W4 Reading

I kept on reading this week in anticipation of writing a Literature Review. I have found the some of these articles, while they initially looked good aren't going to be a big help in my AR project and I will have to so some additional searches. Also, I have the folder option on EBSCO host working so I can save all my research there as seen below from this weeks reading summaries:

W4 - Final Video AR Project

In this video I provide a brief overview of my Action Research project and invite you to join-in.

PE6 - Doing Multiple Takes in Garage Band

For PE6 I was going to do a video on how to make a techno song in Garage band, but unfortunately it didn't work so well.  Instead, I am going to show you how to do multiple takes in Garage Band.  This is excellent for improvising a part or recording a difficult part again and again until you finally get it right.

This is a hidden feature that is not available on any of the menus and you have to do some setup to make it active.  It works for all instruments as well as vocals.  Enjoy!

PE5 - Mastering, (re)Mastering, and Controlling Your Final Sound in Garage Band

Ever wonder what "digitally remastered" means?  Want to know how to control you sound profile in Garage Band using mastering? If so, then this video is for you.  It took me awhile to truly understand these concepts.  If you are planning to do anything serious with Garage Band you will need to understand mastering and the compressor to get "your sound".   Watching this movie in HD will give you the best sound quality.



If you are interested in dynamic range and the "loudness war" this is a video which compares and contrasts older recording to digitally remastered recordings.  However, everyone is using compressors now (including radio stations) so all music is basically loud with little or no dynamic range.

PE4 - Adobe Contribute CS5 - Blog Manager Software

I haven't done much with the Adobe CS5 Suite so this week I thought I would dig around and see if I could find any lesser known useful Adobe tools.  Currently at FSO, we use the Apple iWeb application for managing our AR website.  Adobe Contribute is similar to iWeb and is designed for for managing blog sites like Blogger where you are currently reading this blog post.  Adobe Contribute can even replace iWeb.

To begin I started up Adobe Contribute CS5 and created a new "Blog Connection"

Adobe Contribute Creating a New Blog Connection

Adobe Contribute is a generic blogging tool so I specified that I would be connecting to Blogger. Adobe Contribute can also connect to WordPress, Mobile Me, and TypePad.

Connecting to a Blogger Blog

So far so good.. I entered my username and password and successfully connected to my Blogger blog site. Next, I tried to pull up an existing blog page (BP11) where I would make a simple change.  It took Blogger nearly 60 seconds to retrieve and display the page.  This slow response was perplexing so  I performed a quick check of the machine and Internet connection and everything seemed nominal.  To make sure this wasn't a anomaly I tried the same process again with the same slow results.

Editing a Blogger Blog with Adobe Contribute

After making a few simple edits to an existing page (BP11) for test purposes I decided to publish my changes back to Blogger and received this perplexing error message.  How could the images, audio, or video files not be unsupported?  I didn't add any audio, video, or images to my post and simply added a few lines of text.  Bravely I clicked "OK" to find out what would happen next.

Warning Message when Publishing a Change in Adobe Contribute

This is where things started to get even worse.  For some reason this edit created two RSS Feed updates with the subject of "##TITLE##" and the content of "##CONTENT##".

Strange RSS Feed Messages Generated by Adobe Contribute Publishing

Thankfully, these strange entries do not appear on my main Blogger page so this must be something internal to the process which Adobe Contribute uses to update pages.  This is where I decided to stop my exploration before something really bad happened and destroyed my Blogger site or corrupted the RSS feeds of my followers.

Before admitting defeat, I did a quick check for software updates and none are currently available for Adobe Contribute.  This tool has ample training material available in Lynda.com so I reviewed the blogging videos just to see if I made a misstep. Unfortunately, I could not find anything that I had done incorrectly. I was really looking forward to a good experience using Adobe Contribute CS5  so that I could work-offline and have an application to manage my blogs. Unfortunately the simplest of tasks are slow and produce warning messages and strange RSS feed messages.

If anyone of my followers is using Adobe Contribute CS5, I would like to hear from you and learn if I am using the tool incorrectly or if this behavior is normal.  In any case, this post was written with the editor on the blogger website and not Adobe Contribute CS5.

A wise philosopher once said, "It is better to learn from the mistakes of others since you may not live long enough to make them all yourself."

W3_Reading

This was the focus of my reading this week:

Online Assessment and Measurement: Foundations and Challenges . By: Hricko, Mary; Howell, Scott. Information Science Publishing. 2006 372 pp. (ED508842)
Online learning is one of the most important topics in distance learning, but practitioners and researchers have experienced difficulty in defining the process. "Online Assessment and Measurement: Foundations and Challenges" approaches the topic by finding a common ground to properly analyze online assessment and measurement. "Online Assessment and Measurement: Foundations and Challenges" explores the development of online assessment and the way practitioners of online learning can modify their methodologies in the design, development, and delivery of their instruction to best accommodate their participants. It acts as a handbook for educators, trainers, support staff, librarians, human resource managers, and anyone interested in online assessment. 

