Tuesday, May 01, 2012

Best of Lunch with Loretta & Lori in Practice

Last Friday, I held a breakout session of Best of Lunch with Loretta & Lori in Practice for the afternoon of our campus professional development day which is  known as an in-service here at JWU. So along with Lori and Amanda, I helped several of our faculty demonstrate some of the technologies they learned about during a session of LLL and are now using in their classroom. After (or during) each demonstration, faculty participants were given a chance to try out each of the technologies which included student response system, Turning Point 2008, Google Docs &; xtranormal animated video.

As often happens with technology, best laid plans went awry! First xtranormal raised the cost of their animation application to $10 per month, instead of $10 per year! Faculty were of course outraged, as was I, and some asked why are we learning this if we can't use it? Good point but please just let's have a nice workshop! Then on to Google Docs which I have been using almost daily for years. Guess what? Google chose this week to change Google Docs to Google Drive (which as much as I try to keep on top of technology, I had never heard of) and as a result several participants could not access Google Docs but strangely enough nearly 20 participants could! Big sigh here! As it turns out, Google Drive is not really much different but really bad timing for me! Maybe they could give us some notice, do you think?

So today I am preparing an email to go out to participants with a brief explanation of the snafus for each technology, and directions for how they might proceed anyway by using Google Drive and by trying out a replacement for xtranormal, goanimate. The free version is very basic but better than no animated video tool at all. See my test video below.

Searching for Animated Video by mrsdriskel on GoAnimate

Make a video easily. Powered by GoAnimate Video Maker.

We wrapped up our session with Lori's Prezi presentation of LLL by the Numbers - super job and super ending to a great year of LLL. http://prezi.com/ncyxck-kxqjs/present/?auth_key=91wvd0m&follow=zaevud2x5op5#0_328496