I found a lot of lapdesks at amazon, and an old review of lapdesks at cnet.

And then this comment caught my eye:”Don’t waste your money on this piece of future landfill material (aka “junk”). See $2 solution below”.

The writer suggests that a really good solution would be to use a plastic cutting board.  Good size, not slippery, plenty sturdy, and can take the heat.

I immediately jumped up and grabbed my black 12×18 cutting board out of the cabinet and set out to test the suggestion.  Results?  I like it very much.  Lovely size (just enough room on the side for the mouse).  Excellent surface–don’t need a mouse pad and the laptop does not slip.  You will need some kind of padding underneath, or it will hurt your knees.  Fortunately, I had made a quilted laptop bag (really, just a big envelope to stuff my tablet in since my rolling backpack is quite stingy with padding), so I put that underneath the cutting board and the result was quite comfortable.  Perhaps it would be nice to have a little “stop” at the front to keep pencils or pens from rolling off, but I would think you could add that with some hot glue.

So no more shopping for lap desks!  I think this solution will work just fine.

One of the presentations I have signed up for is Extending Firefox.  It took me a while to choose and review a number of add-ons that would be of value to the average faculty member.  I use several of the web developer add-ons and I love TwitterFox, but those are not necessarily of interest to most instructors!

These are the five I selected:

• Web of Trust
• Download helper
• Adblock Plus
• Screengrab
• Autopager

We will also take a look at some firefox themes, the U. S. Dictionary for Firefox, and a variety of useful plugins/players.  If time permits, we will browse the “recommended” list of add-ons and see what the group likes!

Here is the presentation with links.

When you record, you simply hold the camera in your hand (it is about the size of a cell phone), push the record button and start talking.  The screen on the back is quite bright and easy to view.  When you are finished recording, you press the record button again to stop.  You can certainly take multiple clips and plan to edit them to combine or trim later.

When attempting to create the movie, I began by making the mistake of just trying to use the video straight off the camera without installing the software.  This did not work because the proper driver/codec was not installed.  I think this is going to be a problem, because my students work in a computer lab and are not able to install software.

At least if you intend to use Windows Movie Maker, the proper codec (3ivx_d4_451_win.exe), is available on the Flip camera itself.  I found this blog post helpful with respect to using the Flip and Windows Movie Maker.  I elected to go ahead and install the video editing software that comes with the camera.  There is a free upgrade available from Flip.  Once you install the driver, whether you do that with the Flip editing software or simply by installing the driver itself, you are ready to edit your video files.

Here is my movie.

All in all, I found the camera easy to use and the audio volume was certainly acceptable when you are within a couple of feet of the camera.  If you were trying to record a group of students from several feet away, you might need to boost the volume in your video editing program.  I will have to experiment with that later.

There is definitely a limit to zooming in.  Once you get within a few inches of an object, the focus is poor.  From a foot away, it was acceptable.

The verdict?  I think this camera (now approximately $125 USD) would be a good choice for a classroom teacher.  It is small and simple to use.  It does not require any accessories.  It runs on AA batteries, which are easily obtained.  I would be comfortable handing this camera to a student or group of students and having them come back with a set of video clips.  Once you have installed the proper codecs (or the video editing software provided with the camera), students would be able to add titles and edit their video easily.

The device should be undocked properly each time it is used.  The teacher might want to take care of downloading the files and placing them into the student work folder.

We signed up with edublogs campus in preparation for departmental and school blogging this coming fall semester.  So far we have about 6 blogs set up, and expect more to follow in the next couple of months.

The Jay-Rollins Library blog will be used as an information tool.  Better than a newsletter, a blog is searchable by text, tag, and category AND available through rss.  We are expecting some great things!  I will be subscribing to the feed to keep up with all the new books that come in.

The School of Natural and Computational Sciences has been posting stories since last March.  This fall, we are going to try to spotlight every department at least once as well as publishing information of more general interest.  Expect to see stories about student research, new programs, faculty research, and more.

Other schools and departments on campus are planning to add blogs, so I am excited about the possibilities!

Here is my room (you will need the Lively plugin)

It was a little slow on my home internet connection, but I had fun choosing my room shell, furnishings, and avatar clothing. I made my avatar without hair to reflect my current state of baldness! I learned how to use the catalog and selected a number of different outfits, hairstyles, tables, chairs, and lights so that I could add things later.

I was interested to find that the catalog category with the most items seemed to be “goth”. I was more interested in “campus coffee house”. I did not find much in the way of paintings or posters that I wanted to use, and some things I chose in the catalog didn’t seem to be available once I got back to the room. But maybe I did something wrong!

I turned off the ambient sound, hoping it would remedy the “flicker” in the overlay panel, but no luck. It might be a bandwidth issue, so I will try it the next time I am on campus and have a much better internet connection.

There were quite a few items that corresponded to a classroom. Desks, tables, whiteboards, and filing cabinets. I was surprised that there were no books or laptops in the catalog! I decided that I didn’t want to build a ‘classroom” space that looked like a traditional classroom. So I went with the coffee house, an overstuffed chair, and a floor lamp. Right now, there is only enough furniture for me. I guess I need to allow people to add their own furniture!

I have, for a couple of semesters now, required all my students to get gmail accounts, primarily so that we can explore many of the google tools that are of particular use for teachers. We like to use the google spreadsheet, documents, and presentations. Maybe we will take a good look at Lively as well!

