ET-725 final project

As an ADE, I thought I'd devote the majority of the work for my final project towards the great content available on iTunes U. The following Prezi has some videos and links to great collections.

ET-725 final project on Prezi

Voki - ET-730

Here's my first animation video... I decided to try out Voki for my maiden voyage.

iTunes U

For this Discovery Project, I decided to dabble in iTunes U a bit. I've been doing it some for another project, and I think it has some real potential for schools and entities using iOS devices. It was my plan to show everything in a single video, but as I started, it became a bit long so I decided to break it up a bit. Here is part 1 of a series of 4 or so videos to get started.

iCabMobile Screencast

Here's a screencast of one my favorite apps for the iPad: iCabMobile. This app allows users to download media, from virtually any website, directly to the iPad that can then be used in other programs (Keynote, etc).

For this screencast, I used a program called "Reflection" which allows the iPad to wirelessly project to a desktop (in this case, a Mac) computer. It has a built in recording feature that automatically records the  screen of the iPad. I had to bring this video into another program to do the voiceover. Ironically, as I was completing this project, I had some friends on Twitter share that Display Recorder is now available that will record the screen AND the audio, thus allowing for a seamless screencast. Reflection is a $9.99 app, and the Display Recorder app is also $9.99.

Library of Congress - Teacher Section

I decided for this project to do a screencast of the Teachers page of the project. Cheryl Davis, a fellow ADE & GCT showed this to me a few months back, and I was blow away by the amount of information available.   Here's the screencast, with some spotlighting features present in Camtasia as well as the notes/annotation feature available in YouTube!

Library of Congress... the world (almost) at our fingertips!

Whenever I watch stuff like this, it amazes me that regardless of the amount of technology at our disposal, we still have so far to get "everything" at a state that is accessible by all. The numbers in these two videos were staggering:

• 700 TB of data
• 200 TB available to the public on the web due to copyright issues
• 120 Million Books
• 36,000 feature films
• 100,000 + music sheets and recordings (they also keep a lot of information on Vinyl too!)
• 1% of all the Library of Congress information digitized and made available on the web.

Although they didn't go too far in depth with how they are storing it, yet the capacity and the individual technologies involved for the various "forms" of artifacts were amazing. From simple pictures, to lateral scanning, to the (apparent) painstaking process of the copy process where each picture had to be physical placed on the scanner. The amount of time and effort put into this process seems like a never ending task. But keeping "America's Memory" intact is a big job!

What I found to be the most interesting was the collections from other countries that the LOC stores. I don't think I realized that there was as much information from other countries in our national library. I foolishly expected it to be solely American, but I guess if you're trying to maintain the worlds largest library, you have to get information from all over.

As I explored the LOC's website, I came across the educator section of the site which I found to be quite interesting. With a blog, information on using Primary sources and links to their partners, it's encouraging to see the amount of development that is going into sharing this information with educators from all over. 

Questions that made me go, "hmmm"

As I watched, it made me wonder how long ago the movies were made? I found out they were published to YouTube in 2009. This isn't too shocking actually, I expected them to be older (probably because of them not being HD.

How much more information is being gathered due to the digital age we live in?  With the amount of information we're already behind on (and I don't mean that negatively), at what rate is the capacity of the LOC growing? WIth all of the people working on the old stuff, what type of technology and manpower is being using to capture current and up-to-date information?

How has the storage technology changed since this time? I know most organizations have morphed to a Storage Area Network over the past few years, for power saving and redundancy?  How many backups does the Library of Congress have? 

eBooks

The following is a presentation I did on eBooks for my Masters program. Very interesting numbers and concepts behind what still appears to be a "late-adopter" platform for many.

ET - 725: eBooks on Prezi

Google Scholar Breakdown

As a part of my Masters In Education Technology, I had to choose an information technology resource and do a presentation on it. Encouragingly, we had to choose a presentation method we haven't done yet this semester, so I decided to jump in and try my hand at using Camtasia. I've had a copy of this program for a while, and thought it time I actually give it a shot. I really like the interface.

iPad Adoption Article Review

The Article I found from the ERIC database deals with an early iPad adoption program ran by a group of librarians at Ryerson University in Toronto. I've been doing a lot with iPads and plan to possibly make something of a thesis and/or project out of it, so the more research the better. The article is titled "Project iPad: Investigating Tablet Integration in Learning an Libraries at Ryerson University." The article is well thought out and is outlined to discuss the research and background that went into this technology adoption. The project idea was to purchase a small amount of iPads, select up to four students that would use them throughout the academic year. Each student was asked to blog weekly about their experiences about using this relatively new technology (the article was published in September 2011, but began in late 2010 after the iPad was first introduced). The librarians opted for the 16GB Wi-FI model and purchased $300 of apps for the iPads and granted some gift cards to each student later in the program as more apps began to flood the market. The article describes the impact the iPad had on organizing and completing academic work to conducting research with the iPad. All in all, "Each of the students agreed that the iPad altered their academic workflows, making them practically paperless" (p. 18). The summary of the article concludes with lessons learned and recommendations which would be beneficial for anyone thinking of making the leap to this platform. As the project developed and concluded, the librarians discovered that more professors were beginning to adopt the iPad and their efforts needed to be focused on helping the staff with iPads, not so much the students. The librarins developed "iPad Literacy" drop-in sessions for the faculty to helping with the growing population of tablets. ~~ Eichenlaub, N., Gabel, L., Jakubek, D., McCarthy, G., & Wang, W. (2011). Project iPad: Investigating Tablet Integration in Learning and Libraries at Ryerson University. Computers In Libraries, 31(7), 17-21.