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

For your next paper, make it an EazyPaper

So, you’ve spent three days writing a Psych paper, and you’re finally done! But, wait, not quite: You still have those two-dozen (or more!) required references to do that will eventually be sprinkled throughout your pages, requiring just the right style, formatting and citation conventions that your departmental style guide lays out. This could take hours…

Luckily, there’s a great solution being offered to students and instructors alike for their academic citation and bibliographic needs. Born through the fine wits of a former Carleton Student, “EazyPaper” is a Microsoft Word add-on that will keep the cap on your pain-killers and save you valuable time in order to meet that next deadline. Do it on the fly, as you go, and this time actually finish the paper when you reach the end of the last sentence.

The Carleton University Alumni Association, in partnership with EazyPaper, Inc., is offering a free, one-year EazyPaper subscription that will save students valuable cash and give them all the tools they need to generate in-text and bibliographic references for essays and dissertations. (Use your connect or carleton.ca email address upon registration, or else you won’t be credited the 100% discount.) The Word add-on supports AMA, APA, MLA, and Turabian / Chicago Manual of Style. In addition to the paper format or citation style, you can choose whether you’re writing a term paper, masters thesis, PhD dissertation, or journal article. But this is only the beginning.

The powerful attribute that follows, we thought, is the predictive default settings (based on the citation style you choose initially), and the customization options that follow. This means that, based on the type of paper you’re writing, EazyPaper automatically offers a number of preset options conventional to that type of paper. Still, your document layout is all customizable; choose whether, on top of References, you need such additions as a Table of Contents, an Appendix, Footnotes, and others. Finally, enter the running title of your paper, your name as the author, and the institution in which the paper is being submitted. Click OK, and that’s it! A new template for your paper has been created, and it’s time start writing. Click the Insert Citation button every time a parenthetical citation is needed, and EasyPaper will guide you through all of the citation information needed.

To some, EazyPaper will be somewhat reminiscent of EndNote, which is a cross-platform program geared towards bibliographic citations and many of the same features put forth by EazyPaper. It supports a multitude of academic styles, boasts PDF import functionality, and can also import saved references from RefWorks, an online reference tool for keeping track of references from various online databases (primarily accessible through the Carleton University Library’s journal catalogue).

EazyPaper Inc. also offers other useful products such as “EazyResume”, available through their website, which is available to Carleton students 25% off. Again, be sure to use your connect or carleton.ca email address upon registration in order to be credited the discount.

For Carleton students interested in a free EazyPaper license, click here.

For Carleton instructors interested in a free EazyPaper license, click here.

Check out our previous post on a similar app Zotero.

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.

Searching for Plagiarism – Part 2 of 2

Cartoon Via bLaugh

Professors and administration have both told students not to plagiarize, but papers still get handed in with parts that seem suspicious of plagiarism. This can take on various forms: submitting original work from a previous class without the professor’s approval, submitting other people’s work in part or full, using other people’s research data or findings or simply not citing resources properly. If you suspect an assignment may be plagiarized, there are a few different tools you can use to investigate. When conducting your search, you should let two things lead you:

1. The suspected sections of text in the paper.

2. The general topic of the paper.

This allows you to find directly copied sections of text as well as areas which have been paraphrased. The most valuable tool for detecting plagiarism is a search engine, such as Google.

Example of how to search for plagiarism

If you come across a suspicious sentence (shown below) in an essay on African American Women and Music and would like to check it for plagiarism, follow the steps below.

“Like blues, jazz began to shape during slavery, and in the years after the civil war. The end of slavery meant the end of an isolation period that prevented blacks from sharing ideas and art forms such as music.”

1. Enter some of the suspected text in quotations as well as the topic of the essay. For the example above, entering the following would be affective:

“African American Women and Music “Like blues, jazz began to shape during slavery, and in the years after the civil war”

2. The search engine will give you a list of matches corresponding to the sentence you have entered. You can then look though the links to see if there are any that are similar. You will have to use your best judgment to determine if a sentence or idea has been lifted without citation or if it is merely a similar sentence.

Places to Search

The Web

The easiest and most effective way to search for plagiarism is to enter your query into a search engine. Since that is where most articles would have been found in the first place, they are most likely going to come up in your search as well. Although there are many search engines and resources you can use, each one will yield fairly similar results. Below is a list of some of the most popular:

Books or Journal Articles:

Other Plagiarism Detection Tools

Managing Plagiarism – Part 1 of 2

Cartoon From Teachable Moment by Inside Higher ED

No matter how much students get told that plagiarism is not tolerated, they still hand in projects with content that is not theirs. This prompts educators to wonder

  1. Why do students do this if they know the consequences? and
  2. How can plagiarism be prevented?

Why do students plagiarize?

