS devices that is being used in classrooms for videos.

iMovie is a simple video editing app for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Just recently, Rebecca Ammerman used the iPad 2 and iMovie with her Extended Study Rome group to record and create video narratives on site. You can view her story at the CEL Website.  She brings a unique perspective, as the year previous she and many of her students had brought laptops and video cameras to Athens for a similar project.

Here’s a few things you should know about iMovie for iPad.

What is iMovie for iPad best at? 

• Editing video shot with the iPad into smaller clips, or editing out unnecessary bits.
• Creating simple video narratives using photos, voiceover and titles (you can take photos and record the voiceover right with your iDevice, or transfer photos over with the camera connection kit).
• Creating easy photo slideshows set to music.
• Narrating over a video clip.
• Exporting video directly to YouTube.
• Editing short bits of video, rather than working with 2 hours of footage.

What is iMovie for iPad NOT good for? 

• Complex editing. 
• Picture-in-picture or layering of images. 
• Special effects.
• Fancy titles (unless you select one of the titles from the iMovie templates).
• You have to put your titles over something, even if it is just a blank picture.

 Can I use video or images from another source? 

• You can download images from the internet or Dropbox, or you use the camera connection kit to transfer photos over from a regular digital camera.
• You can use video from a non-iPad source, but the video must be precisely formatted to iPad’s specs, and you must save it to the Camera Roll for iMovie to access it. This can be a difficult process, so it is only for advanced users.

How do I get my videos off the iPad?

• YouTube: Once you’ve finished a video in iMovie, you can export it directly to your YouTube account.
• Mac: If you want to export a .mov file onto your desktop, you will need to use the “Export to Camera Roll” option. Then, connect the iPad to your Mac, and open iPhoto on your Mac. Your iPad should show up as a device in iPhoto. You can then import the video into iPhoto.
• Email: If it is a very short video, you may be able to export to camera roll and then email it to yourself as a .mov file. It would have to be very short, and lowest quality.
• Dropbox or Box.com: You cannot directly export to Dropbox or Box.com devices at this time. However, you can export the video to the camera roll, and then add it to the Dropbox or Box app. Your video may be compressed further by going this route.

Keep in mind that iMovie for iPad is not the same as the iMovie on your Mac. As a mobile application, iMovie for iPad is much simpler, and it offers even less flexibility than the regular iMovie. For small clips and quick jobs, though, it can really get things done. 

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This is a free app, but you must sign up for the online service in order to use it. You get 100MB of storage for free.

The SlideShark app allows you to display PPT slides on the iPad, while maintaining all the fonts, graphics, colors, and animations you used in the original PowerPoint. It also does a good job of making sure it is filling the screen, and you can easily switch between slides.

Getting slides from your desktop onto SlideShark can go one of two ways: You can either upload it directly to the SlideShark.com site on your desktop/laptop computer, or you can save the file into a Dropbox account and open it in the SlideShark app.

I tend to use the Dropbox-to-SlideShark method, so that I don’t have to log into another service. I create the PPTx files on my desktop computer, then upload them into my Dropbox account (through the awesome Dropbox for iMac app). Then I open the Dropbox app on my iPad, select the PPTx file I want to open, and open it in SlideShark.

With this method, first SlideShark uploads the files to the online SlideShark server. Then it will appear as an “available” file for you to download on the SlideShark app. You have to click the download button to get the ppt onto your iPad to display it. Once it downloads, you can play it offline from your iPad.

Technically, your files live in the cloud, so at some point you need to be connected to the net in order to upload or download the files.

I have QuickOffice on my iPad for creating/editing ppt files. I was disappointed that things didn’t turn out very well when displaying a pptx file I created on the desktop in the QuickOffice app. You can see the screenshot below:

There is a border around the slide, and it also displays the time and battery settings at the top. I also noticed the missing heart in the “Do you ♥ JSTOR…”

In this screenshot you can see how it appears in SlideShark.

It looks much better, doesn’t give a big border to the image, displays a more true-to-original color, and fills the entire screen. It also displayed the unicode ♥ just fine. SlideShark will also properly display text and images that you’ve manipulated in PPT, and overall gives you the same appearance as if you were displaying it on a desktop computer.

You cannot edit slides in SlideShark, but if you need to display a ppt quickly with only your iPad around, it’s a great option. It is very responsive to taps, plus you can swipe forward and back (in case you accidentally skip a slide). You can also tap and hold to bring up a red laser dot to point out things.

It’s a free service, and I’d recommend it for displaying PPTs.  Especially if you have a bunch of stock PPTs on your computer that you wouldn’t mind being able to display whenever you want to. I’ve used this app in presentations with image-heavy PPTx and graphs, and I was very satisfied with the performance.

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