PE3 - Garage Band - Getting your Compositions and Music Out (Part 3/3)

In this practicum I learned that it is extremely easy to get all sorts of media into Garage Band and even compose using a MIDI keyboard.  But this made me wonder, was Garage Band like "Hotel California" where you can checkin anytime you like but you can never leave? What are the options for moving things out of Garageband to share and remix?  It turns out that Garage Band offers nearly every option a audio enthusiast or musician could want.



Garage Band Export Options

 After you are done with your composition, you can send it to:

• iTunes
• a Ringtone for your phone
• a PodCast
• an MP3 (Export Song to Disk)
• or to a physical CD

In short, Apple gets it.  They are supporting the remix culuture in which we currently live.  Other companies are not so flexible with their output and export options. 

For those working with MIDI files, Garage Band will even let you output sheet music.  Is this exciting or what?  Now I can finally finish my Cello quartet, broadway musical, and opera.   Garage Band is more than just a drag and drop loop remixer.  It is a full featured studio program and I haven't even tried using a guitar or microphone.  I wanted to try filters and create an autotune filter and then sing a song, but there's always next week. The sheet music I printed for the Happy Song in Part #1 shown below.

Musical Score from Garage Band

PE2 - Garage Band + Yamaha Keyboard = :) (Part 2 of 3)

I have an older Yamaha PSR-410 keyboard and I wondered if it would be possible to get this ancient keyboard to work with Garage Band?

Me Playing A Tune on a Keyboard

The rear of the keyboard has the old 5-pin serial MIDI IN and OUT ports so there was hope.  Would these old serial ports still work?  Were they fast enough to interface with a high speed MacBook Pro?

MIDI IN and OUT Ports

I did some research on Amazon and found this cable, EMU Midi 1x1 Cable From Amazon. Thanks to the Amazon comment and rating system I learned that this cable would work in a MacBook Pro without any additional drivers or software?  Could it really be that easy I asked myself. Could this project really only cost $29.99?

Midi Cable

The cable arrived from Amazon and he moment of truth was at hand. I plugged it into the USB port and voila, Garage Band immediately recognized the external MIDI input and when I pressed a key on the keyboard it played a note using the active instrument in Garage Band.

USB Midi Cable Plugged into MacBook Pro

No more using the cheesy onscreen keyboard in Garage Band for me.   I can now record an instrument using a MIDI keyboard.  Mac truly makes this all too easy.  Also, the MIDI interface is blazing fast.  There is no noticeable lag between a keyboard key press and sound events.

Garage Band - Showing a MIDI Keyboard Recording

PE1 - Garage Band and MIDI Files (Part 1 of 3)

Learning Experience 1 - Going Deeper with Garage Band by Using MIDI files





Hope you enjoy the Happy Song! Did I mention that Macs rock?

BP12 OMM (One Minute Movie on iGoogle)

BP11 Comment to Sandy Lopez

Follow this link to Sandy's Blog to view my comments on Sandy's blog.  My comment was the first comment made on 10/13/2010.

(This line was edited in Adobe Contribute and is a test to see if it gets published.)

BP10 Comment to Ginny Holm

Follow this link to Ginny's Blog (The Holm Front) to view my comments on Ginny's blog.  My comment was the first comment made on 10/13/2010.

BP9 Cooklet (Web 2.0) Tool

This week I decided to dig deeper into the pile of Web2.0 apps and find something obscure. After digging through the pile for awhile, I found a site which might be useful for culinary arts teachers. This is the site that has the answer of "what's for dinner?" and is called Cooklet.com

Cooklet.com describe the site was follows:

Cooklet is a platform that enhances the experience of cooking and helps you organise recipes. Through our international community we aspire to develop dialouge and sharing of cuisine among users from all over the world.

Currently the platform is in beta version. We are constantly working on improving all the solutions, do contact us if you have any feedback and suggestions. 

I have found that most recipie sites on the Internet have the same problems.  The first problem is that you don't know if anyone has tried the recipe and second there is no rating system. Cooklet solves these problems by allowing users to share this information using their social network cooking platform as shown below.

For each recipe I can clearly see if anyone "cooked it" and how they "ranked it."  Additionally, members can blog about their experiences and share any changes or ideas they had regarding the dish.


Cooklet also adds a social media feature set to your Cooklet profile.  You can think of Cooklet as FaceBook for recipes and cooking enthusiasts.  Just like other social media sites you can have friends and send messages to them.  Cooklet maintains its own internal email system, similar to other social media sites.  Cooklet supports social cookbooks where you can maintain an online cookbook of recipes you found on the site and add personal notes which you can share with the community. Cooklet also supports forums and blogs for cooking related topics.  Below is a screen-shot of the Cooklet profile manager interface which details the available social networking features.

