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Encouraging student voice and video comments

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Hey team, Won and I are at the Sloan-C Emerging Technology conference (#et4online), and I wanted to share some ideas with you all regarding the utilization of audio and video features in our discussion boards.  The presenter who inspired this post is Michelle Pacansky-Brock who wrote an ebook about VoiceThread. Her institution bought a site license so that students could make comments on VT via phone, ensuring that technology wouldn't be a barrier to student participation. My thoughts are that our online and most blended students have both computers with webcams/microphones and smartphones. I think that in Canvas we don't need to rely so much on VT to facilitate an audio/visual discussion, as these features are integrated into the learning platform. Michelle conducted research in her classes via surveys and discovered that when she as an instructor left voice and video comments, 97% of the students appreciated such comments. However, 75% of the students were unwilling
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What's all this talk about APIs?

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These application programming interfaces (APIs) are all the rage these days.  We hear about them in online commerce, social media, and now they are flooding the world of education and online learning.  So what are they exactly? An API is a way for websites, programmers, and applications to communicate with each other, exchanging information.  If I have a database with information that I would like to disseminate then I can develop an API and make that accessible to the world.  External developers can then create APIs with the purpose of communicating with my  API, and thus extract the information that I am making public.  It's similar to the notion of "my people will contact your people and we'll make this happen".  Only the people in mention is actually a software-to-software exchange. Why APIs are important APIs are a way to access information or databases which would otherwise be inaccessible.  For example, my database might be protected by a firewall, wherea
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Canvas Conference: InstructureCon 2013

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This last week I had the opportunity to attend Instructure's annual conference which focuses on it's flagship product, Canvas.  Founded in 2008, Instructure launched Canvas in 2011, and in that same year hosted its first annual conference.  The attendance at the first conference was meager, but in 2012 the attendance numbers grew to 600 attendees.  This year marked the third annual conference, with 1,200 attendees and a giant inflatable panda mascot flocking to the resorts of Park City.  Including staff and volunteers, some 1,500 people gathered to present and attend sessions.  After-hour festivities were themed based on the 1980's and included a conference carnival, visits from the Ghostbusters, a DeLorean (yes I had to google the spelling), and concerts from an 80's cover band and MC Hammer himself. The festivities were grand (and the 80's florescence was blinding), but the real value of the conference was obviously in the sessions.  Here are a few conferenc
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Below is an excellent blog post from 1stwebdesigner.com detailing the functional use of Dropbox in a professional milieu. To view the post from their website, head over to http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/design/dropbox-tips-and-tricks/
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Embedding Google Calendars

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Hey all, so quite a while ago I was wondering how to embed Google Calendars into a course. At the time I had no SMEs who were interested in integrating (alliteration) such a thing into their courses. But now I have a couple who are asking me to do this for them. It is actually an incredibly easy process, and the end result is very professional. I decided to create a screencast for my SMEs (who are jointly collaborating on a couple of Fall courses), and am going to embed it below:
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Creating flash toggle buttons

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This is a simple post. We discussed flash CS4 professional during today's L&L. I decided to start from scratch and go through the tutorial again with you guys via a screencast. So go ahead and get your hands dirty. (FYI, I had to break down the video into two parts) Part I   Part II
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Recap of L&L

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I just wanted to put up a recap of what I went over yesterday. This should be useful for Nicole and Gia, who didn't make it for that portion, as well as for anyone who would like to go over that again. The short description of my portion yesterday was that there are a wealth of resources and materials built right into PowerPoint that most people don't know about (or they don't realize the possibilities available). We are able to take what is given to us and modify it and truly make it our own.
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