blog moved

Hi -  as of July 2014 I have combined my website with my blogs and therefore this blog has now been relocated to http://adizzolab.wordpress.com

You can follow this blog topic more directly at the following URL: https://adizzolab.wordpress.com/category/tech/

This transfer has included importing all of these past Blogger posts

Blogger is a great tool but WordPress is letting me manage multiple things in one shot which is always a plus!

Prepping a plan for tech use for the upcoming semester

Note: This blog post will be sort of a rough draft of a post that I'm putting together for TLT. 

About a month ago after the registration period for spring closed I contacted the registered students in the class and gave them a quick survey to see 1) what kind of tech they had (ie. iOS vs Android phones, tablets, laptops, etc.),  and 2) their level of use of some prominent web-based tools (ex. Google docs/spreadsheets/presentations/calendars, Twitter, etc.). Now as the Spring approaches I want to be able to take what I learned from this survey and hit the ground running.What kinds of things will be easy to get going in class, and what things will take more time to get the students up and running?

First a recap of what I learned in my survey of 16  3rd and 4th year students in this particular class:

• almost all have a smartphone, and for most of them that is an iPhone
• email and texting is their preferred communication form, as opposed to phone calls, tweeting, or Facebook
• all of them are comfortable with the Google tools suite
• few use electronic calendars to keep organized
• All use Facebook, less than half use Twitter or Instagram or Flipboard. A surprise to me personally was that 80% of them use Pinterest
• only about half of them have tablets or related readers 
• only about half of them were interested in electronic texts
• very few of them use or maintain blogs

Armed with this information, I can now start planning what tools will be useful for this semester. Here's what I've done:

• set up a YouTube channel for the class. Students are going to be set up to share relevant videos with everyone else. YouTube is now under Google control so students will not have issues subscribing
• set up my Google calendar for the class - only about a third of the students reported using this but it will help that one third anyways (and keep me organized!)
• set up professional Twitter feeds to be displayed within the Moodle course. Not many of them seem to use it themselves and I find it to be a little tricky for first-timers so this will allow them to see the material without having to muck around through it. 
• set up a Flipboard magazine for the class (http://flip.it/daelU). Not many students have tablets (this is where Flipboard really shines) but Flipboard now allows magazines to be viewed on the web.  
• set up a static PollEverywhere site to be used for the class. This allows the students to bookmark a URL/textnumber/twittertag that they can use the whole semester when I use in-class polling
• set up a class Pinterest page (http://www.pinterest.com/adizzo/microbiology-class-bio253-board//). Pinterest is new to me but the students seem to love it so we'll see how this develops
• Lastly - and probably most importantly - I am in the process of putting together a Moodle page that is an assignment for the first class. This page steps them through how to do all the basic setup. I am thinking about using some simple tasks and to award badges (more on this in a future post) to help me know the class is able to access all these tools. 

My developing strategy for good tech use in teaching: 

1. figure out what your goals are for the class
2. figure out what tech is out there to help attain those goals
3. understand where your student knowledge base is relative to this tech
4. try to understand what other tools the students are using that you may not be aware of
5. set up and prepare the tech tools

My goal is to hit the ground running in that first week and hopefully this plan will help me set the tech part into place. 

NOTE 1/27/2014 - the more formal blog was posted on the TLT blog site

Reader aggregation using Flipboard

There is a lot of information out there that I would like to access at any given point and that's becoming challenging. This information exists in many forms - for me that currently means news feeds, blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook groups, YouTube channels and Instagram feeds. Feed aggregators are great ways to pull in all of this different information into a one-stop site. I think the primary allure of these aggregators is that rather than log into many different accounts to access these things, I can simply open up the aggregator program and it all is channeled through there.

Flipboard is my app of choice. Not only does it pull all of the information into one place, it also makes it into a ridiculously attractive magazine style format. It is also extremely flexible, having apps for most prominent mobile devices (including iPhone/iPodTouch/iPad, Kindle, Nook, and Android-based devices).

I've actually written about this one just this past June but thought it was worth revisiting. One of my personal charges with the Technology Fellow is to enhance faculty awareness of all the great tools that are out there. There are a lot of great blogs and feeds out there, including our own TLT group's but I suspect many of us are not set up to easily access them - Flipboard is a great solution for this. Once everyone gets hooked in then it becomes easier to have the information delivered right to you.

Consider trying this one out - especially if you have a mobile device.

time to restart posting!

After taking a little time off from this blog it's time to start posting again! Please let me know if you have any ideas for topics you'd like to see

strategy for using Polleverywhere

Since I've taken up the Fac Tech Fellow position my blog posts are sliding into a number of different venues, but I'll try to keep posting here too when I can.

