Podcasting via Email? Yay!

While preparing for a workshop and a webinar on audio tools, I happen to run across Posterous and was immediately intrigued.  This blog tool lets you easily post via your email and even cross-post simultaneously to a number of other sites, including Twitter, FaceBook, Flickr, Blogger, WordPress, and more.   And, while those are really cool features, what really got my attention was the ability to podcast via email.

I’ve taught a lot of podcast workshops and I’m always looking for new tools that make it easier to become a podcaster without having to learn a lot of the technical stuff.  Posterous is that new tool.  Imagine it – create your mp3 audio file, email it to your blog, and voila! You’re a podcaster. Posterous takes care of the rest – putting your file into your blog so that it can be listened to there and also having a feed automatically generated so people can subscribe to it in iTunes.

If you’ve been waiting for a simpler way to podcast, then give Posterous a try.  And, while you’re at it, check out how easy it is to use the other features of this blogging tool: you can send ppt, doc, pdf, jpg, avi, mpg files and more to your blog just by sending an email with an attachment. They’ll be put in a format that can be read online and even downloaded and shared with others.  You’ll be amazed at the simplicity and usefulness of this cool blogging tool.

TokBox Video Chat & Email

Today, I stumbled across TokBox, a free, browser-based video chat and email tool as I was looking for new tools to demonstrate at the upcoming Campus Technology ‘08 conference. There are three things I particularly like about TokBox: 

1. It’s very very simple to use.
2. You don’t have to download anything (but there is a desktop client if you prefer).
3. You don’t have to create an account to communicate with someone who has a TokBox account.

When you create an account on TokBox, you are given your own private URL. You can give anyone this URL so they can visit the page to send you a video email. Video emails can be up to 15 minutes in length and they are stored on the site for you to view when you log in.

When you’re logged in to your TokBox account, people who you’ve given the URL can visit your page and video chat with you.  You can also do video conferences with multiple people (although I’m not sure how many people as I could not find this information on the site).

I tried TokBox on Windows Vista with Firefox and IE browsers and it worked fine. I also embedded the TokBox tool on my WebCT/Blackboard home page and was able to use it successfully.  This tool definitely is worth a look if you and your learners communicate a lot in your courses.

Omnisio – Share & Comment on Video

Have you ever found videos on the web that you wanted to share with your students but, you really wanted to keep all that content in your LCMS (e.g. WebCT/Blackboard)? Well, then Omnisio may be a tool you’d like to check out. This free web app lets you share those found videos in your LCMS and (and this is the key point) let’s you and your students comment on the video! Now, I’m not talking general comments that show up at the bottom of the video as text. Nope, nothing so mundane as that! I’m talking comments right on the video that show up at the point in the video where they’re posted and in the location on the video where the person clicked to add a comments.

I can see plenty of educational uses for this. For example, your students could post comments or ask for clarification about something they see; or you could post questions for your students to answer about a particular scene in the video. You could even post demo videos and ask students to comment on/describe what is going on and why. Or, you and your students could simply post comments to carry on a discussion about the content of the video.

Interested? Check out Web 2.0 – Whoo Hoo or Boo Hoo and add your own comments simply by clicking on the screen anywhere and then typing into the box that appears. I would have embedded it but WordPress doesn’t allow it (Blogger and several other sites do and so does WebCT!).

Interactive Presentations w/ Viddix

Tool Viddix
Type Web Application
Requirements Internet-connected computer, browser
Cost Free!

First Thoughts
Educators often have a need to present information; yet most presentations don’t seem to be all that engaging. Even beautiful presentations from dynamic speakers like Steve Jobs leave a little something to be desired when simply viewed. So, when I first stumbled across Viddix, I was immediately interested in it’s ability to create some dynamic, interactive presentations – just the sort of thing you might want if you are interested in gaining and maintaining the interest of your learners.

