Explain Everything has long been a “go to” app on my iPad. I created narrated presentations for many situations using this app. Recently, it was announced that Explain Everything was coming to the Chromebook.
My initial reaction to using Explain Everything was neutral. The app seemed sluggish and I had some difficulty figuring out just how to import content to my slides. I understood that I would be bringing in images from Google Drive, but I could not get the connection to work. For some reason, restarting my Chromebook helped. I have a Chromebook Pixel so I was disappointed with the responsiveness of the program. This is an expensive machine and more powerful than inexpensive equipment students will be using.
I wondered about the importance of the Internet connection. I was exploring the app from the cabin and our connection is very slow. Today I had a chance to get to the coffee shop and try the Chromebook with a better connection. I am much more impressed today. Evidently, Explain Everything is more demanding than other online services I use and the speed of the connection seemed to make a difference. Hence, educators who want a class of students to work on Explain Everthing simultaneously may want to be aware of the importance of ample bandwidth.
P.S. – this is probably the first app I have actually bothered to take advantage of the Chromebook Pixel’s touch screen.
One of the characteristics on authoring tools we look to recommend is simplicity. The idea is that learners should be able to focus most of their time and attention on the message/content and learn the means to convey their content quickly. TACKK is an online tool that is a good example of such a tool. The tool relies on templates and multimedia objects allowing users to easily generate a variety of attractive “page” types. The tool seems a great way to create what we have described as online embellished documents.
There are several iPad presentation apps based on a “voice over slide approach”. Explain Everything is the app from this category that seems to have received the most attention. I think this type of app offers an efficient way for students to create videos. The advantage is that these apps allow the audio to be generated on a slide by slide basis. This approach makes it easy to redo the segment of audio associated with a slide when an attempt to generate the segment comes up short of expectations.
30 Hands takes a similar approach and has similar capabilities. Again, the author generates “slides” in various ways and then records the audio to accompany each visual. Slides can be generated in multiple ways (see below).
The following is a quick demonstration I created with 30 Hands.
If you have been interested in educational technology for some time, you probably remember the days before blogs and Twitter. Most of us started by creating web pages. We started by creating HTML pages by hand, but then for reasons of practicality moved on to specialized tools such as Claris Homepage, Adobe Pagemill, or Apple iWeb. I used them all. Companies sometimes had both basic and advanced tools. For example, Adobe offered Pagemill for the hobbyist and what became Dreamweaver for the more series site designer. It seems to me that with the advent of cloud services (e.g., Google Sites) and a focus on “short form” and continually changing content (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Google+) interest in the low end “site builders” declined. For educational settings, I think there is still potential in creating sites rather than posts and a need for less expensive tools for this purpose.
Web sites seem suited to authoring projects – a way to describe and teach with multimedia what has been learned from a project. There are simple ways to create multimedia online content, but it seems possible that students have grown to expect more sophisticated looking pages. Whether this “look” is of educational value or not is not the issue. What matters is the willingness of students investing in the production of the content.
This was perhaps a longer than necessary introduction to get to some comments regarding the potential of Weebly. I have been aware of Weebly for some time as an option made available through my Internet hosting service (Bluehost). I have invested time in developing content with Adobe Dreamweaver (don’t get me started on what I think of Adobe’s rental approach to software) and so I did not make personal use of the Weebly option. What got my attention was the recent release of the Weebly authoring app for iOS. I tried the app and liked it. I then backtracked to explore the web-based system available through a browser.
Both versions use a “drag and drop” approach. You select a page template you find appropriate and then drag “elements” onto this template to add types of media (image, text, video, maps) and structural elements to generate a desired layout of these elements. Ready-made options such as slide shows, image galleries and contact forms are also available.
Weebly is available as a free version and as more advanced paid versions. There is also an option for educators that is lower in cost (for the paid options). For example, the “pro account” is $40 per year and includes 40 student accounts. Weebly offers a way to password protect individual pages if desired and argues this is important when student security is a concern. If educators are interested in Weebly for the classroom, it is important that they understand the distinction between the opportunities offered to the public and for classroom use.
Here is an image captured from my iPad showing some of the elements available as I created a site. My sample site is available.
The Mozilla project just released Sea Monkey – the newest version of the integrated web suite from the open source provider. I am not aware of the origin of the name, but this product appears as the updated version of a product that has been around for some time. At one time I was a dedicated user because I liked the idea of a “suite” of applications and found the mail and composer applications to be especially valuable. I used to use the Composer application in classes because it was a free tool for “composing” web pages (see below).
BTW, this is a mature application with none of the clunkiness you sometimes see in open source projects. I am pleased to see this project advancing because it seems to fill a niche.
Spending some time exploring the new offering did reveal just how accustomed one becomes to the way a particular tool works. Sea Monkey will not accept the Diigo Toolbar which has become a natural part of my work flow when using Firefox. I think it has become fashionable to refer to this as an affordance – making something easy shapes our behavior. The Diigolet (a bookmarklet) does work so there is still a way to save Diigo bookmarks.
I liked Composer because it filled a niche. At the time the less expensive web authoring tools seemed to be disappearing (e.g., PageMill, HomePage) and it did not seem productive to expect educators to master Dreamweaver or GoLive (alas now gone as well). The world has changed. The less demanding end of the authoring continuum now seems focused on online tools (e.g, Google Sites) or desktop and template based software such as iWeb. My thinking about classroom applications has come to focus more and more on efficiency. The tool is not really the focus and the core question often ends up being how much time will it take in learning and applying a tool to accomplish an educational end.
My previous post invited you to view a very creative project intro developed by a couple of Grand Forks teachers. Their mini-movie was created using a new online resource called xtranormal.
xtranormal allows users to script avatar-based movies. The narrative is generated by typing a script. You can select camera angles and the set. The process takes a little time, but it is easy to save a work in progress.
You can embed a movie you generate with xtranormal from Youtube, but that seems overkill for a simple demo. If you are interested, view my demo from the xtranormal site. The movie demonstrates a few of the basic techniques you can apply after only a few minutes of exploration.
I make use of personal web portals and while I was aware of Pageflakes, I have always classified it as another personal portal. By personal portal, I mean a web page hosted on a remote server that users can easily customize with “widgets” (or whatever the host companies calls function specific modules that can be selected and positioned on a page) to serve as their browser home page. The idea is to bring together information sources (RSS feeds for news, weather, blogs, images), email, commonly used links, etc. in one location.
Now, I learn that PageFlakes can be used to create a “page” for sharing and some special flakes have been included in a version for educators/students (Mashable). If you don’t understand what this might mean, recognize that it allows a user (teacher/student) to create a page that can include powerful functions you don’t have to understand how to create yourself. Select a “”flake” from a long list of possibilities, position it on the page where you think it is most appropriate, and edit flake “parameters” to adjust the function of that flake to your own needs.
Access control is an important issue when educators involve students with online resources. PageFlake can be private, public, or available to a designated group of participants. I have not included examples of flakes that might be among the more useful for classroom group (e.g., blog, notepad) because I must make my example public for you to be able to access the page. Unless I am missing something, I could not determine how I would turn off “comments” and similar response opportunities under these conditions.
One flake allowing personal content creation even under the public condition is the “anything flake”. This flake amounts to a simple web page authoring tool (see upper left-hand corner of my page). The tool is very easy to use and saves a fully functional html “mini” page that is really part of the full page.
Some have already developed simple tutorials for PageFlakes (e.g., PageFlakes for Education Wiki). The best way to understand this environment is probably to explore (http://teacher.pageflakes.com) as a personal portal and then, if this proves to be a productive experience, progress to the creation of pages for sharing.
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