I revisited the in-class polling today in Intro Bio. I love asking open-ended questions, having the students think about it on their own for a minute, then answer. This helps engage them, but I can't fully assess what the entire class knew, just the few who I can get an answer from. Back to polling then! I have done this before and enjoyed it but what I really wanted this time was to make it efficient. I don't want to have to go through explanations every time I want to poll, and I want them to be able to answer quickly. My solution was as follows:

• set up one single poll that allows full text entry
• provide the students with a handout that spelled out all the different ways that they could add their answer to this poll. Remember that as long as they have either a web or text-capable cell phone, a tablet, or a laptop with them, Polleverywhere.com lets them put in their answers by....
• .....a simple website interface
• .....texting to a 5 digit number, then they have to provide one specific 6 digit number each time that directs them to the specific poll, then they type their answer
• .....tweeting to an address that has the specific poll

A picture of the handout is shown (with the numbers blocked out so noone can hack it :) )

Note that the students did not have to log in at any time. Also, I asked the students to bookmark the sites or text location. Since I will just reuse the same poll over and over they won't have to mess around with inputting different numbers every time. 

Will it work? Well, I polled 2 times in class today after an initial time when I stepped everyone through it. The students seemed to have minimal issues getting going for each poll and I didn't feel like I wasted any time on technical issues. 

reposting of a blog entry I did on the FacTech Group - might be of interest to those using iPads/iPods

http://elonfactechblog.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/flipboard-as-a-reader-and-potential-for-teaching/

reBlog of another post

http://elonfactechblog.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/real-time-monitoring-of-class-lab-data-using-google-forms/

Here's a post I just made for a Faculty Tech group blog that I'm participating in. The post describes an experiment with realtime data monitoring for my "unknowns" lab in Microbiology. Hoping this works - will really enhance the efficiency of this lab!

Using the realtime PCR machine to measure GFP expression

As it turns out, the settings for reading the SYBR green dye also works for fluorescing GFP meaning that the realtime PCR machine in McM221 can be used in this way. Tried a quick test to see if I could get it to work. 4 samples monitored over the course of an hour at 37 deg:

• 30 ul LB broth uninoculated
• 30 ul LB + E.coli HB101 
• 30 ul LB + E.coli HB101 containing the pGLO plasmid, harvested off of an LB+Amp+Ara plate
• 30 ul LB + E.coli HB101 containing the pGLO plasmid, harvested off of an LB+Amp+Ara plate, but then also amended with 5 ul of 0.4 mg/ml arabinose. 
• The A580 reading for the E.coli without the plasmid was 0.29 which translates roughly into 1E8 cells/ml
• The A580 reading for the E.coli with the plasmid was 0.33 which translates roughly into 1.1E8 cells/ml
• Made a program to hold the temperature at 37 deg C and then to take fluorescence readings every minute for an hour.

Things to note from the graph

• bacteria without pGLO showed same level of fluorescence as just the media
• bacteria with pGLO were consistently higher
• bacteria without pGLO both showed  steady levels of signal across an hour while bacteria with pGLO increased. My assumption is that since the bacteria with the plasmid came from a plate that already had arabinose on it, the bacteria already were expressing GFP. Increases across time indicate the increase in GFP - could be due to cell doubling or due to increased GFP expression. Either way the pGLO cells without arabinose shouldn't have shown an increase. 

At the end of the day this shows promise as a tool for us to develop labs around, and of course research too. 

tags

Technical note - just figured out how to appropriately tag my blogs and display the tag cloud (see to the right) so now you can click on the tag of interest to pull up any posts related to that. Cheers

Straightforward video conferencing with iChat/Messages on Mac computers

Straightforward video conferencing with iChat/Messages on Mac computers

A few years ago I was playing around with the iChat Theater mode as a tool for easy off-site presenting. The cool thing about Theater is that it not only allows you to show someone a series of slides or images that you have, it also keeps you in the picture to narrate it. See the pictures below when I recently tested it. The first picture is what the person on the other end saw - me in the big picture and him (which happens to be me too) in the small picture. Next I dragged my pdf file into the main window on my computer - this became the main picture and my face shrunk down to the lower corner (you can see this in the lower picture) So now I can show the other person (or people) my presentation/pictures/videos/etc while they can still see me narrating.

Did this with a winter term class a few years ago - had a colleague video in and show us some of his research slides that related to a paper we had read. He was projected on the screen and so he filled up the whole screen. When he switched to Theater mode the transition I described earlier happened and that was a "wow" moment for the students that they continued to talk about for quite some time. I wish the wow had been for the material, but I'll take it anyway....

