Welcome to my blog! It was created for the EME 6414 Web 2.0-Based Learning and Performance course, and my future posts will include information related to this course. Feel free to share your opinions and comments.
Thank
you for spending your precious time on reading my blog during this semester.
You did me a great honor stopping by from time to time. I am very grateful
for the comments and suggestions I have been receiving the last two months.
Sharing
my Internet findings through this blog was an enjoyable experience, and I plan
to continue doing it after the EME 6414 course ends.
Wish
you the best of luck with all your future endeavors!
Scanner Pro is an iOS app that turns your iPhone or iPad into a portable scanner. This
app is extremely helpful when, for example, there are two simultaneously studying students in
one family (I am in that kind of situation now). Imagine, you and another
family member need to read the same textbook on the same day. There are two
options: You can wait your turn or scan the required chapter and read it on any
device. I personally like the second option more because it allows both of you
to be on the same page and discuss the material you read.
Scanner Pro digitize papers into PDFs, and the result of scanning is quite more clear
and beautiful comparing to traditional scanners. You can customize the
scanned documents any way you like, form files and folders, and change the
place of the scanned pages. Scanner Pro is integrated with cloud storage services
like GoogleDrive and Dropbox. Moreover, the app enables you to constantly back up all the files
you scan.
The
developer of Scanner Pro, Readdle, celebrates its 8th birthday now,
so you have a unique opportunity to download the app for $2.99 (its usual price
is $6.99).
Watch
the video below to see Scanner Pro in action.
Spark
is an iOS email application that aims to make emailing as convenient and quick
as possible. The idea behind this app is to transform your overwhelmed inbox
into a smart tool by including a set of powerful features into it.
Spark
is incredibly customizable. You can choose the order of menu items, the swipe
gestures’ functions, the work of the Archive section and many more.
My
favorite feature Spark offers is Quick Reply. There are three options: “like”, “thanks”,
and “smile”. They are very useful when you get a lot of email. If you are
involved in an informal email conversation, it is so convenient to have an
opportunity to reply with a simple tap rather than having to type “thank you so
much” on every email. From this perspective, Spark gets closer to instant
messengers, letting the user options to act informally.
Among
the features Spark has are a language search and a calendar widget. In
addition, the app can be integrated with cloud storage services (e.g., Dropbox),
Evernote, and Pocket.
Eventually,
Spark can be downloaded for free. With all this in mind, I believe it is worth
trying this new way of managing your email.
Have you ever wondered who
made a particular web application (for example, Google Reader or the What IS
Code? - the manual I referred to in my previous blog post)?
If yes, check out the
Makerbase website. The website was launched recently, so there is little information there yet. However, the Makerbase team declared they are going
to create a database that will be similar to IMDb; that is to say, the database
will be as informative and searchable as that 100-million-data movie portal.
Makerbase contains
information about the creators of applications, websites, podcasts, etc. The
website allows you to get to know people who made the tools you are using and
appreciate their work. It could also be used to find out the projects your
favorite developers are working on or have been worked on in the past.
The computer is an integral
part of everyone’s life nowadays. Still, not so many people understand how this
powerful machine actually works. Since getting my first computer in the middle
1990s and starting browsing the Internet, I was wondering what kind of
mechanisms make this magic happen.
During my undergraduate studies,
I took several basic programming courses, but never received the answer to the
question above. Those courses discussed lots of technical terms related to the
computer sciences, and I even remembered some of them; however, nobody cared to
explain the working process of the computer so I would be able to get it.
Last weeks, I was searching
for coding-related learning materials for my soon-to-start IDT career in
Kazakhstan. And I was lucky to find an amazing interactive manual that is written
for people who are not very familiar with coding, but willing to understand it.
That is to say, I found the coding book of my dream, and it is called What Is Code? While interacting with the book, I experienced lots of “aha moments” that
never came to my head before.
What Is Code? is a real treasure
for anyone interested in the topic of coding. If you are not one of them, you
still may find it to be interesting to go to see how this interactive web-based
learning tool works. I promise, you will be impressed.
Here is a short video from
the introduction to What Is Code?
I decided to do a brief review of Lynda.com in case if there
are people in our class who are not familiar with this wonderful learning tool
yet.
Lynda.com offers a collection of learning materials related to
different topics, from Instructional Design to Photography. Usually, you get
access to a set of video-lectures that are often accompanied by exercises to assist you in processing the new information. The quality of lectures is very high; they
represent short videos, no more than 10 minutes long. What is important for me
as an international student, the lecturers speak clearly and slowly (in a normal way), which helps me follow them with no additional effort
involved.
There is a wide range of learning activities available on Lynda.com,
and, what is more, this web portal is absolutely free for FSU students. This is
great news because the regular monthly price is $20 minimum, depending on the
chosen plan. In the Secure Apps folder on my.fsu.edu, there is a direct link to
the Lynda.com website that enables you to get your free access.
Lynda.com also has an iPad application for those people who prefer being mobile.
Watch a short video about Lynda.com below. What courses would you
like take (or are taking) on this eLearning portal?
Memrise is a beautifully designed web-based technology for
memorizing things. It allows you to create your own sets of flashcards to be
remembered or use the sets developed by other users.
What differs Memrise from services like Quizlet is that the study
and self-assessment processes happen simultaneously. For example, you created
a list of 10 new words to remember in the word-and-its-definition format. When
you start a learning session, the software introduces you to the words from the
list and then alternate the blocks containing the assessment items about the words
you study with the blocks stating the words and their definitions. The idea behind Memrise technology is
you better remember new words when you continuously repeat those words and solve
problems related to them. The assessment items include matching a word with the
correct definition option, typing in the word appropriate to the displayed
definition, and answering multiple-choice questions.
