Distance Learning Mentoring Group

Minutes for April 10, 2008 CTL Workroom, 3:15 P.M.- 4:45 P.M. AS192

In attendance at the DLMG meeting: Alex Cheroske, Scott Gustafson, Laura Kobar, Georgianna Anderson, Sharon McLaughlin, and Peggy Johnson. Absent: Linda Evans, Shabana Kausar, Misa Vening, Marianne Arini, and Biray Alsac.

Shelley Rodrigo gave DLMG faculty a list of technology topics to consider. She asked them to select their top three topics and then began her presentation by addressing those issues. GOOGLE TOOLS Google calendar was of great interest. You can construct multiple calendars using the Google calendar tool (which is free).  You can share these calendars with other people you select. You can upload the calendar into your WebCT course.  Notes:

• Be sure to select "see all event details" if you are creating a calendar for your WebCT course.

• Whatever view you are seeing when you copy the HTML code for the calendar you created to paste in your course, that is the view students will see. For example, if you are viewing the "month" view, students will see the calendar by month, rather than week.

• You will have to update the calendar each semester. But you can save yourself some work if you have the deadlines in your course materials listed as Deadline 1, Deadline 2, etc. Then the only place the dates need to be changed for each of these deadlines is in the course calendar (rather than in numerous course documents).

• For events, you can build in "invites". You send these invitations to those gmail addresses you select.  This would work for class activities too, such as chat sessions.

• You can have reminders sent to you up to two weeks ahead of time (or an hour ahead of time) of calendar events.

• Google calendars can be public (shared with everyone ) or private. If you share your Google calendar with someone, Gmail sends them an email giving them a link to the calendar. 

Google Chat is a free tool for live chats. The chat transcript gets saved as an email.

PODCASTING

Podcasting was another topic of great interest. Podcasts are syndicated recordings. They are a series of talks on a regular basis, such as a weekly summary/overview for your students.  Shelley recommends that you make most podcasts "good enough" and not worry about production quality (much too time consuming for one-time podcasts).  If the podcast is something you plan to use for several semesters, then consider production quality.

Gabcast is one tool you can use to make podcasts. It's free if you don't do any editing to your recording. You call in on the phone to make your podcast. You can then download the file as an MP3 file. You would have to send it to Andrew Kasian ( akasian@mail.mc.maricopa.edu ) to get it uploaded into the MCC iTunes U site ( http://itunes.mc.maricopa.edu ).

See links below for Alish Cooper's workshop on podcasting. Jeff Anderson is a good resource in the CTL if you want to create podcasts ( jeffa@mail.mc.maricopa.edu , 480-461-7709).

RSS Aggregators

Shelley showed a UTube video on RSS in Plain English ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v =0klgLsSxGsU ). You need two items to receive RSS feeds, a reader and a connection between teh reader and your favorite websites. Shelley suggests Google reader or bloglines.com .

Many RSS feeds are available through iTunes ( http://www.apple.com/itunes/ ). They are free.

Browser Apps

Shelley likes customizing your browser. Mozilla Firefox allows more add-ons than does Internet Explorer.

Social Bookmarking

Delicious ( http://del.icio.us/ ) is free software that allows you to store your bookmarks on the web. Then you can access them from any computer that has an internet connection.

You can share these bookmarks with others (such as an instructor for whom you are doing a research paper) and you get to see what others who bookmarked the same site have in their bookmarks (easy way to find good links). 

You can use the Delicious site to bookmark links you want students to have access to. If you group them by course, then students need only look at the ones that apply to their course.  And you can check these links are active much quicker/easier than if the links are scattered throughout your online course resources.

When you bookmark a site, you can add as many tags to it as you want. This is equivalent to copying the bookmark into a number of folders, which makes them easy to locate later.

SEARCHING

Shelley suggests looking on You Tube and other web sites for videos that have already been created before you spend time making your own for students. For example, there is a video already created on how to embed Google calendar into a website (like your WebCT course).  Check it out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v =2tnYwbs-yDk Shelley graciously created a list of her recommended sites. Enjoy!