This week I created a twitter account for Ask Seek Learn @askseeklearn (please follow me). With Ask Seek Learn being fairly new to twitter, I wanted to share my thoughts after using twitter as a means of communication and discovery for this blog.
Twitter is easy to use and addictive
Twitter makes it super easy to set up an account. All you need is an email address and you are good to go. Twitter immediately gets you involved in the twitter community by following others with similar interests. This is the hook, line and sinker that makes twitter so addictive. Twitter gives you instant access to information you want to know about.
Retweeting and tweeting is empowering
My first tweet was a retweet from @autismspeaks announcing that we are just 5 weeks from World Autism Awareness Day. My first original tweet was an article I found online that had to do with Parenting a Child with Autism. Twitter allows for you to easily discover information as well as share your discoveries. It allows you to be the quarterback and the receiver.
Tweet from anywhere
I was at the doctors office this week and I came across an inspirational article in a magazine that dealt with the challenges a family endured with facing autism. I pulled out my iPhone, searched for the article online and posted it on twitter. Twitter allows for you to share information from anywhere.
I will definitely use twitter as a means for discover, to share information with others, and to build a network of people like me who are trying to educate others about autism.
In addition to my post on wikis this week, Techie 4 Teachers has a great post on teacher related wikis that you should check out including Educational Origami and Cool Tools for Schools. Click here.
Mindbogge also has a post on Cool Tools for School and talks about the use of Wikibooks in an educational environment from a teacher’s perspective. Please jump over to Mindbogge to read more about Wikilbooks and other wikis by clicking here.
However, one of the main points for me had to be Wikipedia’s mission of giving free access to the sum of all human knowledge to everyone in the world. This by itself is amazing, but how this mission had come to fruition by a large community of 100,000 or so volunteers is astonishing. This concept of building a product/entity as large as Wikipedia that is solely powered by free workers whom produce very accurate and reliable information is even more mind boggling.
Watching these videos helped me to appreciate how the power of like minded individuals who work towards a common goal can make a mission like educating the world for free a real possibility. Wikipedia’s community based business model is driven not only by the need for others to be educated but also by the need for others to share knowledge. One thing I will take away from this concept is to leverage the knowledge of the community and use some form of crowdsourcing to contribute to the information provided future projects.
Now that I am armed with a new found respect for Wikipedia I wanted to check out what other wikis out there that I could glean from as well. I came across Wikiversity and Wikibooks.
Wikiversity is based off of the same community model that Wikipedia works off of in which Wikiversity invites the global community to build its educational content. Wikiversity offers courses for all ages and is categorized by schools. For example, the school of art and design has instructional resources on how to build a basic web page and covers topics like HTML, CSS, and Javascript. A quick search on Autism led me to Autism Resources for Early Childhood Special Education for Parents and Teachers. Wikiversity covers every subject at every grade level imaginable and invites you to create a course if there is not one.
Wikibooks follows the same ideology as Wikipedia and Wikiversity. Wikibooks is a community of open-content textbooks that anyone can contribute to. You can browse Wikibooks by subject, completion status, and by reading level. Wikibooks mission is very similar to Wikipedia’s as that it wants to provide open books to and for an open world. Wikibooks appear to be an infancy stage as compared to its sister projects Wikipedia and Wikiversity. However, each of these wikis are looking to change the way the world is educated.
The emerging technology I discovered this week is called ShowMe. ShowMe turns your iPad into a whiteboard with recording features. ShowMe allows you to quickly record what you draw and say conveniently on your iPad and upload these presentations online to share with others.
Below I discuss my review and thoughts of ShowMe after my first experience with this unique iPad application.
Usability
ShowMe starts off with a modal window showing you how to create a presentation in three simple steps. This is a good usability practice because it recognizes that you are a novice to the application and gets you up to speed on the ShowMe basics in a matter of seconds. However, ShowMe is so easy to use you really do not need this introductory tutorial if you are familiar with most iPad apps. One thing I did notice is that this introductory tutorial disappears after a couple of times of opening ShowMe. I was not able to find out how to access this tutorial again or find any other help feature within the iPad application. This can be negative from a usability standpoint if you forget how to use ShowMe.
