Category Archives: Application

Teachers Make Technology Work For Them

I love Google Earth – to me it has this magic carpet feel to it. I can visit anywhere on earth in moments and often when I get there I will find that someone has taken photos of interesting sites there or I can add overlays that tell me everything there is to know about the area. I’m a Google fan anyway.

Right now a friend of mine and I are making some slides for a praise service using Google docs. I type or copy and paste lyrics onto slides and then “share” with him (which sends him an email with a click-able link to the presentation) which he then adds a background to and maybe tweaks the text a bit. When he is through he shares it back with me. We can work on it at different times, in different places and even add collaborators if we want. The slides can be downloaded and used in Powerpoint, Keynote, OpenOffice Impress, and even SlideShare.

I have not been so in love with Twitter. Twitter is an application that lets you constantly add a few words about what you are doing at the moment. I see how it might have it’s uses (sort of) for people who have a shared interest but mine would bore people to tears. Maybe I could make it a paid subscription for insomniacs? I signed up for a free account trying to see if I could “get it”. I have even subscribed via RSS to several of my favorite education/technology/blogger “tweets”

This morning I read how several teachers are using it and was once again reminded of how creative and resourceful teachers are.

Langwitches have started a Teachable Moments Shoutout Twitter account that you can that you can subscribe to and if you have a Twitter account you can join in. You can help other teachers with teachable moment ideas or get help yourself. If you are not familiar with Twitter, this does not mean a huge lesson plan with rubrics and worksheets – these are short messages. You can even subscribe via cell phone and get “tweets” as text messages. If you are curious you can find out more on the Twitter FAQ page or the Twitter Lingo/Help page.

This Shoutout idea was inspired by Tom Barrett and his use of Google Earth and Twitter. Tom got his Twitter network people to participate in his students’ Google Earth lesson. The students had to find these people based on a few clues on Twitter.

I asked my network to challenge the children to find them in Google Earth, to search and discover their location from a few scraps of info via Twitter. Well the challenges rolled in and in a couple of hours we had 25 different people to track down.

Some of the Tweets were longitude and latitude. Others were addresses or well-known geographical sites. As the students found the locations the sent back messages via twitter to let them know they had been found. The students got experience searching and using the different layers and even the three-D buildings feature. Because they had a real purpose the focus of the class became finding real people in real places and the technology became the tool instead of the lesson.

When I was in elementary school I had a Japanese PenPal. That was our Web 2.0.

Another Journaling Application

I will be the first to admit that while I am great at trying new things, I am not great at following through. I have the best intentions but this and that happen and next thing I know, I have forgotten that shiny new goal.

This school year I was determined to be more organized and I think I have improved some but there is definitely room for more. I have tried several applications this year as I tried to get in the spirit of GTD and most of them just seem more complicated than I need for what I do.

I am trying a new one starting today. It is free and simple and I’m loving that. It is called Tagebuch. It is from MyOwnApp and is a very plain diary program. You add a new entry and it adds the date and time so you can do multiple entries in a day. You can tag your entries and search them. There are a few formatting choices and you can export your notes as a PDF but for the most part it just gets out of the way and lets you write notes. So far the only feature I would like to see is a way to see a list of tags I create but I can live without it.

I will be giving it a workout this next month because I plan to use it at the hospital. I have learned to take notes on everything that happens and while I like online apps, I know I won’t always have access. This will give me a way to take notes while it keeps track of the date and time for me.

As you can see the interface is very clean and basic – write a new entry, delete an entry, tag an entry, and search for an entry.

I think I already love this.

Opening Office 2007 Files and Open Office files

We have no computers running Vista at school, but a few students have it on home computers. I learned I can open documents created on Vista machines with Pages on my Mac.

Just yesterday I downloaded the latest OpenOffice and burned it to a cd for a student to install on their home computer. The student created a presentation and brought it to school on her jump drive. It wouldn’t open with PowerPoint on a PC or Mac and I finally had to just open it in OpenOffice on my Mac and let the teacher view and grade it on my machine. I’m not sure it was because it was a new version of OpenOffice or if it was because the student had not saved it as a PowerPoint when she created it. I will download and install it on my PC to check it out.

It is always a challenge to deal with the issues that crop up as the public sometimes moves on to new technology before the school can completely catch up. Newer printers can only be hooked to the computer via usb and older computers like Windows 98 machines may have usb ports but they don’t seem to be able to use them. Unfortunately, printers tend to give out before computers do so this is getting to be more of an issue.

