Had Moodle training yesterday. More on Moodle later but Randy Piland (Faculty Technology Fellow) showed us the ins and outs of twitter feeds which really got me excited.
There are a lot of different kinds of Twitterers out there - ranging from a simple enthusiast to world experts on any topic that you might be interested in. What I'm going to do this year is set up a Twitter feed on the class website that will funnel in current musings/postings from Twitter feeds from professional Microbiology groups. An example of this is embedded on the right side of the screen albeit I still need to work on the formatting.
My goals for this is to bring current information directly to the students as an enhancement to the course, however I can see where you could build in assignments around this too. I do bring current information into the course anyways but I like how this really highlights the cool and emerging topics
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
lynda.com
I keep forgetting about this great resource - www.lynda.com. Great tutorial videos on all sorts of tech-related tasks or for how to accomplish specific things within common core software (MS Office, Adobe, etc.). This is a FREE resource for all Elon faculty, staff, and students
www.lynda.com
there are probably things we can refer the students to in here that would allow them to work through basic tasks like "how to make a graph in excel"
www.lynda.com
there are probably things we can refer the students to in here that would allow them to work through basic tasks like "how to make a graph in excel"
Friday, June 17, 2011
Google docs for a digital research lab notebook
OK, first official content for my blog....
One of the things I've been experimenting with this past year that I really like is the use of Google Docs as a digital labbook for my research students. This stems from my personal transition to a digital notebook during my postdoc in order to solve 2 problems. First, searching through many hardcopy notebooks for notes on one specific problem is a drag. Second, when you relocate or have a meeting with another lab person, it's a pain to drag these labbooks all over the place and you never seem to have the one that you need. Lastly, there are useful websites, papers, etc. that it is often handy to refer to while you're looking through your data/methods.
Google docs solve these problems to a certain extent.
- you can perform word searches to locate individual projects. This is easier if you include some descriptive narrative in your notebook
- the Google docs sit "in the cloud" meaning they are on an external server and accessible from any computer. I can pull up the date from the lab, the office, or even at home very easily with a simple login to Google
- you can embed links to useful web resources/papers, etc really easily.
Something that Google Docs doesn't do well right now is to have within document tagging/linking - or perhaps I just haven't discovered it? I'll keep looking. This would be useful to help cross-reference studies - not every study is relevant to just one thing you are doing.
I started having research students use this format last year and have been really pleased with it. As I run back and forth between office/lab/home I can always pull up their notes and check to see how things are progressing or help them with interpretations. The students have been really positive about it as well. Most of them are already pretty adept with Google Docs and like the technology.
Last issue - permissions and backup issues with storing data on the cloud. You can set up the Google docs so that only you and the student can access it - your data is not visible across the web. Also, you can download your document at any time to have a working backup on your hard drive.
Other features of note:
- embedding images like gels, data analysis figures, etc. is pretty easy and keeps you from having to print them out.
- you can easily make comments in their notebook that they can refer to later. I have students write out their initial interpretations then I add my own in after to help them learn and to give them a future reference.
- ability to cut and paste previous protocols to increase efficiency
- much much easier to read than handwritten
- you can always see when the document has been edited (timestamp)
- you can actually instant message each other to the side of the document - this has been useful a few times when each in different locations
One of the things I've been experimenting with this past year that I really like is the use of Google Docs as a digital labbook for my research students. This stems from my personal transition to a digital notebook during my postdoc in order to solve 2 problems. First, searching through many hardcopy notebooks for notes on one specific problem is a drag. Second, when you relocate or have a meeting with another lab person, it's a pain to drag these labbooks all over the place and you never seem to have the one that you need. Lastly, there are useful websites, papers, etc. that it is often handy to refer to while you're looking through your data/methods.
Google docs solve these problems to a certain extent.
- you can perform word searches to locate individual projects. This is easier if you include some descriptive narrative in your notebook
- the Google docs sit "in the cloud" meaning they are on an external server and accessible from any computer. I can pull up the date from the lab, the office, or even at home very easily with a simple login to Google
- you can embed links to useful web resources/papers, etc really easily.
Something that Google Docs doesn't do well right now is to have within document tagging/linking - or perhaps I just haven't discovered it? I'll keep looking. This would be useful to help cross-reference studies - not every study is relevant to just one thing you are doing.
I started having research students use this format last year and have been really pleased with it. As I run back and forth between office/lab/home I can always pull up their notes and check to see how things are progressing or help them with interpretations. The students have been really positive about it as well. Most of them are already pretty adept with Google Docs and like the technology.
Last issue - permissions and backup issues with storing data on the cloud. You can set up the Google docs so that only you and the student can access it - your data is not visible across the web. Also, you can download your document at any time to have a working backup on your hard drive.
Other features of note:
- embedding images like gels, data analysis figures, etc. is pretty easy and keeps you from having to print them out.
- you can easily make comments in their notebook that they can refer to later. I have students write out their initial interpretations then I add my own in after to help them learn and to give them a future reference.
- ability to cut and paste previous protocols to increase efficiency
- much much easier to read than handwritten
- you can always see when the document has been edited (timestamp)
- you can actually instant message each other to the side of the document - this has been useful a few times when each in different locations
 |
| Sample from digital lab notebook |
This won't be the last time I talk about Google apps, they seem to be useful for a wide range of things in this setting!
Monday, June 6, 2011
1st follower!
Robert - thanks for volunteering to "follow" this blog while I work out the bugs. Feel free to try out things like commenting on posts, etc. as well as commenting on what is useful and what isn't. Once these things are worked out I'll start some actual meaningful blogging!
Saturday, June 4, 2011
test post
Ok, is a blog actually more useful than a posting notepage in a website? This is another question I'll need to address over the next weeks. For now I'm seeing if you can embed a newsfeed into a Google site
Friday, June 3, 2011
How to follow a blog
One of the side purposes of this project is to figure out how this tool might be useful for communication in some of my classes. What would be ideal in the content delivery is that the material finds the person rather than the person has to click on a bunch of stuff to get to it. Blackboard can do that if the students sign up to have the posts emailed to them, however you have to be part of the BB class, and once people leave Elon they lose that access.
Here's what I've figured out so far of how people can get this content directly to them:
- subscribe to it as an RSS feed. The easiest thing would be to link it in your favorite web browser and then whenever the blog gets updated a little notification comes up in your browser bar. In my Safari browser it shows up as a little number in parentheses.
underneath the posting there's a "subscribe to post comments". Clicking on this appears to subscribe you to the RSS feed for this via your web browser
- follow it via Google - I'll have to look more into this.
Here's what I've figured out so far of how people can get this content directly to them:
- subscribe to it as an RSS feed. The easiest thing would be to link it in your favorite web browser and then whenever the blog gets updated a little notification comes up in your browser bar. In my Safari browser it shows up as a little number in parentheses.
underneath the posting there's a "subscribe to post comments". Clicking on this appears to subscribe you to the RSS feed for this via your web browser
- follow it via Google - I'll have to look more into this.
test posting
This is a test post for my Blog about general technology that may be useful for the Biology department faculty. Whenever I find something that I think might be useful at any particular level I'll try to post about it and comment on it
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