Reflection

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.

Final Presentation

Dotsub

http://dotsub.com/

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

http://prezi.com/vjd_ju63whlx/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share

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. 

Productivity Tool Review

It’s time to change the way we do research

http://www.mendeley.com/

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

http://www.mendeley.com/videos-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

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

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: 

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.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Tool Review

https://cacoo.com/diagrams/

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.

Features

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.

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.

You can also view the history of your diagram 
creation in which modifications are highlighted.

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. 



.

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. 

Use of Zimmer Twins to facilitate foreign language learning

Why is the study important?

Encouraging young students to express their thoughts and ideas in a creative and innovative way is an important task of K-12 teachers, especially primary school teachers. Kids explore and learn in an amazingly fast speed if they are facilitated to do so. One of the tools that can really empower young learners’ creativity and innovation is Zimmer Twins, tool for creating one’s own story. It is a site devoted to kids who want to create and share their animated digital story.

I would like to investigate the use of Zimmer Twins in a foreign language classroom, specifically in a Basic English class. It is important for any language learners to be able to express their inner self and ideas/concepts innovatively and uniquely in the target language. I would like to find out how they would do this conversationally and narratively through hands-on experience with this tool.

Who are the subjects/participants of the study?

Even Zimmer Twins is specially designed for students of 8-14 years of age; however, this study will take students’ English language proficiency as a moderator variable. Therefore, participants’ age can be of a wide range, as long as they are foreign speakers of English and their English proficiency level are intermediate.

This will be an experimental study. Participants will be divided into control and treatment groups who both receive the same content instruction. The difference is, control group will be asked to do and submit assignments in a traditional way whereas treatment group will carry out their assignments using Zimmer Twins after being trained on how to use the tool.

What is/are the basic research question/s?

Is Zimmer Twins an effective tool to promote English conversational and narrative writing among language learners?

Where would the study be conducted?

In a foreign language classroom, intermediate level, focus on skills (reading, writing, listening) development.

What is the time frame of the study?

2 months of Basic English, focus on skills development

What type of data would be collected?

The assignments are to produce conversational or narrative writings on the topics of instruction (i.e. tenses in English, unconditional sentences, English verbs of motion, state, think, English adjectives, etc.)

Data to be collected would be

·         Writing pretest scores

·         Writing posttest scores

·         Survey about students’ experience with Zimmer Twins (treatment group)

How might the data be analysed?

Pretest scores will be compared with posttest ones to find out whether there is a significant difference in the performance between the control and treatment group.

Survey result analysis would be used to explore treatment group’s experience with the tool, and to help explain the difference in the two group’s performance (if any).

Inspired by the following source:

Admin, (2014), iLearn Technology, an edublog about integrating technology into the classroom, retrieved from http://ilearntechnology.com/?p=2180

Creativity Tool Review

http://zimmertwinsatschool.com/

Encouraging young students to express their thoughts and ideas in a creative and innovative way is an important task of K-12 teachers, especially primary school teachers. Kids explore and learn in an amazingly fast speed if they are facilitated to do so. One of the tools that can really empower young learners’ creativity and innovation is Zimmer Twins, tool for creating one’s own digital story.

Description:

Zimmer Twins is a site devoted to kids who want to create and share their animated digital story. The Zimmer Twins is the brainchild of Jason Krogh, founder of Zinc Roe design. Jason set out a tool that allowed kids to use their imagination and exercise their storytelling powers. Jason teamed up with director Aaron Leighton, who developed the characters and designed the visual styles for the stories.

The Zimmer Twins was launched in 2005 and selected movies from the TELETOON site. Their next partners were ABC in Australia, and qubo/NBC in the U.S.

The unique feature of the Zimmer Twins format is it combines online participants with broadcast delivery. Children are invited to create and share up to 1 minute movie using a story editor and a library of animation. Kids tell their stories by choosing actions, characters, and background for each of the scene. The scene can be inserted, deleted or its order can be altered in the series. They can also add their own dialogue and on-screen texts. New clips can be added, or removed from an existing one.

Additional download/ installation/skills

No downloads or additional installation is needed in order to use Zimmer Twins. As many other Web 2.0 Tools, users (kids from 8-17 or adults) would need an account. Their usernames will be displayed on the story when it’s broadcasted.

No specific skills are required in order to use this tool.

How to make a movie on Zimmer Twins: http://zimmertwinsatschool.com/movie/howto

And here is the most simple movie that I created using 3 types of animation. http://zimmertwinsatschool.com/node/103841

Application scenario

I believe there’s a wide range of instructional applications of Zimmer Twins, just as digital storytelling can be applied to various teaching subjects. Story creating on Zimmber Twins seems simple, but requires and allows a lot of creativity, and thus autonomy, imagination and independent thinking from the students on the go.

