The very first thing I deeply appreciate about these 2 linked courses is the master list of Web 2.0 tool by category. Even I got to review just 1 tool , reading and commenting on peers' posts have broadened my knowledge on the tools every week. I was especially interested in the presentation of educational uses of the tools. I was glad to be able to count what I learned at the end of the day during the courses.
The tools that I have reviewed over the courses are: Dotsub, Zimmer Twins, Cacoo, Linkin, & Mendeley. As I mentioned in the previous post, my favorite tools on my tool review list are not one but three: LinkedIn for its professional networking value, Mendeley for its professional research management power, and Dotsub for its video translation and caption offers. However, if I have to rank these three tools, I would put Dotsub on top of my list for its community service value.
My plan for the tools that I didn't have a chance to read and provide comments on is to check out their uses and their applications in the English language teaching field.
I appreciate reading many mini research proposals being a TA. They have broadened my eyes with many new insights and ideas, some within my field and a lot out, which has made the experience even more valuable. I appreciated learning about multiple research directions and perspectives in the proposals I read.
Besides the content value, I liked the structure of the courses that allowed students to go from mastering the content (the tools) to thinking of ways to applying them into real educational environments and research, which made my tool package more diverse and complete than just knowledge about the tool.
If I would give some suggestions for the courses in the future, here are some:
1. For the tool review, I personally believe the students should be up to picking the tool they want to review each week. The list can be as amazing as it is right now. If a group of students end up picking the same tool, they can do a group work in presenting the tool, and individual work on the educational uses of the tool, based on their very own teaching and learning experience. A quality list of educational uses of a tool is the real value of this group work product.
Teachers can limit the number of group members up to , let's say, 5 to make sure not half of the class will choose to review one tool. Teachers might also increase the expectations on a tool review done by a group vs. by individual, for example, the depth of each part.
There's a likelihood that some tools might be left un-chosen, this is room for extra credits. Extra credits for presenting parts of the tool, i.e. how to use it, what's its educational value? etc.
2. For the mini proposal assignment, I would further specify and raise the expectations by asking for specific and more details on the methodology, type of data to be collected and data analysis. A lot of the ideas in the mini proposals are so worth further investigating, and this can be done only when the feasibility of the study is thought through and clearly presented, especially in such a cross-disciplined environment like our courses.
And finally, thanks professors and classmates for all the delightful learning experiences in the past 7 weeks.
Learning with Technology
Sunday, July 20, 2014
Thursday, July 17, 2014
Final Presentation
Dotsub
In deciding which tools to present their educational purposes, I
was debating among Dotsub, Mendeley, LinkedIn, and finally chose Dotsub for the
following reasons:
1. My current colleagues are doctoral students who most likely
use, or know Mendeley, and they are connected with me on LinkedIn.
2. I personally was curious to learn how to do captioning and
translation on videos, and I was very excited to learn and use Dotsub.
3. I see Dotsub as a great tool to localize the videos. As the
website mentions, localized videos are smart videos, because they attract more
viewers, and the content is broader broadcast. This is good for business as
well as education. In a foreign language classroom, Dotsub can be used to
facilitate learning of low language proficiency students; benefit classroom instruction with a variety of students’
learning styles; and support students with the students’ simultaneous
development of multiple language skills (i.e. reading and listening).
Obviously,
there are disadvantages of this tool, which actually derives from one of its
own advantages, that is, it can hinder language learners from striving to
obtain the target language through listening; for example when subtitles are
provided. But on the other hand, students
are expected to make their choice to learn.
I see a big potential to use Dotsub to translate on-demand
English MOOCs, especially when the tool is free. I would like to introduce this
tool to the Vietnamese group of Coursera Global Translation Community and
anyone who is interested in captioning and translating videos.
Link to my Final Presentation
Script for the presentation (Part of it is on the slides).
Slide 1: Introduction
Slide 2: To use Dotsub, you first need to create and account, or
sign in with your username and password.
Check the box for “I acknowledge that I have read and agree to
the Dotsub Terms of Use”.
You can either choose to check or leave it blank for the box “I
want to receive updates about Dotsub, please send me updates”
Slide 3: Once you have
created an account and log in, you can start uploading the videos that you want
to caption and translate.