I also read a “just for fun” tip on A New Mac Tip Everyday. This is how to change your login screen background. If you are like me you don’t see that screen too often but you might want to put a picture as a background even there. Here is how:

1. Make a copy of the background you want and rename it to “DefaultDesktop.jpg”.

2. Go to /System/Library/CoreServices and find the file DefaultDesktop.jpg.

3. Store the file somewhere on your hard drive in case you want to go back to the original default background.

4. Place your new background called “DefaultDesktop.jpg” in the folder /System/Library/CoreServices.

This won’t actually affect your productivity but then if you use a Mac to work you are already productive!

Microsoft Word Column Limits

A class was trying to do a project today and the idea was to use Word in three column format to create a magazine style article. The problem was that they needed to be able to insert a picture and the teacher wanted that picture to be able to span several columns and have the text wrap around it but still stay in column format. Microsoft Office 2000 and 2003 were being used. I tried to figure out a way to make it work and created a text box to use as the container for the picture. On my MacBook it worked like a charm. Unfortunately the text wrapping part didn’t work so well when I tried it on the PC.
Microsoft Word worked better on my MacBook than on the PC? That is just weird.

TaDa! Google Presentation – Finally!

Google has finally rolled out their presentation piece. Here is a screenshot of the main page when you click new presentation. It’s big so click on the thumbnail and you can see it full size in Flickr.

I tried to embed but so far I see no way to do that so here is the link: BrandNew

Interesting – I tried this and while you are at the document you must click Preview before the link will work to send you back to the presentation.

The presentation describes the application for the most part. It is easy to use and if you are looking for a tool to share a basic presentation online without a lot of bells and whistles but also without a huge expense then Google presentation will work fine. I have linked to a text document created in Google to see how the two could be used together.

The links worked for me in practice and I am going to assume you can do the same with the spreadsheet piece so it is possible to integrate the applications. That could be a great tool and an answer for students who need the basics.
I hope that Google will add some more features later and will be watching to see.

Update and Link To A Web Application

It has been a long day. I attended a UIL conference today and am planning on coaching Computer Applications this year. I found that there is still much I need to learn! If anyone out there has any helpful hints and suggestions I am all ears and eyes!
My blog has a non-theme right now because I am still trying to resolve my theme issues so please be patient – I hope to have things cleaned up soon.

In the meantime check out ANIMOTO ! You need to sign up for an account and as an unusual way to request that you create an account the question is asked why? The answer – because Steven Seagal did. OK, that was different and so is the rest of the site. I created a short video in moments using some images I had on Flickr and Animoto’s music. I would have preferred some more music style choices but hey it was quick and free. It’s look reminds me of some of the applications for the Mac and I am hoping that Google pays attention as they get ready to roll out their presentation piece. This is a very pretty and easy to use application!

My Favorite Ways To Use Del.icio.us

This is a cross post from my school blog but it really is one of my favorite tools so I wanted to share it here too.
While teaching a blogging class the other day I was explaining about feed readers and I showed some teachers Del.icio.us and how you could actually have feeds set up to work for you. An example would be to type in a URL like this: http://del.icio.us/tag/scotland then look at the bottom of the page for the orange RSS button. If you right click on it and go to properties you can copy the link into your news aggregator (feed reader) and as people add links to their del.icio.us accounts tagged scotland, you will see those links as a feed. You can also do the same thing but add another criteria to the search http://del.icio.us/tag/scotland+history you can narrow down the search to items tagged scotland and history.If I wanted to keep up with what sites are popular on a particular subject I could type http://del.icio.us/rss/popular/scotland and this would generate the most popular links tagged on del.icio.us for scotland.

You can do the same thing with people instead of tags. If you have someone who is in your â€œcircle of learningâ€ you can subscribe to their tags (unless they have designated them private).

These and other tips can be found at Likehack.org if you would like to read more.

Just an Update

It rained this morning. This has not been an unusual occurrence in Texas this summer but this morning we got a little over three inches in a very short amount of time. There was street flooding all over including the drive into the school where I was supposed to meet for a class. It didn’t make any difference that the little entry road was flooded because the power was out too.

A house just a few streets over caught fire. There had been one of those cracks of thunder that shook so hard you could feel it in your chest and it came almost simultaneously with a lightning strike and I would be willing to bet that is what caught the house on fire. We were running around looking out of the windows trying to see where it struck because we knew it was close. It blew up my answering machine.

There is more rain predicted for tomorrow….

My friend B.J. is one the road again. He has been to two of my favorite places – Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs.

Another one is Rocky Mountain National Park where the chipmunks are so used to people that they will come up and beg for food.

He was at Mt. Rushmore and hasn’t uploaded those pics yet but I will be watching for them.

You can see more of his travel pictures and some wonderful local ones on Flickr.