I would use this tool in a Basic English language class. A snapshot example would be in a basic grammar class about tense in English in integration to conversational or narrative writing. Teachers can ask students to create a 1 minute story of what they dreamed the night before, including dialogues of the characters in their dreams (if teaching Simple Past Tense), or a most unrealistic thing that they can imagine (teaching Unconditional Sentences), etc, for example.

Would I recommend this tool?

Absolutely!

Tool Review Module 1 - DotSUB

Name of the Tool Review: DotSUB

URL of the Tool: http://dotsub.com/about

Primary category for this tool: Communication Tool but it can also be Presentation Tool

Tool Description

Dotsub is web-based used for creating and viewing subtitles for videos in multiple languages across all platforms and mobile devices. By this, it means one can upload a video of her own, or share a URL of an existing video for capturing and translation. The video can be translated from or into any languages of your choice provided you are equipped to type the target language (for example, you need Unikey software that allows you to type Vietnamese with diacritic marks).

Dotsub basically is very easy to use and require no additional downloading or installation for the tool to work. Dotsub allows you to do two major things: 1) to transcribe and allow caption to appear on the screen as the video goes, and/or 2) to translate and show the caption in the target language.

Steps to dotSUB:

1. Upload videos to dotSUB:

- Sign in or first create an account

- Click on “Upload your video”, decide on the license language, genre and how you want to share your video (public or private)

- Decide further on “Video Properties” as you wish and click “save”

2. Capture videos on dotSUB

- Be sure you are logged in

 

- Click on “Caption” option

- Hit “CTRL + SHIFT + P” to start and stop the video, or simply hit the “Play” button.

- Type what you hear in the box, then hit CTRL + SHIFT + ↓ to enter the "out" point for this caption line. (You will notice that the 00:00 numbers to the left of the caption line box change when you do this. Then hit the "enter" key. You will see the line you just typed move up in the cue, and this will save your work).

- Repeat the procedure for every caption line whose length is up to your choice.

- To set the in point for a caption line you can hit CTRL + SHIFT + ↑. 

- To rewind 1 second hit CTRL + SHIFT + ←,

- For higher speed rewind, hit CTRL + SHIFT + ← for a few times or hold the ←  arrow

Tips:

Try to keep the captions to 2 lines. 3 lines can sometimes get in the way of the picture. Also, make sure your captions are up for enough time so that the viewer can read them. Once you get the hang of it you'll find it quite easy and even fun!

3. How to translate a video on dotSUB:

- Go to the video and look for the blue "Caption/Translate" tab

- Look for the drop down menu next to the yellow “Translate” button, select the language you want to translate it into and hit the “Translate” button.

- Click on the blue text that says “Click here to translate into [language] under every caption line

Note:

You can translate as many lines at a time as you like, hit the enter key, just be sure to hit “enter” key for your work to be saved.

You can go “back to video” to see your translation against the video and publish the video if you wish.

What do you need to know before using this tool?

- No advanced skilled. As basic skills as hitting the “play” button to start and stop the video, or pull the drop down button.

- You don’t need any additional supplement devices as transcribing and translating the video basically manual work.

I used dotSUB to transcribed, captioned, translated and published the “Intro to Digital Storytelling” video of Dr. Robin (the publishing is just meant to temporarily showcase this assignment. The video will be taken down after this Module). Make sure to choose the language on the CC button so that you can see the caption.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4G16EI64f4

Please describe a scenario of how you might use this tool in a teaching environment

Obviously, DotSUB is a great tool to use, especially in a language classroom with low level of language proficiency students. With dotSUB caption in source or translated language, teachers face less limitation on which videos to use and less be headache if the target language is over the top of the students’ command.

dotSUB caption and translated subtitles will also benefit classroom instruction with a variety of students’ learning styles (i.e. a number of students are visual learners who like to see the texts while some others are auditory who want to listen, for example).

DotSUB also directly benefit language learners in developing their two language skills (reading and listening) simultaneously, especially with challenging materials.

And yes, in the time of MOOCs, captioned and translated videos help to decrease the language barriers and thus attract a bigger group of global audience. As dotSUB slogan says “a localized video is a smart video”.

Disadvantages of using this tool in a formal or informal teaching environment

However, risk or negative consequence of using dotSUB can derive from one of its own advantages, that is, it can hinder language learners from striving to obtain the target language through listening, for example if/when subtitles are provided. Or, it will be less work than necessary for the students to digest the target language if the translation is provided. However, this disadvantage isn’t always the case. It is only disadvantageous when the students could process the language alone without the need to be supported with captions or translation.

Would you recommend this Web 2.0 tool to others, or suggest that they explore a

different tool?

Absolutely!