- Give the video you upload a title, and a short description
Slide 4: Under “Language” heading, when you open the drop down
menu on “Please select”, please enter the language primarily spoken in the video,
NOT the language to which you wish to translate into.
- You will need to also decide on the license language, genre
and publish setting of your video (i.e. either public or private)
- The next step is to browse for the file that you want to
upload. This might take a while depending on how big the file is.
- Click “upload” to finish uploading the file onto Dotsub.
Slide 5:
- Once the video is uploaded onto Dotsub, it will be listed
under “My personal video” together with its description. If the video has not
been captioned, it will be marked “Waiting to be captioned”.
Slide 6:
- To caption the video, simply click on “Caption the video”
under “Caption and Translate” bar highlighted in yellow on the right hand
corner.
Slide 7:
- As you start captioning, the In/Out time will appear to the
left where you add the caption line. The “In” time is when the caption appears
and the “Out” time is when the caption disappears. Please align the In/out time
to make sure the caption stays from the beginning until when the speech is
finished.
- You can either use the mouse, or the keyboard shortcuts to go
around your captioning.
Slide 8:
- The caption will appear on the video screen as soon as you
release it.
Slide 9:
- One important thing to keep in mind, make sure the “out” and “in”
time of the two successive captions are not overlapping. The “in” time of the
latter caption must not be before the “out” time of the previous caption.
Slide 10:
- You can change the text of the caption, as well as the In/out
time by clicking on the editing icon, or delete the caption by clicking “delete”
icon.
Slide 11:
- Make sure to mark the captions complete when you are done
captioning
Slide 12:
- Once you have your captioned video saved, the whole
transcription will show underneath the video.
- You can also select a language to translate the video into at
this stage.
- Notice that “Translate” is not an option before the video is
captioned.
Slide 13:
- When you are on the “Translate” page, click on the box under
the caption to start translating.
Slide 14:
- When you play the video, the subtitle will appear on the
screen. The caption will be also highlighted on the transcription if the video
language is on.
Slide 15:
- In the meantime, translated caption will replace if the
translated language is selected.
Friday, July 11, 2014
Productivity Tool Review
It’s time to change the way we do research
The firm and highlighted
statement that caught my eyes when first came to this site was the firm
statement “It’s time to change the way
we do research”. So what is it all about and what can Mendeley offer?
Description
Mendeley is a free reference
manager and academic social
network that can help you organize your research,
collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research. It is
a desktop and web program for managing and
sharing research papers, discovering research data and collaborating
online. It combines Mendeley Desktop, a PDF and reference management application (available for Windows, OS and Linux) with Mendeley Web, an
online social network for researchers.
Mendeley users are allowed to store all basic citation data on its server. Storing copies of documents is at the
user's choice and discretion. Mendeley
provides the users with 2GB of free web storage space by the registration time,
and upgrades with a cost.
Features
Some common features of Mendeley include:
- Automatically generate bibliographies
- Collaborate easily with other researchers online
- Easily import
papers from other research software
- Find relevant papers based on what you’re reading
- Access your papers from anywhere online
- Read papers on the go, with our new iPhone app
As a free reference manager, Mendeley is fully compatible
with:
- · Windows Word 2003, 2007, 2010
- · Mac Word 2008, 2011
- · LibreOffice
- · BibTeX
To use Mendeley, you will start with
downloading it and install it on your laptop. You can also install the Word
Plugin once you are on your Mendeley page and start creating your bibliography.
Video
Tutorials
Mendeley already provides very thorough tutorial videos to walk its users through the steps of using the tool. I don't see the reason for doing this over again, instead, I highlighted the videos that I hope you might find useful for your Mendeley exploration.
Strength
and weakness
On the weakness side, I noticed there were not many
color choices to highlight the PDF (users might want to color code the
materials by topics or by importance, etc. But I guess this might not be a big
serious drawback.
I found some more critical feedback from Mendeley on the website. For example, Mendeley should
enable the built-in PDF reader to recognize annotations (notes, highlights,
etc) made in external PDF readers (such as Acrobat and Evince); assign a label
in “All Documents” section for each PDF to show the folder that it belongs to; option
to show only the highlights of a paper, instead of the whole paper, or
synchronize Mendeley with one Google scholar account.
