University of Michigan LSA Instructional Support Services

Why I’m Here

Lauren — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 15:45:44 +0000

I’m here because I love wordpress and I love blogging and I like to teach others how to do it as well.

You know what else I love? Videos.

We’ve Moved!

Lauren — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 15:14:57 +0000

Instructional Awesomizing now has a brand new home! Take a look at our new digs…and don’t forget to update your RSS feeds and links accordingly!

We are now at:

www.instructionblog.com

Work with Files Across the Internet

Chase — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 15:35:59 +0000

Why waste the time to set this up? Why not just work with your files via FTP? Trust me, if you are a Mac user and do any work on fileservers / web hosts across the internet [such as accessing your University of Michigan IFS space] this tip can save you lots of time. And its free.

If you do any web design / development you are likely very familiar with juggling files via FTP and your editor of choice. Some editors have very nice integration with some form of file handling. I will commend Dreamweaver and Coda for this. My choice however is TextMate. TextMate has no integrated file handling. What is a guy to do.

After some digging I came across MacFUSE and Macfusion.

Macfusion is an open source Mac application that allows you to work with files on servers across the internet, as if they were sitting on your computer. – Macfusion’s web site

This means that it is now possible to mount your web hosted drive as a local disk.

This is really simple to do. First download MacFUSE. This is only a prerequisite for Macfusion.

…installing the MacFUSE software package will let you use any 3rd-party file system written atop MacFUSE. – MacFUSE’s web site.

Then get Macfusion and run the installer.

Launch Macfusion and click on plus sign, choose FTP of SFTP and enter your user name and password.

Now just click on Mount.

If you open a Finder window you will see your web drive mounted as if it were on your local computer. Pretty sweet eh?

[via theblog.danstever.com]

Editing with MPEG Streamclip

Chase — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 18:30:21 +0000

We’ve recently had an increase of faculty members who would like to do basic video editing on their computers. Typically, they’ve already ripped the DVD and used MPEG Streamclip to convert it to a standard video file. You can use the same software to trim and combine video clips into one file. Take a look at the following video for instructions:

The Visions of Students Today – Call for Submissions

Lauren — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 13:20:38 +0000

The Digital Ethnography group at Kansas State University has sent out a call for submissions for a new video project showcase how students see their world and what they learn. The group is asking for 2 minute video submissions from students and professors that illustrate your most critical daily learning moments.

Click here to learn more.

The Digital Ethnography group is headed by Dr. Michael Wesch, who will also be the keynote speaker at this year’s Enriching Scholarship Conference here at U-M.

Twitter Assignments

Lauren — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 20:45:40 +0000

We find that a lot of instructors want to incorporate new technologies into their curricula as a way to engage students with tools that they’re comfortable with and would understand but aren’t always sure how to do that, particularly for tools the instructors themselves may not use on a regular basis. Take Twitter. When Twitter launched, people jumped out of their chairs, pointed at it and exlaimed, “That’s it! The next big thing!” It clearly had potential. The only problem was…no one knew for what. That’s still a problem for many people. “Sure,” they think, “I could use Twitter…but I don’t know what I’d use it for. Especially not in the classroom.”

And while there are reports here and there of faculty using Twitter as a way to send messages to their students, or to receive questions or feedback from their students, actually using Twitter itself as a model for a class lesson is much less common. However, it can be done and it can be done very well.

While surfing comments on the news aggregator community Reddit, I came across a link someone posted, a screenshot of an assignment that (supposedly, anyway) their History professor had given them. I thought it was such an interesting and fun assignment that I had to post it. Click here to read the assignment.

What will instructors think of next? No, really–I’d like to know!

EmbedPlus Adds Extra Video Controls to YouTube Embeds

Chase — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 14:32:53 +0000

Embedding YouTube videos is a pretty useful feature, but it only gives you basic player controls. With EmbedPlus, you can start your videos at a certain time, skip self-defined chapters, add annotations, zoom, and more to tweak the video to your liking.

If you’re sharing your own video, you probably don’t need anything extra, but when you share other people’s videos, sometimes you want to tweak the video—start it at a certain point, ignore more boring parts of the video, or just add notes to the video to get your point across. YouTube doesn’t let you do this, but free service EmbedPlus adds these and some other pretty neat features to YouTube embeds.

