Mind maps and OWL's

Here's the text of my first xtranormal movie.

So I've decided it's time to have some fun on this blog. I've recently decided it would be fun to make a movie instead of just typing up something. So twenty five dollars and an xtranormal account later, this is my first experiment in making a truly anonymous video blog.

Now... let's talk about mind maps. Oh, mind maps. What a useful tool for organizing old ideas and coming up with new ones. As you can see in one of the posts below this, I've used Freemind to play with organizing some of the ideas for my terminal project that have just been swimming around my head. If you look at it, you can kind of get a sense for what I'm thinking about in terms of MALL history, case studies and a basic outline for a needs analysis. Maybe the most useful part of Freemind, for me anyway, was its ability to track research abstracts. This lets me see how one bit of information is connected to another bit of information. My only complaint with this software is the fact that you can't link it to bibliography software like Zotero or Endnote. That really would have made it a complete package.

All right. Now let's talk about the second part of last week's class. I'll tell you, I try to spend as little time mired on the Purdue OWL website as I possibly can, mainly because I'm not the biggest fan in the world of A P A formatting. That being said, the OWL site is a great resource for all things citation related. It is laid out very well and I really has no trouble finding my way around the site. The in class exercise even made it a little tricky, sort of like a sadistic version of a treasure hunt. It was mean, but it was also a very useful activity. And to tell the truth, I'm really looking forward this week's lesson on using Endnote. I've used it once before as part of a demo in Trish Pashby's 608 class last term, but there's a ton I still need to learn.

So. That's it for right now. I think I'll post the text of this entry somewhere on the blog too. Just to be safe, you know? By the way, I'm probably going to try to build part of my presentation for next week using xtranormal. I think that it has some real potential in an educational setting, especially since I plan on using ANVILL as my platform. We'll see how this flies.

Bibliography Exercise

Hmmm.... many brain cells were used putting these citations into proper APA format.

Mind Mapping using FreeMind

Here's a quick sketch of my terminal project proposal. Needless to say, it is not fleshed out at all. I wanted to include the whole thing with links and everything, but I haven't been able to figure out how to make it work. So... here's a jpeg of it.

Moving into new and exciting realms

Topic One.

So when push comes to shove...  I have to admit, I was a little worried about how things were going to go at the beginning of class since we were all trying to figure out how to divvy up the time which we had allotted for our presentations. Thankfully, we have Mahfoudha. She really got the ball rolling for all of us with the time breakdown she created. Once it became apparent that there would be just ten short minutes for everyone to present, it really got everyone thinking about how to creatively present their materials. While I may have decried the overuse of websites before, I'm not thinking seriously about building one, possibly a wiki with embedded video. Another thought would be to build a mini course in ANVILL... hmmmmm, I'm going to have to consider that one a little more. Just to add one more iron into the presentation fire, today I was introduced to what may be one of the coolest presentation platforms I've ever run across. It is called prezi. It allows free reign through slides, embedded video and audio, allowing people to go anywhere in your sandbox they'd like. It's sort of like those old "Choose Your Adventure" books.

Topic Two.

I found much of the material in this section of the class quite engaging, in particular using the wrap text function around clip art. I'll admit it, I'm a clip art fanatic, and I am frequently pulling clip art off the internet in order to build documents. In fact, using clip art, word and gimp, I was able to build a mind map for the lecture portion of LT 548. It looks like this.

As a GTF at the AEI this term, I use tables every day to build my daily lesson plans. However, I still learned a ton. By far, the coolest tricks were the text wrap and image transparency. I am glad to have these in my tool kit. I mixed it all in with some of the word techniques we learned in the previous CALL session, including bullet pointing. In fact, I was so jazzed that I converted the handout I created in class into a pdf and posted it on my blog right away.

Topic 3. 

Screencasting with Jing was definitely the high point of the day. While the topic I picked for my screencast was slightly outside of what is normally seen, I found it incredibly easy to download and install the software. It took me just minutes to have my screencast built and in Dr. Healey's inbox. I've been trying to wrap my head around how I can use this tool for language teaching and I've come up with the idea of building a treasure map using this tool. It can also be used for form focused instruction, showing students parts of sentences, parts of paragraphs and parts of essays. I can't wait to play with it and exploit all of the possibilities. Where I think this software falls down is in its reliance on the cloud. I would love to be able to embed these screencasts on webpages, but having only a link really limits its usability, in my estimation.

Here's a screencast using Jing

This is my practice screencast using jing.... he audio quality is terrible because I was using the microphone which comes with my cell phone's headset.

http://screencast.com/t/atWFUt8oRMF

Here's my experiment with clip art and jpegs in Word