The most recent issue of Technology and Learning: Ideas and Tools for Ed Tech Leaders (January 2012) includes a wonderful list of their top one-hundred education websites for the classroom and beyond. While many of them are really intended for the K–12 audience, this list provides a few tools that could be of interest to instructors in Higher Ed. One in particular, a tool called EmbedPlus, seems particularly promising.

This free tool allows the user (with only the YouTube URL) to use the wizard to enhance the YouTube video by doing things like marking chapters, cropping videos, and providing the ability to view the video in slow motion.

I started working in the FITS department (then called Instructional Design and Development) at DePaul as a graduate assistant, and a large percentage of my duties at the time involved moving instructor-created content from a word-processing document into the learning management system–basically, a lot of copying and pasting. But it wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Simply copying text from Microsoft Word and pasting it into Blackboard or Desire2Learn often produces strange text formatting.

These are just a few of the text formatting problems I’ve seen:

• huge spaces between words
• abnormally small or large text

In her October post, Emily Stone talked about using Twitter as a way to engage with her students. It allowed her to create a conversation and foster a community of sharing. These types of interactions are really Twitter’s bread-and-butter. But I’m more of a passive Twitter user. My last tweet was January 31, 2010: “really dropped the ball on this 3-d glasses thing.” (Apparently the Super Bowl halftime show that year included a 3-D component. Unfortunately I didn’t have the glasses. I cannot tell you if the show was good or not.) So don’t follow me. I won’t tweet anything. I just don’t find that I have anything really useful to say, and I’m uncomfortable “broadcasting” my thoughts. But I do log in to Twitter every day. Instead of sharing, though, I use it as another form of information gathering. I have subscribed to several feeds related to my field of study (Human-Computer Interaction/User Experience). I find it incredibly efficient and much less daunting than the 1000+ unread articles in my Google Reader, where I used to try and read articles. I think Twitter has incredible value for others who are more like me. For teachers who may not quite be ready to tweet their assignments, they too can incorporate Twitter in a passive way. Aside from subscribing to tweets related to their field to help stay current, teachers could simply point students toward some of the more engaging Twitter feeds. I found several examples re-creating historical events through “live-tweeting” (or rather the simulation of live-tweeting), which is simply Twitter’s way of reporting on key events as they happen.

Multimedia is not a new concept. It’s been around in multifaceted forms long before learning management systems and the development of online courses came to fruition.

If asked “what’s the most popular form of media in today’s society?” one would be able to argue the Internet or television depending on your generation, technological savviness, etc. With the evolution of the Internet and the creation and mass use of online video services such as Hulu and video sharing websites such as YouTube, having access to varied forms of multimedia is becoming increasingly more common. So should professors and instructional designers incorporate multimedia from sites like these into an online course? In my humble opinion, absolutely. These sites offer content from a variety of credible entities. With course design, whether face-to-face or online, vetting what peripheral resources are included is essential.

Sometimes you need a no-cost way to work collaboratively and synchronously at a distance. For instance, earlier this year I was a member of a graduate-student team designing an interactive app for the iPad. We had a member in Saudi Arabia, another on the eastern seaboard, and several members spread across the Chicago metro area. We obviously couldn’t meet in person to sketch out ideas and critique them. We needed a way to post design documents, mark them up, and discuss in real time. Fortunately for us, we discovered Twiddla, a collaborative workspace with a free version that proved indispensible.

As a long-time project manager in the software engineering industry and especially during my time at Apple Computer, I’ve had to work in environments with a frenetic pace, to say the least. Limited time was available to manage multiple projects, let alone deal with the intricacies of the details. Hence, I learned early on to deal with the exceptions rather than the norms. This is a widely used management strategy called Management by Exception (MBE).

(Listen to this entry in the Everything that FITS podcast.)

I’ve had a Twitter account for several months, and aside from occasionally checking my feed to see what’s for dinner @RachaelRayShow, I really do not use it. In preparation for teaching my online Educational Technology class, I’ve been thinking about how I might use Twitter to enhance participant engagement with the material and with one another. The prerequisite course to this course includes an activity where students create a Twitter account and think about its possible uses in education. I would like to build on that foundation and use Twitter to promote a virtual community for sharing EdTech-related resources and trends, as well as ideas (or even logistics) about the course and course material.

My six-year-old son Grant loves school—that is, all school except the Sunday Chinese School. To him, it is boring, too hard, and no fun. Last year, after trying the kindergarten class at our local Chinese school (and being a left-behind student) for two months, he dropped out.

Being a liberal educator and a non-tiger mom, I didn’t feel like forcing him to learn something that he was not interested in—until one day he said to me, “Mommy, do you know why I can’t speak Chinese? It’s because you never taught me when I was a baby!”

If you’re the type who likes to follow trends in technology, you know one of the most remarkable trends in the last few years is the pace of innovation in mobile platforms like Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. If you have a smartphone, it’s probably already become your notepad, your navigation system, and your external memory, and in a few years, it could be your wallet, the brains of your computer, and your home automation system. I have to confess that I spend more than a little time tracking each new development in the smartphone/tablet world.