Learner-Shaped Technology

I mentioned in an earlier post how much I liked Scrivener as a writing tool.  As I used the program to write some learning goals for an upcoming course, I began to realize how powerful it is for facilitating the entire course development process.

Here’s a brief video demonstration which shows how I’m using it for course design as well as reflection and organization during the course.

While there’s only a Mac version available, Literature and Latte, the maker of Scrivener, has provided a list of supporting and alternative software.  WriteItNow is mentioned as an alternative for the PC, but I haven’t tried it yet.  Anybody out there have any experience with WriteItNow?

What’s this demo about?

I wholeheartedly agree with Bryan Bibb’s great overview of Scrivener . Scrivener is an amazing tool for writers and allows for easy organization of a wide variety of resources. This tool has transformed my writing process!

Additional Detail:

The software is only available for the Mac.

How long is it?

The overview video is fairly long but definitely worth the time to get a sense of what this software can do.

view the demo

It used to be that expensive software like ArcMap or strong artistic skills were required to make thematic maps like the one below. up2maps is a site, based on Google Maps, where users can make their own maps or view maps created by the user community. View this brief demo to see how it works .

CMapTools is concept map software which is available free for educational use. I created a quick demo of some of the main features. I especially like the support for mulitmedia objects.

Oops! See this 60 sec correction / tip for saving space in your concept map.

Of course, there are many academic uses, but the above superhero example is kind of a fun intro (see more detailed, finished super hero map here). For example, the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) at Carleton College has some great information on using concept mapping in the geosciences.

The purpose of this post is two-fold.

1. To demo the timeline animation and wikipedia features new to Google Earth (see my earlier post)

Check out the very amateur demo. My apologies for the hushed tones. You may need to turn up the volume. Everyone in my house was still sleeping .

Please let me know via comment if you can’t see or hear the swf version.

2. Tim Lauer blogged about using iShowU as a Mac alternative for Snapz, so as a newly converted Mac user, I decided to give it a try. I wanted to see if I could generate an swf from the created movie like Camtasia does automatically (only for the PC – sigh) . After taking care of some minor edits in iMovie, I was ready to experiment.

This article on converting video to swf from Adobe was very helpful. We have Flash in-house, so it made sense to try it with that. I still have some learning to do, but the process wasn’t too bad. I want to get rid of the dead space above and below the capture, and I sound like I’m talking into a tin can after the conversion to an swf.

I learned that the swf autoplays automatically, even if you set params in the html object tag. I had to take care of that setting in the flash file itself, setting the movie component autoplay parameter to false. Hopefully, this saves someone else some time in the future!

You essentially have 3 files you need to move over to the server to include the swf in your webpage.

1. The generated swf file
2. The generated flv file
3. The swf that presents the player controls to the user

Then it’s just a matter of including the appropriate tags in your html to bring it into the page. Dreamweaver makes that pretty easy, and the publish feature mentioned in the Adobe article also creates a sample html file that has what you need.