Audio Notes in Word and OneNote
During a summer history course a little while back, I noticed one of my colleagues with a laptop, but she was not taking notes as fervently as the rest of us. I asked her later on why she wasn’t taking as many notes, and she said she was in fact recording them – straight into Microsoft Word.
Within Microsoft Office OneNote 2003/2007 in Windows, and Microsoft Word 2004/2008 for Mac, there is a toolbar available relatively unknown to most users from what I’ve found. It’s the Audio Notes toolbar, available in OneNote for Windows and Notebook Layout View in Word for Mac. It allows users to record audio into the document through a built-in or external microphone.
While audio notes can recording using Word 2004/2008 for Mac, Microsoft Word for Windows 2007 or earlier will not take audio notes. And, unfortunately, OneNote is one of the only programs not included in the Office suite on campus. OneNote is an additional program in the Office 2007 (Windows) suite that is not included in the Mac Office suite, so this tool is exclusive to that program in Windows. We’ll keep our eyes out, however, for any possible plug-in that may allow Word 2007 integration. In the meantime, while I haven’t found it to be a truly bonefide word processor, per se, OneNote is not a bad program for taking lecture notes, and if you buy any copy of Office 2007, the program will be included.
This can be extremely useful, either for taking personal notes while planning a lecture, or any academic work on the go. You might even record a lecture as you’re giving it, so you can get an idea on how well you are delivering a lecture, talk, or interview.
In Word for Mac, If you take written notes as you record audio, playback will display an arrow next to the point in your notes that you were writing at that time. The arrow will skip down every time the “Return” button was pressed, so that when you play back your notes, you’ll always know exactly what was being said while were writing a certain line.
Audio notes can be exported, so you can share with a colleague, and students with a classmate. Check out Audio Notes (see the graphics I’ve provided), and encourage student use of this tool in lectures as well. Read more
Brain Controlled Computer
If you were told about a computer that you could control using only your brain and your thoughts you would likely think it would be the product of the latest sci fi movie. However, as revealed in a story presented on CBS’ 60 Minutes this technology already exists and has been successfully employed for human use.
Brain Power Video via 60 Minutes [via Lifehacker]
The story focuses primarily on the plight of Scott Makler, a man who at age 40 was capable of running a marathon but is now confined to a wheelchair, paralyzed after the devastating effects of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. It is shown however that thanks to a radical new invention he has regained his ability to communicate with the world around him. In the segment it is shown that a system has been invented called the brain computer interface or “BCI” in which the user wears wears a cap that picks up the electrical activity of their brain and allows the user to select letters simply by thinking about them. The computer system is then able to take these letters and turn them into spoken language. Mr. Makler is shown to be able to effectively communicate using this device and although it’s slow, with it taking about 20 seconds to select each letter, it has nonetheless opened up a world of possibilities and opportunity which had previously been unavailable.
Researchers however say that this is just the first step in exploring the possibilities of this amazing new technology. It is said that the next step is to insert a chip directly into the brain which they suggest would allow for much clearer reception of the brains signals. This is then shown to have already been effectively employed for use in both monkey and human test subjects. Though still very much in the early stages of development this technology’s ultimate goal is to enable amputees to use BCIs to control robotic arms, and to allow those with paralysis to be able to move their own arms and legs again.
Check out The Wadsworth Center Brain-Computer Interface System website.
- Monkey’s brain controls robot arm via BBC
- Monkeys control robotic arm with their thoughts via CTV
- Mind-Computer Interface with NI LabVIEW
Save on Photoshop by image-editing online
In anticipation of an upcoming workshop EDC will be hosting in December, we began a hunt a few weeks ago for an online image editor that would be free to use and hassle-free. We think we found one, and to be honest it even raised a few eyebrows with us. But first allow me to recap what sprung on us along the way.
Two relatively similar sites came to our attention first. Both dr. pic and Pixenate photo editors have many of the same features (see first image below), and, although simplistic, in our trials we found them effective and dead simple to use. 
It’s easy: first, you browse your computer through a built-in upload tool and upload your desired image. Although it may feeln a little wierd having ‘write’ capabilities in your web browser, once you upload your photo you have free reign to resize, rotate, touch up, zoom and crop (although each service offers a few specific editing tools defining it). Then, save it right back into your Facebook photos with the changes in full effect. No one would even know the photo went anywhere, because it didn’t — it just got spiced up a little.