Navigation
Navigation in ShowMe is clear and consistent. Main navigation features are aligned to the top of the application. You are able to hide the toolbar when creating a ShowMe presentation, but ShowMe leaves an unobtrusive visual cue in the form of a ribbon to let you know the toolbar is hidden. Again, if you are familiar with the iPad then navigating ShowMe is a breeze. For example, touching and holding a ShowMe presentation you created in your My ShowMes view allows you to delete the ShowMe presentation much like deleting an app on your iPad.
Content
At its core, ShowMe is all about content and sharing it. You can explore ShowMe and its multitude of presentations to learn about almost any subject. There are presentations about math, art, music, and how to speak Spanish to name a few. This content is user generated from teachers, educators, and subject matter experts. ShowMe also allows you to sign up for feeds from particular categories and/or ShowMe members.
Audience
Educators
Teachers
Students
ShowMe’s targeted audience is composed of teachers and students. Teachers can create accounts specifically for their students and share ShowMe presentations with their students as an extension of their classroom. Students in return can create ShowMe presentations and submit them to teachers to prove that they have learned a concept taught in class. ShowMe’s initial audience is composed of educators and students, but ShowMe’s appeal could easily crossover and be successful in corporate and business environments as well.
Cost
ShowMe is currently a free application and only costs you some personal information like your name and email address. Hopefully, ShowMe will stay free because it has great potential to be an excellent resource for educators and students.
Creating my first ShowMe presentation was a quick and easy process. Show me allows you to pause a recording so that you can draw ahead of yourself if necessary. It also has an undo feature if you make small mistakes along the way. Drawing with your finger does get tiring after a while, and I would suggest investing in a stylus for your iPad for serious users of ShowMe to get the most out of the application.
In closing, ShowMe is a powerful teaching and learning tool. Even if you do not have an iPad to build ShowMe presentations you can view lessons on the web to learn something new and see this emerging technology in action.
In looking for emerging technologies to discuss and share on Ask Seek Learn, I was recommended to check out Trello. Trello is a web application that allows users to organize and share just about anything on its virtual whiteboard. The more I looked into Trello, the more I realized how powerful and useful this simple web application could be in any environment but particularly in an educational environment.
Here are my notes on Trello based on its usability, navigation, reliability, privacy options, and cost.
Usability
This is the area in which Trello shines. Trello is simple to use from signing up for the application to creating a Trello board. I was quickly able to create a Trello board in a matter of minutes. Trello is also a responsive web application meaning the application is able to intelligently adjust its user interface to fit the display screen of any device. The experience users get on their laptop in Trello is the same experience they get on their mobile devices.
Navigation
Trello is an intuitive application that quickly turns novice users into power users. The navigation is responsible for this quick and early adoption by users. Trello provides obvious visual cues to add a card, create a list, and to share a board with others. Every navigational element and function is available on single page which allows users to quickly manipulate their Trello board.
Reliability
Trello claims to be disaster proof and even goes as far as saying they are able to withstand a Godzilla attack. Trello allows users to see updates from members of their Trello board in realtime. Being a new user to Trello, reliability is something that needs to be tried and tested, but at first use there did not seem to be any issues at all.
Content
Users are in complete control of the content on Trello. Trello can be a list of things to do, flash cards, a virtual bulletin board and more. Trello is only limited by the users’ imagination.
Privacy Options
Trello defaults to making a board private. This is added security to make sure that what users create is not publicly consumed without their intentional permission. Trello gives users three options on privacy. Users can make their board private, assign a board to an organization for collaboration, or give permission for the entire public to see their board and make it searchable by search engines.
Cost
The amazing thing about Trello is that it is completely free to use right now. I imagine that such an application will eventually have a cost associated with it, but Trello contends on its website that is free, now and forever. Hopefully, this is true and Trello will not fill up users’ boards with silly advertisements as a result of the application being free to make ends meet.
I really enjoyed my experience using Trello. I created a board for school assignments that I need to complete and assigned due dates to each card on the lists. As I start an assignment I simply drag a card from the ‘To Do’ column/list to the the ‘Doing’ column. I drag a card from ‘Doing’ to ‘Done’ when an assignment is complete. This allows me to keep a visual record of what I need to do, what I am doing, and what I have done throughout the week. Also, with Trello being a responsive web application, this allows me to take my Trello board with me wherever I go. Thanks Trello!
Ask Seek Learn 