My older son set up all my content–ripped my CDs, set up my playlists, and got everything uploaded to the right place. Then he ripped several movies for me (Mulan, You’ve Got Mail, and The Music Man).

It turns out that this ipod has been a true blessing to me as I go through chemotherapy. It is so small and lightweight that I can just slip it in my purse. The movies are wonderful, because they distract me from the long hours of waiting. I can muffle the noise from other patients and their visitors with the ear buds.

So between the ipod, photo/video capable cell phone, and text messaging, I have a whole communication network right there in the chair. How cool is that?

Then we got started with the planned sessions for the rest of the day.  The intro sessions were all held in computer labs, so participants there were actively working with Moodle and practicing skills.  These sessions were very popular as a large percentage of the conference participants are just starting with Moodle.

I was pleased to go to a Mahara workshop, because I have been experimenting with Mahara for some time but was interested in seeing how other people were using it.  Two other people from my institution also attended this session, and we are going to try to set up a pilot instance for one of my classes in the fall.

I also went to a presentation on outcomes, which is another thing I really want to work on this fall.  Right now, the outcomes can be set up site wide so that teachers in multiple courses can use the same outcome.  However, I don’t think there are really any good reporting tools to pull out information and aggregate it across courses.  So maybe we will work on that.  I think that all the information should be stored in the gradebook tables, so if we can figure out how to write the queries, we should be able to aggregate the information.  For general education assessment, this could be a great tool.

At the end of the day, we had a debrief and then dismissal.  We hit the road home about 4:30.  I enjoyed the conference very much, and I met some really nice people.  I appreciate Metrotech for sponsoring this even.  Maybe we will do it again next year!

I opened the conference with a presentation on Moodle: What Students Want (or, reading between the lines). I had examined survey data from 4 institutions to determine some commonalities in student comments and further, how to use those comments to improve the student experience.

Afterwards we had a wonderful lunch, catered by Metrotech students, and broke into 4 separate tracks for interest sessions: moodle basic users, moodle intermediate users, moodle administration, and moodle technical.

I attended a session that was videoconferenced from France. Nicholas Connault gave us a review of the new gradebook in Moodle 1.9. We used Elluminate, but had a lot of trouble with the connection. We dropped at least 5 times, and that was frustrating for the audience. Other video sessions were technically more successful.  We used Elluminate for all of them.

Next, I went to a session on adding closed captioning to video. We learned two different techniques for accomplishing this goal. One was using free software, called MAGpie. The other was using Camtasia. I think Camtasia was easier, but for individuals with real budget constraints, the magpie method works well enough. The major problem, of course, is getting the transcription to begin with. Metrotech was fortunate in that they could hire students in the medical transcriptionist program to provide the initial text files. Once these were created, you could copy and paste to the appropriate program and then cue the text to appear at the appropriate point on the video timeline. When the video plays, the CC button appears and the user can selectively show or hide the captions. I have been interested in closed captioning for some time, and was delighted to find out about these new tools.

My session on E-Portfolios: Getting Started with Moodle was the very last one of the day. I was delighted to find that the room was full and there were many people interested in a simple way to get started with portfolios. I started with an overview of the types of portfolios one could use, and the benefits and costs of each type. I also pointed out that some types of portfolios (showcase/employer) were not very compatible with others (growth/developmental). The last portion of the presentation demonstrated a number of portfolios pre-service teachers from McMurry had created using a standard instance of Moodle.

The conference ended around 4 p.m., and I am looking forward to the sessions schedule for tomorrow. There are a number that I am very interested in, and I will give one presentation on using uploadcourse.php to create course shells as a batch process and end the day serving on a Moodle Panel taking questions from the audience. The highlight of the day, of course, begins at 8:00 a.m. when we are addressed by Martin Dougiamas from Australia.

As part of the exploration and documentation process, each student posted a discussion topic in a social bookmarking forum on our Moodle course. They gave a run down of the major features and linked to the site. Then, as they gave their presentation, we all logged in and started a reply. We took notes, added questions, mentioned the things we liked, or the things we disliked as the presentation proceeded. It was rather like organized back-channeling.

The idea is that each student will be able to use our shared document from google docs, the original post, and the notes provided by every other member of the class to create a blog post reviewing this particular bookmarking service and its potential for professional or K-12 classroom use.

These reviews will be published in our community on eduspaces.net with a tag of “social bookmarking”.

At the end of the class, we voted on the social bookmarking service that we thought would best suit our needs and diigo.com won. Everyone signed up and by Monday we should have all “friended” each other and started sharing bookmarks!

I have been struggling somewhat in figuring out the most sensible order for introducing web 2.0 tools in a 3 week course. Should I start with the goal (personal learning environments) and then explore the different venues for creating a PLE? Or start with the tools and end up with a good application for using them as a professional growth tool?

In three weeks, we don’t have a lot of time to grow in our use of tools such as blogging or social bookmarking, so it seemed more reasonable to start with the tools and applications of those tools, albeit in a rather separated manner, and then end up with a glimpse of what the future might hold (the PLE).

At this moment, I have planned to begin with Social Bookmarking (how to effectively collect information and find it again later!) and then segue into blogs and wikis. We do have a few non-web-2.0 things to cover as well. I want to show the students some whiteboard/web conferencing software; eXe and basic e-learning design principles; take some time to look at e-portfolios; and get an introduction to using an LMS (moodle, in our case).

If we can, we are going to read a manuscript from a colleague and provide some feedback on topics we cover in the class. I think the students will find it interesting to correspond with the author!