The basic setup of Viddix is a two-screen layout. The left screen holds your video, while the right screen can hold polls, text, images, links, and even dynamic content like RSS feeds and even other embedded videos. The right screen content is tied to the timeline of the video on the left so that it becomes visible at designated times during the video. The content on the right can be interactive – links can be clicked on, polls can be answered, etc. Plus, there’s also a comments feature so people viewing the presentation can ‘talk back’ and future viewers can read those comments and post their own. All in all, my first thought was “slick!”

Of course, even while thinking about the cool-factor of this tool, I was initially also concerned that it might be too difficult to learn or that it might take too long to put together a decent presentation. Additionally, it seemed like two screens might increase the potential to create a presentation that was more distracting than engaging. However, after putting together my first presentation, my fears about the difficulty of the tool were put to rest. The distracting v. engaging concern is another story – but, that challenge is more about an individual’s presentation skills rather than something inherently problematic with the tool. LOL.

First Experience
Here’s my first presentation with Viddix.

Exploring Web ..

The movie on the left actually took more time to put together than putting the entire finished Viddix presentation together. The interface was easy to navigate after only a few minutes and it was remarkably easy to add all that content that shows up in the right screen. My only complaint (and it’s a small one!) is that I would like to be able to set the start and end times of each of the content pieces that show up on the right. Currently, you can only set the start time and then that content piece stays up on the screen until the next content piece pops up. You could work around this, however, by simply putting up a blank screen so it’s a minor thing. For a lengthier description of the process, I’ve posted how I did this presentation on my wiki.

Aside from an overall positive first experience with this tool, I feel I must mention the wonderful support I have received from the Viddix team. Very soon after completing my presentation, I received an email from them. The email gave me warm feedback on my presentation and let me know the team was there to help if I needed it. They even reminded me to publish my presentation (for which I will be forever grateful because it saved me from embarrassing myself during a conference workshop). I have tested countless new web apps and this is the very first time I received an email like this. So, because of the tool and especially because of the Viddix team, I highly recommend you try out this unique application.

Cool Video Tools

While searching for a Flixn replacement, I stumbled upon:

• veotag – upload videos and then add live tags along the timeline. These tags can be clicked on to take the viewer to specific locations within the video.  Here’s a nice example.
• viddix – upload video and add ‘cue points’ – text, polls, html, rss, images, and other media. The video is played in the left panel and the cue points are played in the right.  See the viddix example.

You can bet I’ll be checking these out in more detail and posting more in-depth reviews. I think they have some unique possibilities.

Finding a Flixn Replacement

I use Flixn.com quite a bit for quick updates to my learners, so I panicked when I found out they were phasing out their free video recording service.

Of course, there are other services out there: Bubble Guru, Hellodeo, SeeTheFace, and Vlip to name a few. But, since I’d been relying on Flixn, I hadn’t paid any of them much attention. Now, I’ve got less than a month to find something new to replace my old standby. <sigh>

Must-have features for the new online recording service include:

• privacy – I don’t want these messages posted to the web or some social network unless I can make them available to only a select group of people.
• embed-ability (new word!) – I want to be able to paste the video code into my LMS or my private class blog or wiki.
• 3-5 minute record time – I want to have enough time to make a few quick statements and emote a bit.
• free – is that too much to ask, do you think?

A quick (and I do mean quick!) preview of the above-mentioned services revealed that Bubble Guru was not free, Hellodeo was buggy (will have to revisit this), and Vlip was not private. SeeTheFace looks promising but I’m not sure how long the recordings are or how many I can have on the free account. Stay tuned for more info.

In the interim, if you’ve got any suggestions that meet the requirements I’ve listed, please do let me know.

update: after saying that SeeTheFace looked promising, I spent some more time with it and, while it has some seriously cool features, can record for 5 minutes, and can be private, it’s doesn’t have embed-ability. <heavy sigh> The search continues.

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.

Digital resource collections, anyone?