I spent a lot of time today installing xampp and WordPress on my computer so I could work on an online tutorial for creating themes for WordPress. The tutorial can be found here at WPDesigner and I finally have at least the basics of a title, post titles, content, and header information. I also got a little help from Geeks Are Sexy and both sites were tremendously helpful. It never ceases to amaze me how generous people are on the internet with their knowledge. Both these websites had to have taken hours and hours of work and yet the information is shared freely and extra help is given in the comments sections.

I hope to create a new theme for this blog and maybe some more. I like doing the “pretty stuff” as far as images and colors – what I’m learning right now is the nuts and bolts of how to get everything to go where it belongs!

Goodnight B.J. and Colby somewhere in South Dakota – see you soon !

Computer Centers for the Classroom

In a post on a student leadership panel by David Warlick, one of the students made the statement that she was tired of going to the lab to do technology. The statement was made that we do not make employees share computers at work (which isn’t entirely true, at least in education) the students felt that all students should have a laptop. If that isn’t an option but creating some project centers in classrooms utilizing xtenda boxes is – I’m thinking about what we could include in the way of software that would give maximum use for students. The following is my list but I would be glad to here any suggestions. Most of what I have listed is opensource and I’m concentrating of budget-friendly, but if you have a software piece that your students just couldn’t do without, let me know.

Firefox – of course for the browser
VLC – media player
Audacity – audio editing
OpenOffice – office suite
Abiword – basic word processing
GimpShop – graphics editing
Inkscape –
Google Earth
Comic Life
TuxPaint (graphics for lower elementary)

I’d like to know about a video-editing program that is either opensource or at least low priced and fairly easy to use. I have been spoiled by my Mac and want somethings that are “Mac easy” for the students to create with. I have included software ideas for elementary through high school. I know there is more out there and I will add to this list if I think of some more.

Software additions!

MovieMaker

Flickr Goodies

I’ve seen some interesting new things on Flickr this week and decided to consolidate the links in one post. I love Flickr and they just seem to get better and better.
Alan Levine has a post on a new “toy” SlideFlickr which allows you to quickly and easily create a slideshow from a flickr set. Lawrence Lessig has an interesting article on Web 2.0 Ethics and “sharing sites” comparing Flickr which makes it easy to download images and Youtube which does NOT. He discusses some other sharing sites and made me think about the subject of sharing and which sites actually embody the concept and which ones just ride along on the bandwagon. Definite food for thought.

If you haven’t visited Flickr:Creative Commons yet you are missing out. The first page defines the type of creative commons licenses you will run up against and then you can search photos and use them for non-commercial things (like your student’s project!!) without the copyright violation issues.

The last one for today is just gorgeous. I could just sit here and click and feed myself eyecandy. It’s called ColrPickr and it’s by KrazyDad. You choose a color on the beautiful color wheel and it displays a group of Flickr photos that fit the color. Now if this was just mashed up with Flickr Creative commons (hint! hint!)

You can also visit BigHugeLabs and find all kinds of toys that let you create new things with Flickr photos.

Have fun – I would love to hear from you and see what you are creating with Flickr!

Mindboggling Photosynth!

I saw a video yesterday (thanks for the heads up, Tony) that showed a gorgeous application called Photosynth. You can check it out at Microsoft Labs and as the news spreads there will be more videos and articles about it on the internet. If I understand it correctly – image resolution will no longer be a problem.

It creates a three-D image of other images – thousands of images taken by thousands of people. You can zoom in and out without losing quality.

Think back to a time when you have found a picture on the web that you wanted to use in a document. You saved it and then inserted it into your document but it was just a little thumbnail. You stretched it out to the size you wanted and it became ugly, blurry, and pixelated (or blocky) Not so with this – if you watch the demonstration you will see an entire book and the presenter will zoom in and the fonts will stay clear and smooth no matter what size you view.

The three-D part is where is gets confusing and exciting. You have this huge collection of photos (his demonstration used photos of Notre Dame) and all of the view might be slightly different and yet you can use this to get a 3D view of the site. You can also see from different perspectives and it looks like you can see the exact spot the photo was taken from.

Another aspect of this that is very cool is metadata. Metadata is everywhere and it simply means data about data. A non-computer example would be card catalogs in libraries. The card catalog is not the book but it tells you where the book can be found, who wrote it, and other information about the book. Metadata can describe a file or a web page. If you are looking at a web page and view the source code you will see some entries near the top that begin with meta – these usually contain information like keywords that help search engines find the website. Imagine that all these photos have been tagged with keywords and also contain metadata that gives you the time and date the photo was taken, gps coordinates for the exact spot where the photo was taken and much more. Imagine that all these photos coming together as a 3D view of the groups of them and the metadata for one becomes part of all.

