Knowtes: Learning 2.0 Flash Cards

All of us probably teach courses in which there is some information that needs to be memorized.  In those instances, flash cards can certainly be a helpful study strategy. Knowtes is a free online service that provides your learners with the ability to create flash cards, schedule study intervals with automatic email reminders,  and create study groups to share their flash cards with each other and help each other study.Help your students become better learners.  Tell them about this service. Then, give them assignments to create flash cards (with text and images) related to your course materials and share them with the others in the class.  The act of creating the flash cards would help them learn and then studying from them will help them even more.My Knowtes ID is tektrekker.  Look me up if you create an account! We can share flash cards!

File Conversion Tools

In an online teaching environment, it almost seems inevitable that we all get a few files each course that are in a format we can’t open. When this happens, we either have to spend precious time explaining to students how to save their file in a format we can use or learning how to download and install various plug-ins that might make the file more accessible to us. Neither is really an acceptable solution. Fortunately, there are a few online sites that provide us with better options: ZamZar and YouConvertIt.

Common Features
Both ZamZar and YouConvertIt are free web-based services. That means, among other things, that you do not need to download any software to your computer to use these services. Both also allow you to upload and convert up to five files at one time and then send the links to the converted files to any email address. Finally, both services provide conversions for a variety of text, image, audio, and video file formats. Of course, while they offer similar features, each service has some differences - differences that will impact your choice of which to use.

User Experience
Interface - both services have simple, 3-step processes that will have even the most novice computer user converting files in no time! Of the two, I think that ZamZar’s interface is more pleasing, but YouConvertIt’s interface seems less confusing when you are trying to upload more than one document to convert.

Convenience - ZamZar and YouConvertIt convert uploaded files fairly quickly - However, ZamZar had similar conversion times for all file types while YouConvertIt was quicker for audio, similar in time requirements for video, and much slower for text documents. Both also send a link to any email address you specify and the download process is quite simple. However, YouConvertIt keeps your converted files for 7 days while ZamZar only keeps them for 1 day. If you don’t check your email that often, the 7 day window is much more convenient.

Quality - The quality of the PDF and HTML conversions of a word document was similar for both services. Also similar was the quality of their .mp3 files when converted from a .wav format. However, when I uploaded a 24MB QuickTime (.mov) video file for conversion to a flash video file (.flv), ZamZar returned a very nice 1.6MB flash file while the YouConvertIt file was over 100MB and gave me errors. A second attempt with YouConvertIt yielded the same results.

Formats - Both services have a number of file formats that they can handle for conversion. However, each has some niche conversions that the other doesn’t. For example, YouConvertIt handles many StarOffice formats while ZamZar handles MS Office 2007 formats.

Recommendations
Both services are comparable so the choice is not clear cut. For basic text and audio conversion, either will work. If, however, you need the convenience of a 7-day download window, go with YouConvertIt. On the other hand, if you plan to be converting video into FLV or you need to convert MS Office 2007 files, then ZamZar seems the better bet.