Google Street View – Ottawa
Google Street View is a popular feature in Google Maps and Google Earth that allows users to view panoramic pictures taken from street level of many cities in the United State, Europe and parts of Asia.
A great example of Street View is its use in Washington DC. Using it you can walk/drive the streets of the US capital and explore the exterior architecture of monuments, landscaping as get a scope of the city.
Google just recently announced plans to expand the feature to Canadian cities, including Ottawa.
Privacy groups have concerns with Google Street View as images of people are often included, occasionally in unflattering or compromising situations. Google is addressing some of these concerns by removing pictures (by request) and by blurring faces and license plates of cars.
So how could Google Street View can be used in teaching and learning? Some ideas:
1) It could be used as part of an assignment; i.e. travel to a city and create a virtual field trip for classmates.
2) It can be used to build community; particularly when teaching a class with new Canadians and/or ESL learners i.e. encourage students to send you a link to the street view of their community, favorite restaurant, or have them show their community/home town in class.
3) A source for learning about city planning, landscaping, spatial relationships, and architecture.
4) Foster a discussion on privacy. Should Google be allow to do what it is doing? What are the concerns?
5) Use it to foster discussions around social issues and equity i.e. Locations for low income housing in relation to city services.
6) Tour historical areas, i.e. walk the hot spots of the French revolution in Paris.
Anatomy Online
For anyone looking for some new ways to help learn and remember human anatomy the world wide web is here to lend a hand yet again. Two new websites are now offering fascinating and highly detailed outlines of human anatomy in a couple of different manners.
The first site Anatomy Arcade uses a variety of different games to guide users through the human body. The Whack-A-Bone game has players trying to identify bones in the skeletal system before a timer runs out whereas the Poke-A-Muscle game takes a similar approach to the body’s muscular system. Also featured on the site are complex jigsaw puzzles for some specific body parts such as the eye, heart, and digestive system.
The second site Visible Body deconstructs the human body into various layers allowing you to view them individually or all at once. After a simple registration process users are presented with an interactive highly detailed, anatomically accurate, 3D model of all the human body’s systems. The one drawback to having such high levels of detail and interactivity is that the application is very resource intensive and can easily bog down on slower internet connections. However, if you’re lucky enough to have a high speed connection you’ll be hard pressed to find a better application out there.
So whether you’re a fourth year biology student or just someone curious about anatomy both applications are incredibly useful, make no bones about it.
Sketching The 3D World
If you haven’t used Google SketchUp yet, you should give version 7 a try. They have made the latest version even easier to use. Create 3D models of cars, spaceships, buildings, or even your own inventions using the intuitive program. As a first time user, it wasn’t long before I was ignoring the start-up tips and exploring the tools for myself. Compared to other graphical editing programs such as AutoCAD and ProE, which have an abundance of features that often require some form of training to use, Sketchup’s design is simple, powerful and doesn’t use an abundance of resources to run on your computer. For your first time, try making a 3D model of your house simply by importing a 2D picture of it and tracing the outline. You can even take images from Google Earth using the same method, make a 3D model of it, then export them back into Google Earth.
Aside from Sketchup being a useful tool for the average computer user, it has also been used for educational purposes. Using a downloadable ad-on to Sketchup called Sketchyphysics2, Mexico State University students created a 3D model of a Chile Cleaner. The model gave the engineers an outline of what needed to be built and developed a virtual walk through of the design so many of the problems could be worked out before construction. This video shows the capabilities of the software.
Every year Google runs an International Model your Campus competition. Using Sketchup, students from various disciplines get together and model their university’s campus. These models are then uploaded into Google Earth for anyone to see. Although Carleton University’s campus is large, it would not be impossible to design in 3D using the latest version of Sketchup. It would be a fun and engaging opportunity for design, architecture, computer science and other students who are interested in designing. Similar projects were submitted to Google’s case studies page.
Although Sketchup is already at it’s 7th version, we still have yet to see the extent of it’s capabilities as more and more people discover it. With user’s as young as 5 years old who are creating relatively complex models, it would be no suprise to find Sketchup on every computer in the near future. As Google states, “we think that SketchUp has a place in every classroom, dorm room and student laptop in the world. After all – we live in 3D. Why shouldn’t we start thinking and teaching that way?”
