Wimba Voice Boards

What is a Wimba Voice Board?

• Online forum to post threaded audio and text messages
• Part of the Wimba Collaboration Suite integrated with Blackboard Vista
  

Advantages of Voice Boards

• Gives students and instructors a "voice"
  
• Provides a different way to interact online (addressing different learning styles)
• Allows online language or ELL¹ instructors to assess pronunciation, grammar, and fluency
• Allows online students of foreign languages to practice speaking and listening skills
• Language learners can play back the audio and self-assess speaking skills
• Can clarify a point that may be difficult to explain with text format

Examples from other colleges²

• Explain difficult concepts (instruction)
  
• Review "take home" points of a lecture (instruction)
  
• Demonstrate step-by-step procedures (instruction)
• Find a poem, recite, and discuss it with the class (learning)
  
• Post responses to in-class lectures or discussions (learning)
  
• Post responses to student postings (learning)

Remember
If you decide to import or export files, make it an mp3. The file sizes are smaller and quicker to upload.

References
1 http://www.wimba.com/customers/customer-spotlights/drexel_university_case_study
2 http://dl.austincc.edu/wimba/faculty/developVBBb.htm; http://www.uofaweb.ualberta.ca/ARC/nav02.cfm?nav02=19375&nav01=55060

Distance Teaching & Learning Conference 2009
Half-day workshop
Wikis in Education: Creating Durable Artifacts
Presenter: Brad Hokanson, University of Minnesota (teaches Graphic Design, Design Theory, etc.)

Brad Hokanson discussed the idea of durable objects, using examples of take-aways, books, and newspapers. Generally, people like to have and item to hold. We immediately made a quick photo album/book using sheets of images on 8x10 paper printed from a PDF with images using black tape as a binding. (Though I didn't do a very good job at putting it together; the concept is good.)

How can you use something like this as an activity in your online, hybrid, or traditional course?

Hokanson displayed the wiki and how he uses it for the journaling activity for the study abroad trips he leads (https://wiki.umn.edu/view/Argentina2007/WebHome|). Each student must post a journal entry and at some point offer some advice to students in the next course, or study abroad trip (named: Letters in a Bottle). University of Minnesota uses TWIKI.com, installed on their servers. (As a side-note, he used the wiki as the presentation, rather than using PPT, click the title link on this entry to view.)

Do you think using a wiki in this way can help you to provide practical and effective information for students?

We were also introduced to the Printing on Demand (POD) for publishing your own materials (example: lulu.com). The downside to this are the costs associated with publishing your own materials, however, the books Hokanson showed us tended to be in the $40-50 range. He admitted students complained about the cost, but they do get to keep their own self-published book. He lists some of the following ideas to use POD:

• syllabus
  
• lecture
  
• demos in a wiki
  
• collected student papers
• academic papers
  
• collaborative writing or textbooks
• printed portfolios
• post notes or advice
  
• collaborative artifact creation
  
• exam reviews
• collaborative encyclopedia
  
• readings; annotate through PDF & POD

How would your students benefit by publishing their own work in your course? What ways could you use POD in your course?

Update from Distance Teaching and Learning Conference

I'm here with some of my co-workers in Madison, WI this week and we're all attending lots of great sessions, many of which I'm sure we'll be posting summaries for when we get back (although I won't speak for the group!). I wanted to share a link from a session I attended yesterday, especially in light of the last postings here about PowerPoint. Interestingly enough, the session was titled, Presentation blogs: The better alternative to PPT. The presenters use Blogger, Ning, and Slideshare to post presentations to the web. Here's a link to their presentation blog from yesterday: PowerPoint(less) Alternatives.

PowerPoint: Savior or Demon?

The other day, I was working on an online course and I came across some PowerPoint "lectures". I use quotes because each of the ninety or so slides in every chapter's PowerPoint looked as if it came from a different presentation. Different fonts, different colors, different sized photos, clip art, and phrases so truncated I couldn't tell what was important. I can't imagine how the students in that course must feel. (NOTE: these particular PowerPoints were included as part of the publisher's "bonus" materials; they were not made by the instructor).

Now, I admit I've used PowerPoint in my classrooms, workshops and seminars and for good reason. Those slides keep me on task. If I get off track, I can look at the slide and know right where I was. It allows me to show images in a way that the old overhead projectors did not. I can make handouts, give them to students or participants so that they can make notes on the handouts and have something to carry out of the class with them. It's an organizing tool, an image display, and (I hope) it keeps others in the room just as focused.

But what happens when we move to online class spaces? Does our trusty PowerPoint transfer its usefulness or does it fade into obscurity? Are there limitations to using it? If so, what are they? Is there any reason at all to use it? I don't necessarily have all the answers, but I'm wondering if (and how) the rest of you guys use it. Your comments please...

Academic Earth Aggregates Hundreds of Lectures

The web site Academic Earth puts hundreds of lectures from Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Standford and Yale into one easy-to-use location. You can search by subjects, universities or instructors. This site reminds me of iTunes University, but Academic Earth is much easier to use. Plus, every video lecture here is free and open. You can can download or embed these videos into your website without charge.

Plain English Series

You'll see links below to You Tube videos that explain a few Web 2.0 services in a concise and non-technical way. Watching these videos will give you an introduction to some new technologies we'll be writing about on this blog.

Wikis in Plain English (3:52)

Podcasting in Plain English (3:00 minutes)

Blogs in Plain English (2:58 minutes)

RSS in Plain English (3:44 minutes)

Twitter in Plain English (2:25 minutes)

Social Bookmarking in Plain English (3:25 minutes)

To send us your thoughts and ideas, click on the word "comments" below.

Susannah Sanchez - Instructional Designer

One of the great things about working with new learning technologies is that they are constantly evolving and changing. That’s also one of the horrible things about working with new learning technologies. Knowing that today’s hot new web applications, like Twitter, may well be tomorrow’s Betamax, makes me skittish about offering predictions and recommendations to faculty. How can we know which applications and tools in the Web 2.0 universe are likely to be useful to a college instructor and have any kind of longevity?

If you’re like most Pima Community College instructors, you’re teaching overload level credit hours and taking care of a family or maybe you’re an adjunct with a PCC teaching load, “day job”, and family. When do you have the time to investigate new technologies and evaluate them for use in the classroom or online?

That’s the purpose of this blog: to share the ongoing research done by the instructional design and web design teams of PCC’s Center for Learning Technology (CLT). Moreover, we want to solicit feedback from faculty, staff, and students regarding information, demonstrations, and training presented at our Learning Technology Showcases and Hands-on Labs.

Part of the CLT’s job is to discover and investigate new technologies for use in PCC’s educational endeavors. To do this, we participate in workshops, take graduate courses, attend conferences, and network world-wide with other designers during the process of course design, searching for the tools and technology that can help deliver content and knowledge to our students. We are “out there” in cyberspace using social networking technologies like Second Life and Facebook. We tweet on Twitter, we communicate on listserv lists, instant messaging services, on mobile devices by text messaging, and, yes, even by way of plain old email. We do this to help develop technologies for instruction that students have come to – or will come to – expect from a 21st century institution of learning.

To be successful meeting the needs of our college faculty, staff, and students, we need to hear from you. What instructional technologies do you want to learn about? What do you want to see demonstrated or want to try out? What type of training do you need now? Tell us by posting your comments to our blog, and we’ll do our best to bring what you want to our Learning Technology Showcases and Hands-on Labs.

To send us your thoughts and ideas, click on the word "comments" below.

Len Thurman - Instructional Designer/Adjunct Faculty