Tool recommendation & educational scenarios
Thursday, July 3, 2014
Tool review 5 - LinkedIn
Hi all,
Please find my Voice Thread link below for the most part of tool review for week 5.
https://voicethread.com/share/5883174/
Possible educational uses of LinkIn:
LinkedIn could be a marvelous resource for students in high ed thanks to its various cool feature sbesides connecting people professionally. I could imagine using LinkedIn for a major research assignment in my freshmen writing class, for example. Students would be asked to pick a topic regarding reading, writing, listening, experience with learning English, or Computer Assisted Language learning, etc. and conduct a second-hand research study (with a strong focus on presenting a comprehensive Lit review). Students will be asked to sign up for LinkedIn, and follow the language-learning-related groups, for example, the Visual Thesaurus, The Computer Assisted Language Learning, etc. or better to join their discussion forums to learn what's going on live. Students then will be asked to include in their research paper a number of most recently updates/works of literature on the field, which they accumulate through exploring LinkedIn resources and/or participate in the discussion. I would say this will be an authentic, straightforward project and within the students' reach.
Will I recommend this tool?
Absolutely! I don't see any disadvantages of LinkedIn!
Thanks
Please find my Voice Thread link below for the most part of tool review for week 5.
https://voicethread.com/share/5883174/
Possible educational uses of LinkIn:
LinkedIn could be a marvelous resource for students in high ed thanks to its various cool feature sbesides connecting people professionally. I could imagine using LinkedIn for a major research assignment in my freshmen writing class, for example. Students would be asked to pick a topic regarding reading, writing, listening, experience with learning English, or Computer Assisted Language learning, etc. and conduct a second-hand research study (with a strong focus on presenting a comprehensive Lit review). Students will be asked to sign up for LinkedIn, and follow the language-learning-related groups, for example, the Visual Thesaurus, The Computer Assisted Language Learning, etc. or better to join their discussion forums to learn what's going on live. Students then will be asked to include in their research paper a number of most recently updates/works of literature on the field, which they accumulate through exploring LinkedIn resources and/or participate in the discussion. I would say this will be an authentic, straightforward project and within the students' reach.
Will I recommend this tool?
Absolutely! I don't see any disadvantages of LinkedIn!
Thanks
Friday, June 27, 2014
Voice Thread Presentation - Distant Learners' needs and teacher's responses
Our group topic:
What specific needs does a distant learner have? What specific skills does a teacher need in an online environment to meet the needs of students?
Group members:
Link to Voicethread:
http://voicethread.com/?#u3795256.b5877175.i30146971
Collaboration work:
We started with deciding the amount of content (number of slides) for the presentation and who would be in charge of which part. We decided to have 2 pairs to focus on 2 questions and then we would meet up online to look at the whole content together and decide on the presentation format. Glen and I worked on the same question 1 except we focused on 2 different interpretations: 1) characteristics of a successful distant learner and 2) extra difficulties that a distant learner might encounter compared to a traditional one. Amanda and Sandra's tasks were to provide responses on the teacher's standpoint on the 2 interpretations of question 1.
What we did during the online meeting on Google + Hangout included content revision, citation, format, and to make sure the 2nd question is really responsive to the 1st one.
Experience with Voice Thread:
I didn't struggle that much with Voicethread maybe because I did the basic things and follow the tutorials. I like the various options for giving comments, especially the recording one. You can record, save it if you like it, cancel and do it again if you're not happy with it. All happen in a blink on the spot. I also like the sharing setting features of Voicethread that you can decide to allow the people you invite to view, edit, or add slides to your presentation.
I will have to learn more about Voice Thread to know its negative sides.
Possible Voice Thread educational use:
I can imagine using it quite regularly as a supplement of in-class lecture that needs more focus in case the students want the instruction or part of the lecture again.
I think it can also be a very good tool to provide feedback to students' graded performance.
What specific needs does a distant learner have? What specific skills does a teacher need in an online environment to meet the needs of students?
Group members:
Glen, Amanda, Sandra, & Trang (group leader)
Link to Voicethread:
http://voicethread.com/?#u3795256.b5877175.i30146971
Collaboration work:
We started with deciding the amount of content (number of slides) for the presentation and who would be in charge of which part. We decided to have 2 pairs to focus on 2 questions and then we would meet up online to look at the whole content together and decide on the presentation format. Glen and I worked on the same question 1 except we focused on 2 different interpretations: 1) characteristics of a successful distant learner and 2) extra difficulties that a distant learner might encounter compared to a traditional one. Amanda and Sandra's tasks were to provide responses on the teacher's standpoint on the 2 interpretations of question 1.