Finally, Splashup (formerly Fauxto) offers the best all-round image editing capabilities that we have seen to date. While Splashup is still in beta form at the moment, and, although it requires a free account setup to do certain things, you “Jump Right In” straight from the home page without needing any credentials, and a rich, Java-based interface launches that even takes a bit of attention away from Photoshop, 
while it’s hard to even believe this is all web-based. Import a photo through the File menu, and Splashup will ask whether you want to work on photos straight out of your Facebook, Flickr, Google’s own Picasa, from a URL, or simply from your computer. Utilize the tools, colour, and layering palettes (that’s right, even layering!), and when you’re done, Splashup matches your export locations with where you imported them from in the first place. The next time you check your facebook, your updated photo will be right there waiting. The only downside we found is there’s no real way to duplicate photos while editing them through Splashup’s Facebook integration. We would suggest saving a copy of your image before modifying it through Splashup.
Have fun with this: give it a shot at the office before uploading a few things to WebCT, or edit a few of your Facebook photos. Image editing never got easier — only busier!
ThinkFree: Universally-accessible office suite, online!
In a few words, office suites such as Microsoft Office and Corel WordPerfect Office can be a real pain in the butt — for financial, practical and flexibility reasons. It’ll cost you an arm and a leg to buy, it’s typically isolated to run on either Windows, Mac or Linux, and you can only legally install your copy on one computer! These office suites that are at the core of our personal computing should be relatively painless, simple to use, highly accessible, and productive, but often they’re not. In my next post, I’ll continue with another prime example of how transitioning our offline work to an online workspace has made things a whole lot simpler and pain-free. Once again, Web 2.0 has raised the bar for simplicity, compatibility, and accessibility over the internet. These online work spaces, after all, help us out with learning tools that put the “O” in Office, and a more stress-free student back in the classroom.
Although it is still in beta (a sort of pre-release, public test version), up in the office we use Google Docs (or ‘G-docs’) to write and collaborate documents and share internal material. Our blog entries, in fact, often get drafted in G-docs so that we can edit and collaborate before migrating the material to our blogging management system. Google is infamous in their marketing for bundling online tools within the same workspace, and keeping everything in one place for quick access. G-docs will import and export various document types, and allow you to format, embed links, and adjust the primary aspects of your document.
On a side note, OpenOffice.org is another worthy mention (while we’re at it) that’s a freeware veteran and a great solution. Although not web-based as ThinkFree offers in addition, OpenOffice.org is a whole office suite in itself that’s free to download. Yup, if you’re on a tight budget, you’ll be happy to know that this online productivity suite is absolutely free! That’s right, free! (Unlike seeing the word “free” falsely advertising programs online, this one’s for real.) While scratching your head for a while on that note, grab your mouse with the other hand and give Open Office a try. For basic office needs (even a few more intermediate and advanced tools), this program is fairly comparable all-round. Released in 2002, OpenOffice.org has been well-received as being the most robust free office productivity suite available to date.
Our latest online highlight, ThinkFree, is a beefed up variant on a Microsoft product called Office Live Workspace. Office Live Workspace is free to use, but if you want to start making web-uploaded documents it still requires the expensive Office installation on your computer. ThinkFree, rather provides access to an online word processor (for one) that does not require hundreds of dollars to utilise, nor does it even require you to install anything on your computer — only a free account setup through their website. Not only does it offer a word processor, it offers a bone fide office suite, and all from the comfort of your web browser, from wherever you are. As long as there’s high-speed internet access. It reads a multitude of formats so that your collaboration is never kept in the dark.
The overall term they coin for the service is the ‘ThinkFree Boundless‘ environment, in which cross-platform support is the core convenience. Since it’s web-based, it runs on both Windows and Mac and has seamless Microsoft Office integration. Log in, and you’ll have instant access to your productivity suite of applications, including word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, and notes section that includes a variety of templates that can be added to a document on the fly. You can either create documents offline and upload them to your account, or if you have no productivity suite locally, ThinkFree offers ThinkFree Office (so you can work offline), and ThinkFree Manager (to sync your documents between your online and offline work spaces).