There’s certainly no lack of resources on the web, yet keeping those resources organized and easily accessible can be quite challenging. That’s where “start pages” come in. They’re great for helping you collect all those resources into one web page – a start page – that you can easily access. In short, you spend less time visiting myriad pages of resources and more time actually listening to or reading the resources you’ve previously collected.

Of course, there are plenty of options available if you are looking for a start page. Notable options in this category are NetVibes and PageFlakes. And, of course, there is iGoogle. They all provide easy, convenient ways to collect resources and they have some great special widgets to pull in info from other services. However, I was looking for something a bit…different. Those others are great but, well, they all seem quite the same – very squarish and columnar. Yet, there is one start page tool that I’ve found that is different – Protopage.

I like Protopage because it’s stylish. It doesn’t have that square feeling and you can organize content in tidy columns or in messy disarray all over the page. Plus, all the color choices are quite nice. Of course, I know that’s not the point of these tools, but – I am pretty sure that the more fun and personality you can put into your start pages, the more likely you probably are to use them. And, if you are interested in sharing them with others, then all the nice ‘personality’ features certainly will get your page noticed and remembered.

Because I really like to test out tools in relation to other similar tools, I created not only a Protopage, but also NetVibe and Pageflakes pages. Compare them for yourself by visiting: my Technology in Higher Ed protopage, my Higher Education, Technology, & Teaching netvibes page or my Higher Education, Technology, and Teaching/Learning pageflakes page. The primary difference among the three, beyond what I’ve already stated, is that Protopage and Pageflakes seem to be much easier to share with others without a password (especially if you have set up multiple tabs). So if you intend to use one of these start pages to promote your collection to many others, use prototype or pageflakes. If you find the secret to sharing netvibes easily, please let me know. This is only a first look afterall and I’m bound to miss something.

While I have a bit stronger preference for Protopage, any of the start page tools mentioned would be good choices for someone wishing to make collections of digital resources. Faculty would truly find this a useful tool for collecting resources for their own research or even class materials resources for their students. Students certainly can also benefit from the tool – collecting the resources they use for those course projects, for example.

So, go on out and start your own page. You might find that you save yourself some time and stay more up to date with your favorite resources.

Providing student support

Even though I have not posted in the last few weeks, I have been busy checking out lots of new tools. For my “first look” tool in this post, I have chosen Screencast-O-Matic.

Often, as online teachers, we find ourselves asking students to use tools they may not have previously used. In those circumstances, it’s good to provide a little support in the form of a quick start guide or tutorial. Most of us provide text tutorials, but sometimes video tutorials can be more helpful – especially to certain types of learners. That’s where Screencast-O-Matic comes in handy.

Screencast-O-Matic is an online screen capture service that is very easy to use. It allows you to capture anything on your screen and then either upload it to their server as a public or private file or download it to your computer so you can put it where you wish. I was able to create and publish this brief screencast of exporting bookmarks in IE7 in just a few minutes.

This tool works with Windows XP with browsers IE6, IE7, and Firefox 2.0 and Mac OS X with Safari 2.0.4 and Firefox 2.0. The file format of the video screen capture is .mov so folks will need quicktime to see it online. Of course, if you download it for placement somewhere else, you could always convert it to an mp4 which may be more accessible by different players (Windows Media Player, Real Media Player, Quicktime, etc.).

This is just a preliminary review. If anyone has experience with this or similar tools, a comment would be very much appreciated.

Oh – one last thing – although the screencast-o-matic folks don’t mention support for vista, I did the screencast using Windows Vista with IE7 and I didn’t run into any problems.

Flixn and Bubble Guru for your video messages

A frequent suggestion to online teachers is to post their images and bios so that students will have an opportunity to get to know them a little. Another option is to record a video greeting but, if you’ve never ‘done’ video before, this can be quite an intimidating task. However, Flixn and Bubble Guru make it simple (and free) to do. Note: If you don’t like to see yourself on video, it’s still intimidating…but for entirely different reasons! Nevertheless, check out my little video message.