Heidi Olson

Here is an interesting website that takes your URL, analyzes the html code and creates a visualization. You can see what makes up your page: links, tables, etc.

http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/

Here is a graphic for the CDE website front page: distance.uaf.edu

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Try this with your favorite website or with one that you are working on to see what it looks like.

A widget (or badge) is a small application that runs on your desktop, on your mobile unit or that gets embedded in a website. It often will display information that is pulled from a source or from many sources that gets regularly updated. Weather widgets are very popular to see what current conditions are like where you live or for where you like to vacation. Stock Market tickers, count-downs, news, games – someone has created a visual widget for just about everything out there. According to Widgetbox.com, the most popular downloaded widget on their site is Super Mario Game.

PBS has created some “Teachers Activity Packs which look like they feature ideas for activities as well as provide links to resources.

Here’s a short video about Adding Widgets to Blackboard.

I would caution you about getting too carried away with adding widgets to your site. They might take up a lot of screen real estate, they might slow down the speed in which the site is loaded, and they might not really be that useful for your students. You might consider including a pertinent widget for a weekly topic and then taking it down. If they student found it interesting they could always go out and get it for themselves and place it on their myUA page, their google home page or other social networking site.

Creating a presentation using Sketchcast can be a quick way to demonstrate a concept that would benefit from an explanation along with a creating a visual. Here’s an example of a math problem, an example of a chemistry problem, and an example of brainstorming and creating a editorial cartoon. In the first two examples I don’t think the creators used a digital tablet which would probably have helped. Its hard to draw with a mouse or a laptop trackpad–I know that its hard for me. The last example was created by an accomplished artist!

An additional feature is that you (or your students) can post comments but you have to create an account to do so (but that just takes a minute to do). Comments would be open to the general public so you might get comments from a wide audience which might greatly enhance the discussion.

Another great feature is that you can set up an individual channel and have a series of presentations within this channel. The channels have an RSS feed attached to them so if you used a feed reader (like googlereader, bloglines, etc.) you’d be notified if anything new had been added to someone’s channel.

Too bad that you aren’t able to use tagging to further identify your presentation and to help in searching. This would be a nice feature for them to add in an update version.

Using visuals in an Independent Learning course can be a great alternative to supplement your personal course content and typical course resources. Using a variety of resources to supplement (or even replace) a textbook has been proven to be the a successful way for students to learn.

Students have multiple learning styles and to accommodate these differences by using multiple formats will ensure that you’re providing the opportunity for students to be more successful in their understanding. Resources should include (and certainly not limited to) something from each of these areas: reading/writing, aural, visual, kinesthetic/tactile

Here’s a good starting point for finding documentaries with a free download from makeuseof.com, a website I review quite often for updates on web applications, cool tools and helpful tips. Another website, openculture provides a list of video collections on YouTube provided by media outlets, cultural institutions, universities and non-profits and another collection found on openculture is a list of videos provided by major universities.

Other resources include:
Documentary-Film network
And of course all the networks now have some full episodes and/or snippets of their popular shows available for viewing on demand: ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, and PBS.

I’ve been a fan of the commoncraft videos since I saw my first one about a year ago on RSS in Plain English. The videos they create are simple, clever, and short making them a great resource when you want to get a point across. Their newest one explains Online Photo Sharing through flickr. Others that might be of interest to you or to your students include:

• Blogs in Plain English
• Social Bookmarking in Plain English
• Social Networking in Plain English
• Wikis in Plain English

Innovate, an open access e-journal published by the Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University just announced their September schedule of webinars. Registration is free and you can sign up at http://www.uliveandlearn.com/PortalInnovate/.

Each month this online journal provides a varied assortment of artcles that all pertain to educational technology. Their website says:

• The journal focuses on the creative use of information atechnology (IT) to enhance educational processes in academic, commercial, and governmental settings. Our basic assumption is that innovative uses of technology in one sector can inform innovative uses of technology in each of the other sectors.

If you aren’t able to make their schedule webcast then they do archive all of their session so you can review at a time that works better for you. Since all sessions are Eastern Standard Time sometimes they are schedule a little too early for us!

Of special interest this month might be:

Transforming Professional Healthcare Narratives into Structured Game-Informed-Learning Activities

Michael Begg, Rachel Ellaway, David Dewhurst, and Hamish Macleod

Adventure Learning: Situating Learning in an Authentic Context

Aaron Doering

Continuous, Interactive, and Online: A Framework for Experiential Learning with Working Adults

Eric Riedel, Leilani Endicott, Anna Wasescha, and Brandy Goldston

The first two sessions are on September 19 so get signed up right away!