I recently upgraded to Mac OsX 10.8 which moves iChat to Messages. It's not as straightforward to do this anymore but it's there.

preparing prelab/lecture material video

There is a lot of talk about classroom flipping these days and I can see where this will be great - get the content deliver "out of the way" before the class meets, then spend the class time applying the content and trying to get it to a level of working understanding. In many ways we've been doing this in our Biology labs already via prelab content on video that is then applied with hands-on activities during the lab. One of the key things you need to be able to do easily is to capture your lecture/prelab/etc.  Dan Reis at TLT showed me a great tool the other day (free too) called Screencast-o-Matic. SOM allows you to identify a portion of your desktop that you want to be filmed. It also can simultaneously capture video of you so that the students can see you giving the talk.

Here's a screenshot of it in action. The dotted line is what will be captured and it will embed the video of you in there if you want it to. 

SOM has export functions for exporting into mp4, flv, and avi formats. It can also export directly to YouTube which would have some advantages. 

Note that while there are ways to do this kind of thing without the video, inclusion of the video I think is a nice touch that students will appreciate. 

http://www.screencast-o-matic.com

Flexible in-class polling without clickers

I have been able to play around with clickers here and there over the past year (see earlier post on 11/3/2012) and really enjoy some of the things they bring to the class. The things that bugged me about them though was 1) having to lug around the clickers (ok, it's not that bad but in addition to everything else I carry....), 2) the challenge for text entry for some of the models I tried, and 3) the troubleshooting we would have to do each time.

To address this I tried a different approach using PollEverywhere, one of many different on-line polling services. It took about a half hour to figure out the little things about it but it wasn't too bad. Here's how it addressed the issues noted above:

1. lugging around the clickers - no need to! Students can use any data-capable electronic device that they would normally bring. This includes cell phones (with at least texting capacity which is pretty standard these days), tablets, and laptops. 
2. text entry - very easy with any of the devices noted above and the way they send in the info is flexible: they can text the answer, tweet it, or use a web-interface
3. troubleshooting -  the students are using devices that they are already very capable with so there's no technical issues on that end. 

Other advantages: 

• I can see where this would address other issues too like batteries dying on clickers, or students forgetting their clickers (if they were required to purchase). 
• service is free as long as your class is under 40 students - which is the case for most of our classes here at Elon
• with text entry you can take the class responses and report them in a word cloud (see previous post) which is a really nice way to quickly summarize responses like this. 
• no need for students to purchase anything new - although if even a small percentage don't have a mobile data-cable device of some sort (including a laptop) that could be a limiting factor)

Disadvantages: 

• While probably 30 of my 33 students had at least one capable device on them, a few of the students do not carry these around regularly and therefore could not participate. 
• as a very simplistic texter I was challenged to communicate to the students how to text to the site. This only involves a few code numbers but nonetheless it turned out to take a minute for all of us to get on the same page. 

Poll the class then report back with a tag cloud

Had to take a minute to share this one. I've played a bit with PollEverywhere this year and really enjoyed how easy it is to create a quick poll and have the class use whatever means they want (texting, web-based entry, tweeting) to respond on the spot. Today I did that with my Microbiology class and asked them to use text-entry to give me a few association words that came to their mind when they thought of microbes. After polling them PollEverywhere gave me the option of reporting the results as a word cloud - here it is:

I have a previous post about word clouds but I absolutely loved this application of them - allowed me to show them the most common words that they had across their answers (the bigger the word the more common it was). Too cool and I think they appreciated it as well. 

Tag/Word clouds

Took a break from grading to see if I could figure out how to make tag clouds. These are neat graphical ways to highlight what things are prominent within a set of words - these words could be on a web page, a journal article, or whatever text you want to supply. In my case I wanted to see if this would accurately represent to the students what my course was about.

A quick search pulled up a number of free online tools to do this. I randomly chose http://www.tagxedo.com/.  I literally copied and pasted all of my notes into the entry box, chose a color scheme, and then chose the shape of my cloud (bacterial-shaped of course). Here's what I got for the lecture and the lab. 

Tag/Word cloud for my lab: 

 Tag/Word cloud for my lecture:

Pretty cool and honestly not a bad representation of the lab and lecture parts of the course. Basically it uses an algorithm to weight the font size by the frequency of the word, then fits the words into the shape. 