We will write more posts in the future on some ideas and examples of how you might incorporate Sketchup into your course. Take a look at the case studies submitted by SketchUp users whose work is representative of SketchUp in Higher Education.
Google pulls the plug on a Lively hobby
In a recent blog post, the Lively Team announced on their weblog that they would be disbanding with the shutdown of Google Lively by the end of December. Google says the goal of their July 2008 launch of Lively Beta was to allow “users to be able to interact with their friends and express themselves online in new ways,” and with the creative ways users have applied themselves in the Lively realm, they have been largely successful. Google, however, has decided to shift their focus back to the search and web application utilities that they have enjoyed so much success with. Nevertheless, they noted on their development of Lively that “Google has always been supportive of this kind of experimentation because we believe it’s the best way to create groundbreaking products that make a difference to people’s lives”.
Educational communities traditionally have substantial reservations towards new ways of doing things, and the emergence of new technologies – regardless of the potential value – will always encounter some turbulence on their way to being adopted. Virtual worlds have taken ground-breaking steps recently, but more on an experimental level than a practical one. The challenge has been delivering concrete proof, to students and teachers of the educational community, that the use of computer-aided virtual environments can be truly beneficial if widely adopted. For the moment, though, it’s only a virtual reality for optimistic instructors who ambitiously embrace new educational technologies, such as virtual worlds, even though the real world isn’t quite ready for it yet. To those select few instructors with the initiative to utilise a virtual world for their classroom anyway, we applaud their efforts, and hotly anticipate future imitation of the constructive worlds they’re creating.
Despite the news, Google’s not all to blame. If anything, this is largely due to the direction of Google’s genetics, the nature of their business model, and not due to a weakened interest in the flexible and widely expandable application of virtual worlds. Virtual worlds have not fully matured, and Google is likely unprepared to dedicate any further resources at this time. While Lively may have been Google’s pet project over the past few months, we don’t blame them for shifting back to their traditional practices of creating products that make Web 2.0 experiences seamless with everyday life. As virtual worlds aren’t going away any time soon, we wouldn’t be surprised if Google returns to such a project in the future. Meanwhile, you will likely find the student voice to come a consensus, perhaps best summarized by the words of poet Theodore Roethke, when he wrote “I learn by going where I have to go”.
Google’s Virtual World: Lively
Continuing our previous post Virtually Transforming Classrooms, which was an introduction to Virtual Worlds, I’d like to concentrate on Google’s contribution to this market. We are all familiar with Google’s searching capabilities since it’s recognized as the world’s most powerful search engine and is probably the only site on the Internet that aims to get its users in and out as quickly as possible. As a successful business, Google continuously seeks innovative improvements not only within its own business, but to expand these to any other businesses that may benefit from them. From Gmail to Google Docs, their extremely quick and simplistic designs across their wide range of useful products are known for their universally easy means of usability. It is worth investigating their contribution to Virtual Worlds as it may be a big one considering their ongoing success as a business. Google has a number of products that contribute to the idea of Virtual Worlds. These include Google Earth, Google SketchUp, and most recently, the BETA version of Lively – a virtual 3D social world similar to Second Life. Read more
Virtually Transforming Classrooms
The following is the first of three installments ETAs Geoff and I will be covering about ‘virtual worlds’ over the course of the next week or so. As the question of whether ‘virtual worlds’ such as Second Life may have a constructive application within the classroom, we thought the concept deserved another look.
In recent years we have witnessed the Web itself alter in character from being a mechanism of communication and distribution to one of contribution and collaboration. We now live and interact in a drastically different way of things than we did for the majority of the nineteen-nineties. What the Internet has grown into to facilitate this is a new quality of online experience called Web 2.0.