While it is extremely convenient to gain read and write access to files in this level of flexibility, we still recommend the ThinkFree Office addition for primary editing (at least on your own, personal computer), and ThinkFree online as a supplementary editor. ThinkFree Note is a powerful web-based editor built into your internal ThinkFree account suite that offers templates, graphs, emoticons. All these goodies simply through your web browser, not to mention and a full array of formatting and editing tools.
ThinkFree Office may be shareware (try-before-you-buy), but it’s a helluva lot cheaper than MS Office. And it also does something Microsoft would never offers: access on your iPhone. Because it is web-based, and all of the service’s data is stored on a distant server, the ThinkFree Environment is native with Windows, Mac, and Linux. These tools offer the max in compatibility, and they’ll ensure you never have to wrestle around with another pesky .docx file again.
Don’t skip it — Qipit!
Are you one of many people who doesn’t have a scanner, but needs to quickly digitize a document now and then? Until Qipit came along, you might have been out of luck. But thanks to this free online service that boasts mobile uploads on the fly, rest assured that this little “free online copy service” is a true testimonial to the digital revolution at hand. And it will help you out in more ways than one.
Qipit was brought to our attention through a brief lifehacker blog entry claiming you can turn your digital camera (or camera-phone) into a scanner with the click of a button. 
Although skeptical at first, we had to give this a try, and here’s how it works. First, you’ll need to sign up for a free Qipit account through their website. Next, start taking some photos of documents, whiteboards or blackboards, or anything that you would like to capture to either email, fax, or print. For colour copies, color@qipit.com uploads to your account, and for black and white, send to copy@qipit.com. We conducted our tests on an iPhone 3G. Within seconds we found the image appearing in our Qipit account, optimized for contrast and clarity (in case you used a no-flash camera-phone of low resolution). It also automatically converts your uploaded images into PDF format. Not bad, not bad at all, we thought.
Once uploaded, you have the option of printing, emailing, or faxing your content, and when viewing the PDF there are numerous Adobe tools that can be utilised. We were hoping Qipit would also be capable of optical character recognition, so that images of text could be converted into text that can be modified, but perhaps this was a little too much to ask for — at least for now. Even so, give Qipit a try and you might be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to start digitizing your life today!
Right to the Point.
As an instructor at Carleton, you will likely know WebCT is a great way to allow your students to access class content from wherever they are, not to mention it’s environmentally-friendly. You may often provide PowerPoint slides via WebCT, but wouldn’t it be useful if they could open your PowerPoint and have it auto-play — even with your voice narrating? Ponder no more. Screencasts are here.
We’ve recently had a some inquiries here at EDC about the potential for instructors to record narrated video of them reviewing their PowerPoint presentations. There are numerous software titles that have helped make this a reality, as well as a very powerful tool for instructors to bring PowerPoint publications to a new level.
TipCam 2.0, available from uTIPu Inc., is a free program that is simple to use and execute on the fly. Hit record to begin capturing real-time video of anything on your screen. Video output quality is not bad, but I wasn’t very impressed with the compression of my widescreen desktop. There’s a nifty voice-over feature allowing recording narration at a later time, but export options are limited to Flash-based FLV format. Even so, these Flash files are ideal for publishing to an online blog, saving valuable space on your server. Simply upload the Flash FLV file to your WebCT, and students can download and view the screen capture with the help of a free download of Adobe Flash Player (installed on 98% of computers).
Another program we looked at was Debut Video Capture Software from NCH Software. For a free download, this one impressed us. It offers numerous video formats to output as, although most that we tried at reasonable compression settings turned out hazy at best. Even if all you need is a single snapshot of your screen to highlight a WebCT feature to students, this program will do the trick. Higher video bitrates and lower compression provided better overall video output quality, with a sacrifice of larger file sizes on export. If you have a little time and patience initially to negotiate video output settings, Debut won’t let you down.
The best screen capture tool we’ve come across to date is a piece of software still industry standard, and widely adopted by professionals. Camtasia Studio 5 is available as a free trial from the TechSmith website. It not only captures everything on your screen or right within PowerPoint presentations as you narrate through your slides, and saves it as virtually any video format, Camtasia Studio offers advanced editing tools in a video timeline that make it simple to customize and polish your video screen captures to the tee.