Actually I could see this being a neat way to show microbial community composition too. Tried it with Ben's fungi data from the Elon Forest. Added a new twist to - instead of capturing an image here is an iFrame of it so that it can be dynamic (see earlier post on Widgets). Scroll over the names to see the magic. Note that the shape is a nice oaklike tree - nice little touch although why can't they supply a fungus icon for us? 

Early view of next Moodle version

Recently I was able to sit in on a Webinar where they talked about the next version of Moodle that is coming our way (I believe in the next month or so). In the rush of finals I unfortunately lost my notes but here are a few notable things I remember

• file management looks like it will be a lot easier AND it will be much more straightforward to organize and share documents across courses and course sections. I see this as being great for some of our multisection courses where we tend to use the same documents - Sr Sem, Bio113, Bio102, etc.  Equally important will be that updating everyone's file on their page will be as simple as replacing the document that is in the main folder. For example, let's take Bio113. All base lab handouts are held in one folder that the lab coordinator maintains. All the sections essentially build aliases (links) to each file. If the coordinator updates the main file, everyone is automatically updated. 

• currently when you set up an assignment you have to wade through a myriad of options, often times only to figure out later it was the wrong option. Now the assignments will all be under one "set up assignment" feature where you can then customize it - I think that will be much easier than the current setup. 

• while it is not new, the personalized learning designer was being pushed as something that doesn't get used enough. I can't claim to have explored this much but I liked the automated messages that you can set up that will get sent to students who meet some condition like having low grades, or who haven't logged in in a while. I can see where this would be a good push for certain students.

link to the 2.0 version manual: http://manuals.moodlerooms.com/display/JOULE2/Teacher+Manual

1st try with clickers

A few weeks ago I got a hold of a set of clickers so I could try them out in my Bio101 course. After a few busy weeks I finally got a chance to use them and here's a very initial reaction

What was the use? 

• I stole a great idea from Sri and was having the students classify music by building a character dataset which we then analyzed for similarity. Had them come up with 10 music "Traits" (examples were acoustic, slow, techno, etc.) then played them clips of 4 songs chosen so that some of them would be likely to be very similar no matter what traits they had chosen. They each scored the traits for each song. Next as a group we built a class character matrix based on the traits they had scored. We used to clickers to have them give their input on what they had scored for that trait, then took the majority. For this part they only input they had was either A-yes, or B-no (although somehow some students still ended up voting C,D, or E....).  Next we tested a hypothesis that they developed - that the Jennifer Lopez and the Rihanna songs were more similar to each other than either were to the Harry Belafonte song. After showing them how to do one of the calculations, I let them calculate one and then enter it anonymously on the clickers. For this the students used the numeric option which allows them to type in a number. I decided not to show them the results on here but addressed that there was a mix of correct and incorrect answers. 

My goals/hopes - that students would be more engaged overall, would have fun doing something pretty complex, and that they would all feel comfortable answering questions.

Ease of learning how to use them - VERY easy to get going with these. The TLT folks kindly loaned me a set of ~30  iClickers. This comes with a base that you plug into your USB port, and some very simple software. Took about 5 min to get it all set up and to try it out in my office

Ease of setting up in class 

• took a few minutes to pass them out, then a few more to help students who had never used them before. Not bad but I hadn't budgeted that in. In classes that use them regularly I hear that they just get the students used to grabbing the clickers when they come in
• very quick to set up base and open up the software

Issues that arose  

• I think I could see my self getting tired of lugging a set of 30 of these around. The specific units for this are pretty big, as is the base unit.  
• Showing the students the results of a survey (which is one of the highlights - they were clearly excited to see if they were right/wrong) has a catch. Personally I write my notes on the whiteboard and in this room the screen comes down right over most of the whiteboard. Furthermore, the room I was in had an automatic lowering screen so you can't just shine the computer onto the whiteboard. So I had to choose - do I want to show them the results or my notes? If you are someone who uses your computer as the main thrust of your lectures (such as powerpoint talks) then this would not be an issue

Did it help accomplish my goals?

• students definately seemed more engaged  
• students were having fun - At the recommendation of one of the TLT postings on this subject I would hide the results of each survey until everyone had voted which added an element of suspence that they seemed to like. Even the fact that a few people kept mistakenly clicking options I wasn't giving them loosened them up a bit. 
• there was a high participation in the answering - usually only one student gets to answer any question that I ask the class, but now almost all of them did. 