However the Cooklet experience doesn't stop with computer based social media. Users can use their extras to take Cooklet with you on your mobile device so when you are the grocery store you can look up your ingredient lists.  I believe Cooklet can also be run as a standalone application, but I did not test it. The screen shot below shows the Cooklet platform extras.

Enjoy Cooklet! I know I will.

W2 Reading

This week I learned how to make a folder in the EBSCO host and have pulled over 20 articles.  I haven't had a chance to review all 20 but I am whittling them down.  This is the concept map of what I reviewed this week made in the Web 2.0 tool called Mind Meister.  I am not  a Mind Meister expert yet as you can see, but it is a collaborative mapping tool which I am going to try and use in my classroom. 

BP8 OMM (One Minute Movie on Google Docs)

BP7 Comment to Ginny Holm

Follow this link to Ginny's Blog (The Holm Front) to view my comments on Ginny's blog.  My comment was the first comment made on 10/7/2010.

BP6 Comment to Meghan Bassett's DFILM.com Web 2.0 Commercial

Follow this link to Meghan Bassett's Blog to view my comments on Meghan's blog.  My comment was the first comment made on 10/7/2010.

BP5 Web 2.0 Tool Choice, Paper Rater

BP5 Web 2.0 Tool Choice, Paper Rater

This week I found an interesting link on Web 2.0 Guru called Paper Rater.  The description of the Web 2.0 Paper Rater application is as follows:

"PaperRater.com is a free resource, developed and maintained by linguistics professionals and graduate students. PaperRater.com is used by schools and universities in over 46 countries to help students improve their writing.
PaperRater.com combines the power of natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, information retrieval (IR), computational linguistics, data mining, and advanced pattern matching (APM). We offer the most powerful writing tool available on the internet today.
Before we could offer PaperRater.com we had to overcome large challenges related to computational linguistic design and development, handling transliteration variation; ethnolinguistic identification; document classification and entity extraction; name parsing and regularization; duplicate document recognition, plagiarism detection, clustering, and prioritization; automatic entity extraction and entity resolution.
As part of the development process, we put together a team of computational linguists and subject matter experts to develop a core Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine using statistical and rules-based NLP to extract language evidence from essays and term papers and robustly translate that evidence into accurate codes. We hope to showcase some of our technology at a later date" PaperRater.com, (2010).

To Start off with PaperRater you have to cut/paste a document, select the education level for the document, and the type of document.  I decided to use my research paper for Dr. Wyly's class at Full Sail University titled,   Digital Natives: Digital Natives and Emerging Technologies in the Classroom as shown below which was written on the masters educational level.

 
The analysis is very quick.  It took less than a second to get the results for my three page paper.  The first bit of information that is returned is the originality score which detects whether or not the paper was plagiarized.  As you can see in the screen shot, there are no signs of plagiarism in my paper.

The second part of the analysis involves language scores which center around vocabulary, spelling, and grammar.  It found a two grammar suggestions for my paper and suggested I use "different from" instead of "different than" as shown below.

Next it moved onto style and provided statistics about word usage as shown below.

In the final analysis it scored the paper and gave me a score of 59 which equates to "Good Job".  I could not find any additional information on the scoring system, but I am glad that I received a "Good Job" for style.

Next it scored vocabulary and gave me a score of "Excellent work" for my use of sophisticated language. but suggested that I try using their Vocabulary Builder section to further enhance my sophisticated vocabulary.

I plan to run the literature review that we will write next month through the PaperRater website to see how I score.  I will also use this in my scientific research class to assist students with the rewriting of their research papers.  Even though I pasted in the reference section of my paper the website did not comment or score the references section.  It was simply returned in a frame at the bottom of the page without any analysis.

In my opinion PaperRater has two useful features: 1) free plagiarism detection, and 2) free double checking of the syntax and grammar in your paper.  Also, the terms and services associated with PaperRater were quite long and it might be worth it to consult your legal team before submitting a Nobel prize winning paper.

BP4 Web 2.0 Tool Selection (Google Docs)

Google Docs is by far my favorite Web 2.0 tool.  It is solid, very stable, and truly collaborative.  Imagine having 10 people collaboratively work on a single PowerPoint presentation... you can with Google docs. Imagine a class of 30 students all inputting data into a spreadsheet and performing analysis simultaneously ...you can with Google Docs.  Imagine creating an online form to gather information or take a survey then emailing it to thousands of people ... you can with Google docs.

I coach/mentor a robotics team and on day one of the season, I don't have kids sign in and give me their information on a piece of paper.  I simply put out a laptops with a Google Doc opened in the webbrowser.  This saves double entry (copying paper to computer) plus this document can be immediately shared and accessed with a few clicks of the mouse.

