Month: October 2009

I learned about Pear Note (from Useful Fruit) some weeks ago, but until today I had not had the opportunity to try it in a “real world” situation. Pear Note is intended to improve note taking. I tend to think of note taking as a practice related to educational activities, but it is a necessary activity for many professions. You watch/hear something and need to generate a record of that experience to combat the limitations of human memory. The problem is that we all make decisions of what we should record. The process of writing something down takes time and unless one knows short hand decisions have to be made. What we write, at least if you are a student, you should probably not record word for word what was said anyway. Paraphrasing or summarizing are generative processes and increase learning. However, these are also imperfect practices sometimes resulting in a failed record of what was actually said. Note, my interpretation may be very different from the way note taking is described on the Useful Fruit site. I conduct research on academic note taking. I think my analysis (actually based on what others have written before me) actually offers better selling points for Pear Note. How does one recover from less than perfect external storage when word for word recording is not the goal and typically impossible?

Anyway, I attended a conference on distance education today and listened to 5-6 hours of presentations. This offered a great opportunity to evaluate the product.

Pear Note synchronizes multiple inputs. The program records audio (and video) and what you enter from the keyboard. The cool thing is that these inputs are coordinated. If I am later reviewing my notes and something does not make sense, I can click on a location in my text and the recorded content will begin playing at a point in the corresponding audio that is 10 seconds earlier in the audio than the corresponding time at which the original text was entered. I know that was as a confusing explanation, but it is a difficult concept to explain. Think of audio being recorded on a time line and key strokes on the same time line – there is a correspondence between the audio and the individual keystrokes on this common time line. The consequence is that  I can listen to specific segments of audio in a very efficient fashion. I can locate the section of audio that correspond to the text I now find confusing.

If you have access to PowerPoint or Keynote (I did forget – this is a Mac only product), you can load them into Pear Note. You then forward the slide corresponding to the presentation and the slides will also be coordinated.

While you can review the product for free, it does cost $40. A reasonable investment if you use it frequently. I will warn you of a couple of things. Consider where the microphone is located on a laptop (not sure how this product would be useful in a desktop machine). The mike is directed toward you (the note taker). This means the audio may be a little weak. Our speakers today were working with an audio amplification system so the sound level was acceptable. The other issue with the placement of the mike is that you are entering text from the keyboard and at least with me this sound is fairly loud and close to the mike. This combination makes for a less than ideal outcome. I did not say unacceptable outcome. This is why I suggest you not purchase based on the description but download the demo and try it in a real world situation.

This is a pretty well thought out product. The limitations are more limitations of the hardware than the software itself.

I typically describe useful web sites I encounter on my other blog. However, this blog receives more attention and I wanted to make certain the resource I describe here is promoted.

PBS has organized some of its own resources and other supplemental materials as Activity Packs. The packs are organized by grade level and content categories. The packs are even available as a widget (see example below) that can be embedded in a class web page or promoted through social media (as I am trying to do here). Seems like a very useful way to offer resources to teachers.

Do you have to send the same email to many individuals on different dates? If this is a common experience, it is worth learning how to use Google Canned Responses.

Here is my situation so you get the idea. Cindy and I offer a free online resource (book) focused on participatory web applications in K12 settings. The book is part of a suite of resources some of which allow users to contribute material. For security reasons, we want to make certain that those who have access to this content and who can add comments or links are educators. Our biggest problem has been scammers who add links to unrelated commercial sites. We are using a protection scheme that requires users to authenticate (within Drupal) using an email address associated with an educational institution.

I find myself sending a large number of emails to applicants who do not provide an appropriate address. This may happen 5-10 times a day. I end up typing a similar message into each of these emails. I heard an explanation of a Gmail feature during a podcast that allows the insertion of a stored comment in an email, but could never find the feature. Today, I happened across a comment from Google on “lab” features and found that “canned response”  was a lab product. I have now had an opportunity to explore and here are some instructions if this feature sounds useful. I do not claim mastery but I have been able to get the feature to work. For all of the great tools Google provides they do not seem to invest a lot of effort in tutorials. I guess this comes with “free”.

Canned Responses

The feature I thought was available and could not find within Gmail is called Canned Responses. The feature must be enabled before it is available. Hence, the explanation for why I could not locate it. To activate canned responses, a Gmail user must go to settings and open the “Lab” features (be forewarned lab features potentially may be changed, may not work, or may be discontinued). I guess this is the way Google coders experiment with features and you are invited to participate. Any given AVAILABLE lab feature must be enabled before it is available.

It then took me a while to see what changed when the feature was enabled (again, do not expect a tutorial explaining how to use the different lab features – you have to search and explore).

Finally, I found something with pictures and it became obvious that Canned responses had something to do with the “Canned responses” link that had appeared under the Subject dialog box available when composing an email. Here I am still a little uncertain. What I finally got to work may employ some behaviors that psychologists refer to as superstitious behaviors – some things are necessary, some are not, but the actor does not know which is which. The Canned responses link opens up a box revealing “Insert, Save, and Delete). Under Save, there is an option for “new canned response”. So, I wrote the response I wanted to use repeatedly, used the save now button (this is normally used to save a draft), selected the “new canned response” option and generated a label for my response. I then started over as if I was going to write a new email, went to “canned responses” and selected the entry now available under insert. It seemed to work.

I admire the exploratory nature of the Google approach. Some serious folks probably would be frustrated by the exploratory nature of things and the lack of clear documentation. Too time consuming. I think exploring with Google is worth the effort.