What we did during the online meeting on Google + Hangout included content revision, citation, format, and to make sure the 2nd question is really responsive to the 1st one.
Experience with Voice Thread:
I didn't struggle that much with Voicethread maybe because I did the basic things and follow the tutorials. I like the various options for giving comments, especially the recording one. You can record, save it if you like it, cancel and do it again if you're not happy with it. All happen in a blink on the spot. I also like the sharing setting features of Voicethread that you can decide to allow the people you invite to view, edit, or add slides to your presentation.
I will have to learn more about Voice Thread to know its negative sides.
Possible Voice Thread educational use:
I can imagine using it quite regularly as a supplement of in-class lecture that needs more focus in case the students want the instruction or part of the lecture again.
I think it can also be a very good tool to provide feedback to students' graded performance.
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Tool Review
A picture is worth a thousand words. A picture-like
visual presentation of information with short, precise text is probably worth
more. Diagrams have been appreciated for a long time for its power to
demonstrate user’s creative and critical thinking. The diagrams creation tools which
are now added with collaboration features have had a higher contribution in the
dynamic, fast-pace learning environment. Cacoo is tool like that. It is a
web-based diagram creation tool that allows many people to work together
simultaneously on the same diagram in real time. Diagrams can be published
directly to websites, wikis, and blogs.
Description
Simply with a
browser, Cacoo enables you to create and insert beautiful diagrams easily into
an online document and modifications will appear instantly and most recent
version of the diagram is always displayed. Features that Cacoo offers to its
users can be categorized into 1) Diagram creation and 2) collaboration in which
you will find detailed description below.
Creating a diagram is very easy. You don’t need any
extra
downloads or any supplement software to run the tool.
All you need is to drop a stencil you like and finish up the
diagram with connectors if necessary.
downloads or any supplement software to run the tool.
All you need is to drop a stencil you like and finish up the
diagram with connectors if necessary.
The options for the stencils are various and serve
multiple purposes. As long as you have an image in mind that you want it to be
visualize, making it happen on Cacoo is a piece of cake.

Cacoo also enables you to draw a balanced diagram easily by aligning and distributing nearby objects automatically and evenly.
Diagrams created on Cacoo can be embedded
in your blog or Wiki in PNG format. If you edit
the diagram on Cacoo, the embedded image will be converted automatically.
.
in your blog or Wiki in PNG format. If you edit
the diagram on Cacoo, the embedded image will be converted automatically.

Diagrams can also be exported into PDF or SVG which
can be printed out or re-edited on other graphic editors later.

You can also share your diagram with anyone you want by choosing the privacy setting. Your diagram can be shared public where everyone can have access to and edit it, or it can only be viewed by invited people on your list.
Cacoo enables collaboration
and communication among the invited audience. Users can edit the diagram
simultaneously in real time and communicate with each other by posting their
comments or chatting.
How - to
Step 1: Create New Diagram
Step 2: Create a Folder
Step 3: Create a Shared Folder
Step 4: Share a Diagram with your friends
Step 5: Set your icon
Strength
and Weakness
Cacoo tool obviously offers a lot to its users
compared to other concept mapping tools (Mind Map, Inspiration): aligning the
objects, diagram creation history, embedded pictures online in various formats
and the advanced strength is to allow collaboration among the users.
Cacoo does have some requirements for the system but
I don’t think these are the weakness of the tool.
- Processor: 2.5 GHz or more
- Memory: 4GB or more
- Storage: 100GB or more (Note: The storage space required will vary according to the number and size of your diagrams.)
One last thing: Cacoo does offer 2 types of
accounts: Cacoo regular and Cacoo Enterprise. Cacoo regular runs on an ASP
framework where all users are sharing an identical server through the Internet.
Cacoo Enterprise allows users to install Cacoo on their own server, giving them
control over the access to the network, set rules on how Cacoo is used or how
diagrams are save according to the network’s security requirements. And Cacoo
Enterprise is not free. Cacoo Enterprise Annual User License corresponds with
the number of users in the organization.
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