Interesting features that I will try to investigate in the near future

• taking attendance - if you have the students always pick up a clicker then you can use it for attendance which I think would be easy and neat. Obviously you would have to assign a specific clicker number to a specific student for the semester and train the students on that. 
• preset questions - if you are organized enough to know all the questions you want to ask them ahead of time then you can have them set up. Doubtful it will work for me but could be useful for others

collaborative slide exercise

In the middle of trying something new right now. Having just covered transcription/translation for my Bio101 class, I wanted to have a presentation about different proteins to highlight the diversity that exists in these molecules. What I decided to do was make a collaborative Google presentation which is Google's version of Powerpoint. I chose a bunch of cool proteins, added the names onto each slide and then "shared" the presentation with the students. They were then told to claim one of the protein slides and to add info and graphics on it.

One of the things I found neat was that there wasn't a single student who wasn't familiar with Google documents. They all knew how to access the documents and how to work with it.

One of the things I found fascinating was logging onto the presentation and seeing as many as 8-9 students working on their slides all at once. I didn't do it but technically I could have instant messaged them through the program at that point too

Technically you can export the Google presentation into Powerpoint, but they also have their own presentation player right in the software - just hit play and it plays on your screen just like Powerpoint. Tomorrow when I go to class that's exactly what I will do - no collating of slides or having people upload - because they all worked on it together at the same time. Very cool...

screenshot showing that 4 people were on editing at the same time

more moodling on a friday afternoon

Am playing around with the "Add a block" function and discovering some things.... A couple of other tricks for the new Moodle system that a few people in the dept have been trying to figure out...

1. sending emails within the class - add the "quickmail" block
2. sending instant messages to individuals within Moodle - add the "message" block
• Linda and I tried this, it seems to be like chatting in Facebook
3. embedding a widget for some functioning - add the "html" block (see previous post for how to get the widget set up in it)
4. help students keep track of what new things have been added onto the site - add the "recent activity" module

Widgets for Moodle

It's often nice to be able to jazz up a Moodle site with little relevant things that make the site feel dynamic. A while back I wrote about this when I was experimenting with the twitter feeds from the professional societies for my Micro course. Thought it was worth revisiting this as a more general topic.

Let's use a recent example. For Senior Seminar, the instructors always make a big deal about the fact that we've synched our watches to the official regional time relative to GMT - it stressed to the students how serious we're going to be about timeliness. As I set up my Moodle site this year I thought it would be cool to get that clock embedded into the Moodle site as opposed to just having a link to it like I had in the past. The key term here is "widget" - it refers to a snippet of HTML code that you can insert into a site that allows something to be displayed. A quick search of "GMT time widget" found a myriad of options out there. 

Here's just one of many such links: http://weatherandtime.net/widgets-gallery.html

On this page I chose one of the forms that I like - the Apple apple sounds good. Now it let me choose the city, then it spits out a little HTML code that looks like this: 

"<script src="http://weatherandtime.net/swfobject.js" type="text/javascript" ></script><div id="div_clock_06" style="text-align:center; margin:auto auto;width:145px; height:185px;"><div style="padding:0px 1px 1px 1px;position:absolute; z-index:100; color:#239C34; text-align:center; width:145px;height:auto;"><a style="color:#239C34; text-decoration:none;font-size:12px;" href="http://weatherandtime.net/en/North-America/United-States/New-York-City-time.html" title="New York City time">New York City time</a></div><span id="swf_clock_06">&nbsp;</span></div><script type="text/javascript" language="Javascript">swfobject.embedSWF("http://weatherandtime.net/clock_06.swf", "swf_clock_06", "145", "185", "10","clock_06.swf", {city: "18103",lang:"en",color:"#239C34"}, {menu:"false",wmode:"transparent",allowScriptAccess:"always"}, {id:"clock_06",name:"clock_06"});</script>"

Now go ahead and copy that (except for the quotes on the end). Now go to your moodle site for your class, and 1) use the "add a block" function, choose "html" then 2) edit the block as follows: - in the "content" section, click on html which brings up a subwindow.Paste the html code into it and voila! you may need to refresh the page before it shows. I've embedded the code below so you can see what it should look like - These widgets exist for a ton of things - so just search for some whenever something pops into your head that you think would be useful for your course site.

New York City time

setting your defaults for Word documents

One of the things that always drives me crazy is having to alter odd formatting settings every time I open up a new document. For example, the default for my Word program is a document that puts spaces after every return. Today I figured out how to change this. Buried in your file structure is a template document. If you open this in Word you can adjust everything to how you like it, save it, and from that point on every new file will start off with that new default formatting. These things might include:

• margins
• fonts
• the way you view the document
• line and paragraph spacing
• others

You can look up "change the default settings for new documents" in the Word help, then choose the "change other default settings in the Normal template" and it will tell you how to find that file.

Alternately, you can probably search your hard drive for "Normal.dotm" to find the file