To embed a YouTube video with EmbedPlus, just grab the YouTube link of the original video you want to share, paste it into EmbedPlus, and tweak the size, start time, and scene markers for your video. It’ll give you a new embed code that you can paste into your blog, PowerPoint, or another social network. Hit the link to check it out.

[via lifehacker]

Issuu

Chase — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 14:44:08 +0000

Issuu is a digital publishing platform that is used by a large number of publishers to publish their magazines, catalogs, and newspapers. Issuu includes an inbuilt exceptional browser that allows for life like browsing of magazines. It also includes an ability to download a published document in PDF format. Issuu allows the publication of a large number of documents. It boasts, as of date, 33 million monthly readers with over 2.4 billion impressions a month and nearly 250, 000 new publications per month. Issuu has won various awards including being one of the TIMES top 50 websites of 2009 alongside such websites as Google, Flickr, Facebook.

Issuu implements a highly realistic and customizable viewing of publications which includes items such as portfolios, books, magazine issues, newspapers, catalogues, brochures, reports and various other print media. Issuu integrates itself with various social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to promote publications uploaded onto its website. The publications on Issuu can be viewed online and downloaded if allowed. The view itself of the publication is animated with page flips and can be easily viewed in any web browser on a full screen. It is an immensely popular website that also allows users to engage with the publications and publishers thus allowing the publishers to build and increase their audience.

Issuu has also released a new feature known as Smart Look which allows other websites to convert hosted documents into digital Issuu editions so that readers do not have to download documents to read them. Issuu was founded in 2006 and later launched in 2007 by Michael Hansen, Ruben Bjerg Hansen, Mikkel Jensen, and Martin Ferro-Thomsen.

Issuu offers a premium package. The premium package of Issuu (Issuu Pro) includes such features as letting readers ‘View Inside’ before buying, monetizing valuable content in back issues, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), copyright protection and safe Amazon hosting. Issuu Awards include the aforementioned TIMES top 50 websites of 2009, 2009 Webby Awards Honoree and a 2008 South By Southwest finalist.

Issuu is used by a large number of publishers all over the world. A list of some of issuu’s reputable users is as follows:

The New York Times
The World Bank
Google
NASA
Nokia
Siemens
ASUS
United Nations (UN)
T Mobile
Toyota
Gorenje
Sales Force
King’s COllege London
MIT
Metro
Oxford University press
Cambridge University Press
BillaBong
Random House

[via technorotic]

You’re Never too Old to Learn

Lauren — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 12:50:19 +0000

You’re using the internet to read this post right now but chances are there are still a lot of things about the internet, and internet browsers, that are a mystery to you. Well, Google has put together a nice little-book to help you learn more about the very tools you use every day, “20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web.” Check it out—and not only will you learn something, but you might find ways to make your use of the web more effective.

20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web

SlideRocket brings web presentations to iPhone and iPad with HTML5

Chase — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 22:54:23 +0000

Since the dawn of time, traveling professionals have sought easier ways to present on the go. Pico projectors! Netbooks! Converting presentations to video to show them on iPhones! Then there was Keynote on the iPad, and it was good. Not great, however: presenters with libraries of PPT content have had to convert them over, and keeping your decks up to date with the latest and greatest from the sales department is a drag. Wouldn’t it be better and easier if there was a nice cloud-based solution that played well with Mobile Safari?

Enter SlideRocket’s new HTML5 player; the freemium web service now supports playing back (not editing) presentations on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch with full-screen video, a handful of good-looking builds and transitions, and all the analytics and version control you want. While the normal SlideRocket player requires Flash or AIR to show content, this one works fine without them.

SlideRocket’s workgroup and enterprise features mean that presentation designers can update shared slides and have the changes instantly reflected in all the active decks; that’s a big win for compliance-centric industries like financial services and healthcare. Account administrators can also pull analytics showing which presentations have been shown most often, to assist with account planning and content refinement.

Some of the snazzier interactive features of SlideRocket aren’t available in the HTML5 version of the player, like polling and attendee comments, but that’s probably not a showstopper, since an iPad presentation is more likely to be a one-on-one opportunity for you to present to someone on the fly. You can see all the HTML5 authoring tips in a presentation (of course!) right here.

SlideRocket offers a 14-day free trial, followed by a choice of a free Lite plan, $24/mo Pro plan, or an enterprise subscription. If you’re finding yourself in need of a presentation option for your iPad, check it out.

SlideRocket’s demo video:

[via TUAW]