RSS Club meeting 11

Aleister, Quinn, Kevin, Jay and Tim participated in our RSS club meeting today.

Here are the things we discussed from the Drexel CoAS E-Learning blog:

-FeedCount using Feedburner to display your RSS subscriber number
-Blogs and wikis. We discussed the pros and cons of using each tool for distributing class lectures and collecting student assignments.
-A mention of Edublogs.org, the free blogging service for teachers
-My progress with my writing drafts of my next paper on educational gaming inside of a wiki
-a brief mention of science blogs
-the new Blogger Word interface: actually downloaded it and made some sample posts. We also tested uploading images through Word but it doesn't look like that is possible yet.
-A9.com street level view of Philly and tried to figure out how to have it default to one side of the street over another but no luck.
-SiteMeter worldmap: I briefly demonstrated how to access the geographic distribution of your recent blog visitors.

That is as far as the recording went. We followed this up with a little off-the-record meeting. What did we talk about? Come to the next RSS club meeting next week on Wednesday August 31 at 11:00 in 4020 MacAlister to find out!

Dan Karleen from Thomson Peterson will be joining us. Check out his blog - I bet we'll be talking about podcasting in education.

Here is the screencast mp3 podcast

UVSC podcasting and games talk

I just got back from the Utah Valley State College Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange. It was definitely worth the trip.

Everyone there seemed to be interested in sharing knowledge. Refreshingly low hype factor.

I tried to catch most of the gaming in education talks. Tom Cunningham talked about a few of the games he used in review sessions to increase student motivation. I particularly like the way he used Powerpoint to play Technopoly, a game developed by one of his students based on Monopoly. By moving and copying objects inside of Powerpoint, he avoided using any coding to run a very slick and playable game.

John Krutsch did a workshop to show us how to play and create a game based on a multiple choice format without using any coding. We each had our own computer to follow along then play around. Showing is always better than telling. Check it out here.

I talked to several people about games and I hope that it sparks some collaboration with my EduFrag project.

After listening to Joe Buchanan talk about the way online education works at UVSC, I have a better perspective of how our system compares at Drexel. There is a good knowledge base there.

The last talk I attended was more of a conversation involving everyone in the audience. We sat in a circle and brainstormed discussion board issues. Joanne Bentley, Sandie Waters and David Wade guided the talk. (By the way, David - here is one of Mike's presentations that I mentioned with his numbers on discussion boards)

Bios of the various presenters can be found here.

My presentation was on podcasting, screencasting, blogs and games in higher education. I get into some more detail about the EduFrag project, my current student blogging experiment and some new numbers about RSS subscriptions with my online blogged classes.

Here are the screencast mp3 podcast and Powerpoint Slides for my presentation.