Pimp Your Post: February 12 - 19, 2010

free and easy

free and easy

by Sylvia Currie -
Number of replies: 2
During our live session Tracy showed an introductory post done several ways -- one as plain text, the second combined text and images, the third used images and voice in a PowerPoint presentation, and the final one using video.

Some felt that it might be too much to ask some learners to create elaborate multimedia introductory posts. Depending on what tools and services you use it can get pretty complicated with uploading, downloading, creating accounts, embedding, resizing, web shareable file formats...the list goes on.

I thought I'd start a new thread to really zone in on examples of posts that use free and easy tools. It would also be interesting to explore what we mean by easy. thoughtful Sometimes even creating an account on a website can be a barrier (and also raises other issues like where information is stored, what is shared, will you notice an increase in spam email, etc)
In reply to Sylvia Currie

Re: free and easy: badges

by Sylvia Currie -
Big Huge Labs has some easy tools for creating images using your own photos. I found this Badge Maker and thought it could be useful for a number of things. How about as a way for students to declare their main area of expertise? They could then each post their badge as a new forum thread, with a new subject heading to show their expertise (or blog post whatever you're using for the course) and everyone could use that space for peer help.

I created this badge in about a minute. No account required on the site. You can then download the image, send it by email, or share it in twitter, facebook, etc. I re-sized the image before attaching it to this forum post though. It was quite huge and I didn't want to scare everyone!
Attachment sylviabadge.jpg
In reply to Sylvia Currie

Re: free and easy: BubbleJoy!

by Tracy Roberts -
Good point Sylvia: what is "easy"? And, the business of creating accounts does open a can of worms and frankly, can be a deterrent, especially for one-off use.

I think "easy" might mean something I can do with my existing skillset (e.g., I don't need to go and learn a whole bunch more). If I do need to know something more, "easy" would involve clear, step by step instructions for accomplishing the task.

One of the tools we looked at in the session was Bubble Joy - I would classify it as easy. It does require a web cam and mic (which may not be easy for some users), but if you have these things, it requires little more than clicking "record'.

I noticed the quality today wasn't as good as other times I've used it, so maybe their servers are slow for some reason.

Here's an example: http://www.bubblejoy.com/card.php?id=kvyu6