How to prevent plagiarism?

When Wikipedia Won’t Cut It: 25 Online Sources for Reliable, Researched Facts

I stumbled across a blog that caught my attention from collegedegree.com which nicely listed 25 online sources for reliable, researched facts for when Wikipedia can’t be used. I know how professors and students get frustrated with the use of Wikipedia for academic writing so this entry seemed like useful list of sources to deal with this frustration. (Taken directly from collegederee ).

Published on Thursday February 21st , 2008

By Jessica Hupp

Although Wikipedia is a great place to find information, it’s subject to incomplete citations, biased views, and inaccuracies. And when you absolutely have to have undisputable facts, that’s just not good enough. Fortunately, there are plenty of alternatives out there that can deliver with high quality accuracy, and we’ve listed 25 of the best here.

1. Citizendium: This wiki focuses on credibility, using both the general public and credentialed experts. It works just like Wikipedia, but better.

2. AmericanFactFinder: This database from the US Census Bureau is a great source for information on housing, economics, geography and population.

3. The Linguist List: The Linguist List is home to a peer-reviewed database of language and language-family information.

Read more

Roxanne Ross: Using ‘Writing to Learn’ Techniques to Engage Students in Disciplinary Thinking

One of the best sessions I attended on the December Teaching day event was one by Roxanne Ross on how different writing techniques can be employed in the classroom to engage students.

The interesting thing was that many of the writing exercises could apply even to subject areas such as non-arts fields of engineering or mathematics. On the handout, she provided a quotation from a student’s articulation of his or her ‘writing to learn’ experience in a science course quoted from a recent study by Carter, Ferzliand & Weibe (2007):

When you really put it down on paper you have to put it all together, and somehow it has a way of making you understand everything a lot better … It forced me to put my thoughts together instead of having them all jumbled up because I know that when I was in the lab, even though I was trying to pay attention and I was trying to learn it it was all jumbled up for me. I don’t think I was the only one in this situation.

Roxanne introduced several different techniques and explained their efficacy. Adapted from her handout, I will focus on two I feel are the most useful for the higher education environment: Freewriting and Dialectic writing.

1. Focused Freewriting: A less formal timed writing activity in which students are asked to write continuously (without censorship, stream of consciousness) on a particular topic recording whatever comes to mind. This is helpful during the brainstorming or idea-generating stage of the writing process, as well as to help put together new learned concepts and/or reflect on discussions.

This activity has different benefits according to when it is done in the class. At the beginning or end of lecture it is often called “entry” or “exit” slips, and has the benefit of helping students articulate what they have or have not understood in the lecture, or clarify their thoughts on a given topic. These can be kept by the students for their own learning, or you can collect them as a way to see if they are understanding the material in the lecture. It’s a kind of informal quiz. Here are some sample questions from the University of Richmond’s helpful site on the subject:

Sample questions:

1. What is the cause/effect relationship between A and B?
2. What confuses you about the material you read for (entry) / we covered (exit) today?
3. What are three most important things you learned this class period?

In the middle of a heated discussion taking a five minute break for focused writing may help to refocus the conversation and enable students to gain some perspective on the subject.

A variant or second stage to freewriting is called looping, perfectly defined on tutor.edu:

The term looping is used by Toby Fulwiler to describe a second level of freewriting, a way to help refine, limit, and narrow the focus of the writing assignment. After a student has done freewriting, encourage him to identify an idea that stands out from the writing he has generated. Once this main focus has been identified, the student should write it on paper or on the computer and freewrite again [off of that concrete idea] for a set amount of time. After another round of producing more ideas and thoughts, the student then identifies those ideas that are most central, most important to the initial topic. This looping can continue as long as is helpful for the student until a sense of purpose and focus have been revealed.

2. Dialectic writing: Students divide their notes into two columns or sections – one for main points (regular notetaking), the second one for questions and reactions to the notes they are taking. Just as when people erroneously make notes in the margins of library books, this technique encourages critical thinking about the ideas of the lecture and also provides a space in which questions can be asked when they come up. At the end of class, the instructor could also prompt students to share any observations or ask any of the questions that came up for them.

For me, one of the most exciting aspects of using these exercises in the classroom is that it gives students tools they can use for their own writing processes. I wish I had been taught some of these techniques early in my university experience. Also, giving students a chance to write in the atmosphere of relaxed, non-censorship and an emphasis on process rather than product helps them to develop enjoyment for the writing process and take empowerment for learning the ideas of the course. If they take on some of these techniques as tools, they may also help to cut down on both stress and procrastination in writing their assignments.

(Image source: JKim1 on Flickr)

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