If you are a professional instructor with serious intentions on making your classroom content available in the most professional quality and greatest video compression with minimal sacrifice in quality, do not be discouraged by the $299 price tag on Camtasia Studio 5. For even greater PowerPoint integration, keep your eyes peeled in the coming months for further development of Camtasia Relay Beta.
For additional information, check out our podcasting docs, and if you are interested in joining a Carleton podcast/screen capture user group, please contact ryan_kuhne@carleton.ca.
How to Screen Capture – Part 1
Sometimes in a presentation or documents, a picture is worth a thousand words. In this case a screen capture is one of the elements you will want to include to show exactly what you are talking about.
One way to capture a screen image is to use specific screen capture software. You can buy some software or use free ones. However there is a simple way for capturing screen shots which is probably not well known. The advantage to using this method is that it is free and built into every version of Windows. You don’t need to download and install any specific software and you can use it in any Windows machine.
If you want to capture the entire screen, including the launch bar at the bottom and any part of the desktop or program you are currently using, you can press the Print screen key on your key board. Then you can switch to your word processing program and create a new document or open a new file in Photoshop. You can paste the image from the clipboard by pressing Ctrl+V which will paste the screenshot in your open document. If you are using two monitors, it will give you a screenshot of both!
If you wish to capture only the currently selected windows, not the entire screen, it is easy to do that with a similar method. This time open the screen you want to capture, make sure it is the active window, hold down the Alt key and press the Print Screen key. Now if you paste your screen shot, you will see that you have captured only the active application window, not everything else that may be on the desktop.
you can always size or crop the image once it has been pasted on the word document, by right-clicking on the image and selecting Format picture. Then you can click on the Size tab or Format tab and change whatever you want. If you want to edit the image, you can also paste it into a graphics program such as Photoshop and continue editing.
In a future I will introduce you to some free download screen capture software which allow you to take screenshots from any part of your screen, and save images in different formats.
Adobe ConnectNOW: Collaborative web conferencing
A few days ago, while looking for a web conferencing solution for a professor looking to do online office hours, I stumbled upon Adobe’s online application ConnectNOW. While it wasn’t a solution to the original problem, after giving it a quick try I came to see it has many other very interesting functions.
The application (which is free!) basically gives you an online meeting space, which can be accessed and edited at anytime by those invited by the creator. After signing up with your email address, a space (kind of like a personal webpage) will be created where you can store files, notes, whiteboard drawings as well as anything else you add during a meeting. This allows you to meet online (with webcam and audio feeds) while typing shared notes and drawing on a whiteboard, then at a later date you can come back to the space and view, edit, or add to what was there from the meeting. This gives you a lot of flexibility when collaborating with colleagues at a distance.
Some of the other features include file sharing/storing, the ability to remote access other computers as well as telephone conferencing. One of the downsides of the application is that group size is restricted to three people on the free version. However, for a small collaborative project or meeting, this seems like quite a useful tool.
Top 10 Computing Energy Savers
Being environmentally friendly is something that everyone seems to be striving for, but we are also so dependent on our energy hogging technologies. How can we make or technology more environmentally friendly (besides going back to pen and paper by candle light).
Here is a list of the top 10 ways from Lifehacker.
10. Upgrade your gear
That old CRT monitor and desktop computer are sucking up significantly more wattage than a more attractive LCD flat-screen or a more portable laptop. Consider upgrading your gear to more energy-efficient modern models – and be sure to recycle your old stuff responsibly. Here’s more information about how much energy your computer uses.
9. Dim your screen
Your monitor draws the most amount of power out of all your computer’s peripherals. Dim the brightness of your screen to reduce energy consumption, or set it to automatically dim after a few minutes of non-use. (Macs are especially good at this.) Read more
Top 100 Tools for Learning – Free Summary PDF
Today’s post is a mega listing of the top 100 major players in the technology tool game. The post comes courtesy of a fantastic E-Learning Blog I frequent regularly: Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day.
The blog, which has a strong community support that spans the globe, is one part of a larger resource site called the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies which maintains a continually updated list of all new and emerging (Web 2.0) technologies.
Download the free Summary: Top 100 Tools Spring 2008 Summary PDF
FYI – A note on how the Summary PDF was created:
“Between January and March 2008, 155 learning professionals shared their Top 10 favourite tools for learning (either for their own personal learning or for creating learning for others). We used these lists to compile the Top 100 Tools for Learning Spring 2008″