Google Docs is not as robust as Microsoft Office and would not be suitable for creating a newsletter or application that requires heavy formatting and can be considered a Microsoft Office lite.  Additionally, Google Docs is not a good choice for people that need to keep their information top secret or secure.  The good news with Google Docs is that your information is available anywhere on the Internet and, the bad news is your information is available to hackers anywhere on the Internet as well.  Google has been hacked and has servers spread across the Globe so there is no guarantee that your physical data even resides in the USA. 

Google Docs is very easy to transition to for the average user and there are plenty of tutorial videos on all aspects of Google Docs available on YouTube.  Here are some great examples:

Great Overview Videos of Google Docs






Why Google Docs for Educators?


Google Docs Spreadsheet Tutorial

W1 Reading

For my ARP, I am interested in the best practices for blended and online learning. My plan is to look at specific areas in online content and course structure. These articles represent the high level view and each week I plan to get more specific articles with smaller and smaller scopes. Click Image to SUPERSIZE.

BP3_Diigo Group (Screen Shot)

 

Link to our Diigo Website: http://groups.diigo.com/group/the_team

Here is the screen shot of my group's Diigo page.  The Team is composed of Ginny Holm, David Hotler, Jerusha Hufstetler, Dennis Woodward, and of course your blog host (Michael George).

 

In addition to having a group page where we can share bookmarks I have created my own personal Diigo page to track bookmarks for the research articles for my action research project and have invited my critical friends to join.

 

Link to my ARP Diigo Site: http://groups.diigo.com/group/mg3s-action-research-project-bookmarks

BP_2_iGoogle Screen Shots

Here is a screen shot of my HOME iGoogle TAB, you can click the image to SUPER-SIZE.

FSO TAB Screen Shot (Click Image to SUPERSIZE)

My FSO Tab has mostly links to FSO, Viddler, and Team Paged e.g. (Facebook, Diigo).  This is a great way to organize all the various resources and URL's for quick access. It also has the required Diigo and MyListy search boxes.

AR Screen Shot (Click Image to Supersize)

CBL/ETC TAB Screen Shot (Click Image to Supersize)

The AR/CBL area of my iGoogle contains all the required elements, links, and gadgets.  I substituted social photos gadget for the Flickr gadget since the gadget can also access Picassa.  I am a heavy Google Docs user already. Also, I prefer the free form sticky notes over an advanced project management calendaring gadget for simplicity.

BP_1_Google Reader

image courtesy: http://0at.org/blog/free_rss_icons

RSS (Real Simple Syndication) Feeds

I have been using RSS for many years starting with a PC application called RSS Reader.  Thanks to Google and Web 2.0 technology you can configure Google Reader as your online RSS reader which is much more convenient because you can now access your feeds from any computer.  As a teacher I primarily I use RSS for deal shopping and this means taking advantage of websites like:

• Fatwallet.com
• Slickdeals.net
• Cheapstingybargains.com

Being able to aggregate all of the deal sites is great for finding stuff that is free, close to free, clearance, or a really good deal. It is especially nice around the holidays when the Black Friday deals start to leak. However, I must give you a word of caution about these sites.  Deal shoppers have a saying, "I'm saving so much money that I'm going broke" so please deal shop responsibly.

Next up on my RSS feed lists are sites that I pull technology education material from:

• TED
• Lifehacker
• Slashdot
• Tom's Hardware

On Friday in my classroom I have "Big Idea Day" where I typically show a TED video then have a followup activity like a debate, journal, or hands-on activity.  Lifehacker is great website for random tips on everything from working more productively to fixing electronics to staying healthy.  Slashdot is a website with the tag-line, "News for Nerds and Stuff that Matters"  and if you want to be a geek, you have to read Slashdot every day or hour.  Slashdot used to be one of the biggest blogs on the Internet and posting a link to a website on Slashdot would generate so much traffic that it could crush any website and the term "The Slashdot Effect" was coined.  Tom's Hardware is a great blog for learning about new technology and the relative price performance of the new technology.  I rely on Tom to guide me to the best hardware and then provide a guide on how to overclock or modify it for even more performance.

Two of the heavy sites on my list are:

• MIT's Open Course Ware
• Experimental Theology

MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) started putting all of it's courses online way before the idea was en-vogue and you can now experience nearly any MIT course online for free.  This is a great website for learning and reteaching even though YouTube Channels like Khan Academy have stolen the limelight in recent times, MIT was "kicking it oldschool" using RealAudio and RealPlayer before YouTube even came on the scene.   Another topic I follow is religion and the Experimental Theology blog is in my opinion one of the most thought provoking Christian blogs on the Internet today. One of my favorite blogs posts is The Bait and Switch of Contemporary Christianity.