‘So, what, the Internet got an upgrade?’ you might ask. Well, sort of. One of our previous blog entries outlines Web 2.0: Essentially, it’s a whole new way of experiencing what you do online. Imagine your Facebook profile page without a ‘wall’ to post on, and you can imagine an Internet without Web 2.0. Instead of simply reading and digesting what is on a webpage, you can contribute to the material, share it, and collaborate with others at the same time. This could be through blogs (yay!), YouTube videos, or even such interactive and collaborative Web environments as Carleton’s WebCT (think Discussions and Whiteboard sections). In short, Web 2.0 is one of the main contributing factors that has elevated Web experience to the needed level in order to necessarily accommodate what virtual worlds have to offer. This is the beginning of the digital integration of your virtual profile and identity
Enter the world of the post-secondary Learning Management System. Sure, it’s multi-faceted and has a wide range of tools, but in the whole it remains difficult for students to openly collaborate in person, be creative from a distance and proactively learn class material, and all within the same environment, all at the same time. Virtual worlds like Second Life and Lively beta by Google, on the other hand, are three-dimensional (3D) environments accessible over the internet through a high-speed connection. At first, they feel like games, but after some time exploring you begin to realize that it’s not all stimulation: It’s intuitive, interactive, collaborative, and social. These virtual worlds have not only begun to attract attention from companies seeking better conferencing tools, considerable attention has been delivered by educators who believe that virtual worlds have a place in the educational discourse through ‘immersive learning’ – worlds that can offer course content in a virtual setting in different ways that students can immerse themselves in, rather than requiring the student to be adaptive to the material. Read more
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.
Speech-to-text no problem at NoNotes.com
There are headsets and recording programs out there today that can assist with difficult tasks for some, but the note-taking process remains relatively unchanged. My last EDC blog entry surrounded a program called Qipit that borrowed qualities of what we know as ‘optical character recognition’. But you need a camera, and even if you have one you can’t take pictures of what your prof is saying. Instead of an end result that can be modified upon import, Qipit is restricted in some ways, by only allowing you to import as PDF, a format that cannot be modified once distributed.
An ad for a service called NoNotes.com passed across my desk yesterday. A service developed by SilenceIT.ca, NoNotes.com allows you to record your lectures, meetings or personal notes through a digital interface of your own supply (or one of theirs if you choose to fork out a few bucks), and upload the audio file to your free NoNotes.com account online.
The end result is a set of written notes that are automatically generated from your audio file, that can be edited and modified at your leisure. According to the website, grammatical accuracy is heavily dependent upon the quality of the audio uploaded. It’s suggested that the audio input device be as close to the speaker as possible, and also to try and get a hold of an omnidirectional mic to maximize the quality of your results. Meanwhile, the larger the file that’s uploaded, in theory, the longer it will take to upload and process through to your account. But for students with disabilities who have difficulty taking notes, or even for multi-tasking note-takers, this concept is gold.
Unfortunately, this is a pay service. Students who are uncomfortable with an entry point of $7.97 per audio hour should look elsewhere for more viable alternatives. The way it works is not so dissimilar to Skype’s method of payment for their VOIP service, according to NoNotes.com’s Q&A section of their website: “Your account total decreases each time you submit a file and you simply purchase more time as you go”. If you’re a student who has a few two-hour lectures per week, however, we’d suggest looking elsewhere; you’ll probably find your dollars being shot at with each bullet per lecture slide. In theory, though, this is headed in the right direction for keeping up with speedster lecturers, backing up your notes, and recording these experts teaching as they so fervently do.
Assessment Rubrics
The natural conclusion to assignments given to student is, of course, assessment. For many professors, and students, the grading process may be a source of significant distress. Thankfully tools known as rubrics (or grading forms) have been developed to simplify and expedite the process.
As a short article titled Using Scoring Rubrics, written by Mary Allen, of the California State University, explains, “Rubrics are explicit schemes for classifying products or behaviors into categories that vary along a continuum.” (To read this article in full, and to find helpful related links, please click here) In short, rubrics provide lists of criteria, which student performance may be compared against.
However, the advantage of using rubrics is not the instructor’s alone, students also benefit from their use. It is generally suggested that the scoring rubric to be used in grading an assignment be distributed to the students, prior to the due date. As the students now have a set of detailed criteria, explaining how their assignments are to be graded, they can more easily understand exactly what is expected of them, and work to meet these requirements. Often though, the thought of constructing a rubric from scratch is overwhelming, and consequently, is a primary reason why rubrics are not used more often. Mary Allen, expresses in her article that, in fact, starting from scratch is not the best way of developing a rubric at all, but rather, modifying an existing rubric to meet ones need is the way to go. Enter the Internet.
While it is rather easy to find various rubrics for diverse purposes on the Internet, I have recently come across what may be best referred to as a One-Stop Rubric Shop. Rubistar, is a free site, requiring only the completion of a simple web-based registration forum, which allows users to create a rubric for almost any conceivable assignment. From in-class debates, to assessing collaborative work skills, to grading research reports and persuasive essays, Rubistar has got you covered.