At the end of the session, you get statistics demonstrating your
progress through the session and the amount of points received for correct and
quick answers. You can see the words you mastered and the words you need to
work on more.
I am learning HTML 5 vocabulary now via the flashcard set
somebody developed. The results of one of my learning sessions are showed in
the picture below. The flower image means I have mastered the word.
I really like Memrise for its pretty design. In addition, the software
developers assure it is research-based. So, I believe Memrise deserves a tryout.
Do you use any memorization apps to enhance your learning activities?
When working on my SlideShare presentation for the Knowledge Sharing
and Tracking project, I noticed that the SlideShare website outsources the in-built
presentation-construction service to another company, Haiku Deck. I became
interested in that company, especially after finding out they offer an iPad
application for creating and sharing presentations.
I recommend Haiku Deck for iPad to everyone who constantly need to
develop presentations and prefer being mobile at the same time. This is a great
tool for both study and business purposes. It provides the user with lots of
slide templates and a big set of Creative Commons pictures to choose from,
which makes the process of the slides development significantly faster. The
application also includes a collection of fonts and alternatives for slides’
layout.
What I like most about Haiku Deck for iPad is that the app has
intuitive editing options, so every content piece can be relocated or
redesigned in seconds. The company presents the software as a tool for quick
idea sharing, and my perception of it is the same.
Watch the demo video below and download Haiku Deck for iPad for free to test its functionality. Are you familiar with other mobile applications for presentation creation?
Data
is my passion, and I prefer to have a lot of different statistics available to
form my opinion about a certain subject.
Since
I started blogging, I was wondering what blog platform is more successful:
Blogger or WordPress? Do the platforms have the same amount of users? What
countries are the primary source of the traffic for the platforms?
If
you are interested in answers to similar questions about any website,
there is a cool web-analytics software called SimilarWeb. It utilizes big data
technologies to collect, measure, analyze, and provide user-engagement
statistics for websites and mobile applications.
On SimilarWeb, you
can receive lots of data related to the specific website of interest for free.
For example, for Blogger.com I got global, country, and category ranks; traffic
sources; referrals; organic key words; traffic from social media; audience
interests, and many other interesting facts.
Unfortunately,
the free websites’ comparison service SimilarWeb offers is limited to ranks and traffic overview only (everything else you can get by paying the subscription fee). Still, I know now
that WordPress is quite more popular than Blogger (see the picture below for
some graphs; Blogger is orange, and wordPress is blue).
So, those of the Blogger users who plan to continue blogging for
professional purposes might considering moving to WordPress.
Nowadays,
there are a lot of tools that aim to make content presentations not only
informative, but also engaging.
PowToon
is a web-based software of that kind. It is a constructor that allows you to
create animated videos and presentations by using a set of predesigned
templates. The process of the creation of a video is very simple. When you are
in the construction mode of the PowToon software, you generate a group of
slides just like you usually do while working on a presentation. Then, PowToon
combines this collection of slides into a video so that each slide represents
one video scene. PowToon has a drag-and-drop interface, which enables the
creation process to be very fast. The software is integrated with GoogleDrive.
PowToon
offers free and paid usage plans. The produced video presentation can be shared
on YouTube and Facebook freely, but to download the video to your computer, you
should pay for subscription. Unsurprisingly, paid versions of the software have
more animated and still templates to choose from.
Watch
a short video about the history of presentation software created using PowToon.
Do you like the idea of such entertaining presentations? As students, would you like your professors to invest their time, money, and effort in this software? As teaching personnel, would you try it on your lessons?
I
didn’t expected to have so many readings in the PDF format when beginning my
master’s studies at FSU. Since I am not comfortable with lengthy reading on the
computer, I needed to figure out how to deal with all those PDF files. That was
the time I found the Good Notes iPad application. I decided to buy it basing on
rapturous reviews of users and never regret it.
Now,
Good Notes costs $6.99 (one dollar more), but it is worth every dollar spent.
The app combines the functions of a note-taking space and an annotation tool
for PDF files.
GoodNotes recognize handwriting beautifully. The app works very smoothly enabling
you to take notes in a creative manner by using different pen and marker
colors, geometric figures, textboxes, etc. The notes are searchable, which
makes Good Notes an assisting media in going paperless.
Talking
about the PDF annotation functions Good Notes provide, they are absolutely
stunning. You can handwrite on a PDF and then export this annotated document to
the cloud service you prefer (GoogleDisk, iCloud, Box, or Dropbox). The app
also allows inserting pictures in the document and typing on it. All the
changes you made can be synchronized between different devices.
Here
is a video overview of the Good Notes app demonstrating its practicality.
I
also would like to share the annotation methodology I utilize while reading PDFs via Good Notes. It may be useful for international students J On the picture below,
you can see the first page of the Kosonen (2009) reading we had two weeks ago. To
make PDF annotation more organized, I use color codes. I mark definitions with
the brown color, unknown words – with the green color, and the unknown synonyms
for the words I know – with the blue color. I use the yellow color for marking
the author thoughts I find to be useful for my class projects. You can also see that I type the
Russian translation of the unknown words above them so that it will be easier
for me to work with a text when I come back to it for assignments.
Do you use special applications for reading PDF files? I would be
happy to hear about any counterparts of the Good Notes app you are familiar with.
