Tablet PC and Real-time Office Hours
Cool customers, Tips n tricks, Video / Audio March 9th, 2007Gary here. Almost every day, I hear from people who say “Yeah, but can you really teach with this?” or “Why would I want to do that online?” I have some really great answers, but then someone will tell me that of course I feel that way, I sell the stuff! (This, even though I am not a sales dude – plus I am also sincerely concerned about maximizing the use of my education tax dollars and increasing the efficacy of learning – but that is another post altogether [that I hope my boss will approve].)
Lucky for me, at Elluminate we have customers and partners like Dr. J Ricky Cox at Murray State University in Kentucky, USA. I got on a web conference with him, hoping to get a few anecdotes about either pen computing or interactive whiteboards and his use of them with real time collaboration for a presentation I am working on.
I literally asked Dr. Cox one question, and here was his answer. (The content pretty is much unedited except to make it shorter.)
(Click image to pop the 5 minute presentation )
Warm regards, and “keep onlinin’ ”
Gary Dietz
P.S. I really like conversing with people online and whipping out Adobe Audition or Techsmith Camtasia and editing together a nice story. I can even do this over the phone with my handy-dandy Olympus digital audio recorder. If you want to create a story with me this way, drop me a line at gdietz@elluminate.com
March 19th, 2007 at 10:34 am
Gary, I am thrilled to see Dr. Cox’s interview on your site. I am a little biased, of course, because he received an HP Technology for Teaching grant from us (I am the program manager for worldwide higher education philanthropy at HP).
Ricky also gave a talk at one of my HP Online Speaker Series webinars, entitled “The One Tablet Classroom”. It’s a great example of Tablet PC use in the face-to-face classroom – a nice complement to his description of using a Tablet for Virtual Office Hours.
I am curious about your statement about using an Olympus digital audio recorder with Camtasia to capture a phone interview. Can you tell us more how this works? I have Camtasia, but getting clean audio from the phone into my computer has been problematic.
Thank you!
Jim Vanides
Program Manager – Worldwide Higher Education Philanthropy
Hewlett-Packard
http://www.hp.com/go/hied-blog
March 21st, 2007 at 7:51 pm
[...] Gary Dietz from Elluminate posted an online interview with Dr. J. Ricky Cox of Murray State (who I’ve previously mentioned), an HP Technology for Teaching grant recipient (as noted by Jim Vanides). Lucky for me, at Elluminate we have customers and partners like Dr. J Ricky Cox at Murray State University in Kentucky, USA. I got on a web conference with him, hoping to get a few anecdotes about either pen computing or interactive whiteboards and his use of them with real time collaboration for a presentation I am working on. [...]
March 21st, 2007 at 8:27 pm
Hi Jim,
When I need to use the phone (not always, but sometimes I still need to!) I use a $14.95 adapter from Radio Shack to port the audio to the line/mic in jack on my Olympus DM-10. This lets me get the incoming audio and my outgoing audio as necessary into the digital audio recorder.
Then, depending on the task and the media (and compression) needed, I use Audition, Camtasia, Premiere, and Sorenson Squeeze to put together final, edited materials.
This process will be made much simpler in the future for Elluminate-based audio interactions, as there will be some new features $%*(&$$%#%$#….
(The end of the last sentence was censored by my Product Manager
Best,
Gary
March 22nd, 2007 at 2:53 am
Nice video! Here at the UAA we’re also using Elluminate and have been doing similar things with regard to online office hours. Here are a few comments I have about teaching with Elluminate:
1) Desktop sharing with a tablet works great. The online office hours work even better when the students are using tablets. Sometimes we also share uploaded files (for looking at code longer than snippets). It may be too much to ask, but if ink in the Elive whiteboard was supported better it could eliminate using Journal or OneNote just for inking. The whiteboard works of course, but it’s not as smooth as ink-enabled software.
2) Recording inside Elluminate works nicely, but I see you posted a Camtasia video instead. OK, I realize that’s not a fair comparison since you want to do editing and incorporate the phone, but if there were some way to easily export the recorded videos that would be nice. Some of my students have also complained it’s a little hard to replay sections of a recorded video (it’s not as smooth to scroll to the location you want and play it due to the buffering) but they’re happy it is possible to do at all.
3) Having come from a Classroom Presenter environment before our university adopted Elive, I had a blended class where some students were in a computer classroom with me lecturing and some were remote. I liked the Classroom Presenter model where I could give everyone some exercise to do on the computer and then share their results. The closest thing I could find with Elive was to create a breakout room for each student with slides for the exercise, put them in the breakout rooms to do their thing, and then join them back to the main room when done. It was kind of a hassle to set up, but I liked being able to peek into each individual room to see how the students were progressing, and at times would copy out some of their work in the main shared room.
Overall, the Elive adopters here have been pretty happy with the software and we’ve gotten mostly positive feedback from students. Some of our programs are taught almost exclusively via Elive to reach remote communities.
Kenrick Mock
University of Alaska Anchorage
http://www.math.uaa.alaska.edu/~afkjm/techteach
March 22nd, 2007 at 5:27 am
Hi Kendrick,
Thanks for the great input. Excellent points about tablets, about recording, and about the way in which you blend.
We are working on other recording techniques. (That was a purposely vague comment as I don’t want to get slapped by my product manager.) Remember, there is a difference between what I call a “fiduciary recording” (the actual recording of an event, warts and dead air and all) and an edited version. The reason I used Camtasia was that I wanted to cut my conversation with Ricky down a few minutes and delete some private conversation that would not have been appropriate to share publicly.
Actually, we had NOT prepared our Elluminate session to be shared publicly – I had recorded on Elluminate for personal note-taking only. It turned out so well that I decided to ask Ricky if I could edit and publish. Had I known that we would be publishing from the get go, we likely would have edited “in-camera” if you will – and posted the raw Elluminate recording.
Anyhow, that gives you some insight into my process and a vague hint about the future.
Best,
Gary
May 10th, 2007 at 11:10 pm
As a fan of virtual office hours I enjoyed this post and in turn became more intrigues with Elluminate. Thanks for the post.