I just attended a meeting of ACI (Associated Colleges of Illinois) schools with fellow teaching and learning technology mentors last Friday at the University of Saint Francis in Joliet. I’ve always enjoyed this group, because it includes schools of a similar size to Dominican. Millikin, McKendree, Lewis University, and Trinity Christian were among the institutions represented at the meeting.
Among the topics discussed were the Horizon Report (already discussed in this very blog!). There was also sharing of some favorite sites, and I would like to share these with our readers below. Many of them may already be familiar to you. Thanks to Tami Eggleston from McKendree for providing this listing of resources to the group.
Prezi is a free online tool for creating presentations. You define your “path” and then move along it; you can include links to YouTube videos, graphics, documents, and more on the “canvas” that Prezi provides. You can also invite other editors to edit the content. The free version gives you 100 MB of space. One of the attendees, Rick Snoeyink from Trinity Christian, shared some of things he’s done with this interesting tool.
Google Forms was mentioned by several people throughout the meeting, as it is quickly becoming as popular a survey tool as the infamous Survey Monkey. Unlike the free version of the latter, you are not limited to just 10 questions and 100 respondents. You have to create a Google account to create a survey, but survey responders are NOT required to register with Google.
Doodle is a great way to find meeting times for a group of people. You supposedly do not even have to register to create a meeting, though you do if you want to use some of the administrative tools. Doodle looks like it would have great potential for instructors who want to schedule conference times and want to get away from posting a grid on their office doors, though I’ve not tried using it that way yet.
Animoto allows you to make short videos using your own photos, while Xtranormal allows one to make cartoon movies using built-in characters. Several in attendance have tried both of these. (Animoto is free up to 30 second-long movies, anything more requires a purchase.) One video produced using Xtranormal shared with the group was “So You Want to Get a PhD in Humanities” that was posted on YouTube.
Most of you likely already know about Ted, a site featuring many good presentations by known speakers.
Finally, Tami showed us go2web20, a site that provides links to the many Web 2.0 sites out there. A nice touch is that they are categorized.
Hope you find some of these interesting!
Filed under: Teaching and Learning Technologies
At the library we are big fans of Zoho Creator, which gives you quite a bit more flexibility than Google Forms for surveys, though does require (very minimal) programming to get the most out of it.