Iâ€™m still trying to digest it. It gives a whole new meaning to research on the web. I think this will be huge and there will be more and better information as this becomes more known. My only saving grace is that in trying to find out more about it I ran across people much more knowledgeable than I am who were also asking tons of questions.

The implications for ecology, biology, and even astronomy are interesting. Of course we will needs some travelers willing to take their digital cameras to space for that. Imagine using this with microscopic photography, pictures taken from inside hurricanes and tornadoes, legal implications if this type of software is able to create images that can be admitted as evidence in a case.

What about the cultural implications of this and all the metadata that exists out there that leaves our “footprints”. If this application can zoom in on a building detail it can pick out the details of a face or hand in a crowd. We have historically worried about protecting our â€œprivacyâ€ on the internet but I wonder if as we become more aware of how transparent we are and how discoverable, will it cause us to live differently? You know the old saying about people who live in glass houses shouldnâ€™t throw stones? They shouldnâ€™t walk around naked with the lights on either. However – if you know the lights are going to be on – wonâ€™t you behave differently? Maybe this transparency isnâ€™t all bad – if it means that we will strive to be perceived as better then we will act better and in the act, maybe become better. As our culture affects how we develop technology we more and more can see how technology affects culture. This is another one of those times when we canâ€™t see ahead to what the long term repercussions will be but this is one that makes me hopeful.

Visually speaking, some thoughts were expressed in this quote â€œI used to live in Arizona, several years ago, and you’ll notice that the further away you get from a mountain, the more its figure stays the same regardless how far left you go, or how far right. I wonder how the software handles perspective, and distance on this magnitude.
Buildings, which have unnatural forms will look rather different depending on where you are. But mountains tend to retain their figure when you are further away, walking left or right.â€ http://channel9.msdn.com

Another person on this particular forum brought up the cameras that they use for intricate surgery and how they could use this technology to build 3D surgery so they could study it further.

ï»¿Blaise Aguera y Arcas is the presenter and worked on the project before Microsoft purchased the companies that developed it. I hope you will watch the video because my explanation and description do not come close to the reality of this application. It truly has to be seen to be believed.

You can see a video here

Summer Is Here

It has rained nearly every day and everything is the yard is green and thriving! I have started on the summer catch-up around the house and have a ton still to do! I made a dent in it today and I will keep at it – like everything else I am behind because last summer was all about taking care of Dale. We got the word today – he has the green light for transplant as far as his health is concerned – now we just need a donor.

My friend B.J. is on a road trip and has promised to blog it. He has already uploaded some photos to Flickr as you can see here.

He is in Tucumcari and has already published an entry on http://homer4k.blogspot.com/ I’m looking forward to taking the trip without ever leaving home! He did say that gas ranged from 2.97 up through 3.31 a gallon. Sounds like you need a bank loan to take a vacation anymore!

I shared a link with him for Comic Life which is an application that comes on the MacBook but now is out in beta version for the PC. That means there will be some bugs but when they get them ironed out it will be great. This is a fun application that easily lets you make comic strip like documents using pictures and then adding speech bubbles. It comes with preloaded templates – you just choose one and drag the photos to where you want them. Choose the shape of speech bubble and type in your text and you’re done. Today on Bionic Teaching I read about a class that is using this application to create ads for Greek gods and goddesses selling products. There are also some great creations there on copyright licensed under creative commons.

In 2006 Jeff Han gave a demonstration at TED Talks on an interface-free touch screen -and last night Microsoft announced the Microsoft Surface Computer which you can see here. I would love to play with one of these. Instead of spending hours learning an interface just start moving things around any way you like with your fingers. They also show loading things like pictures and maps onto someones phone from the surface. It won’t be on the market til winter 2007 but it will be making it’s appearance at different conferences and events. You can check back on their site to see where it will be shown next. It will be exciting to see how this evolves and if it makes it into the mainstream market. Imagine being able to do desktop publishing by simply dragging your documents and images around on a template and seeing the text flow to fit. Don’t like it? Just drag it somewhere else. Add voice recognition and we really will be using something that like what we only used to see in science fiction movies. The uses just boggle the mind. I’m sure it won’t be making an appearance in Paris Texas anytime soon but maybe next year at TCEA! You can read more about it here.

Is Everything Miscellaneous Or A Soap Opera?

A couple of random things rolling around in my brain this morning. I have been trying to nail down the meaning of Web 2.0 to give a definition to others and it is like nailing jello to the wall. As I research I keep in mind other related pieces and I read an article on tagging and folksonomy on David Weinberger’s site Joho.

I should have known that tagging things would appeal to me. I have always liked playing with and arranging things. When I was little I had one of those metal doll houses with the little furniture and plastic people. This was of course back when we could have swallowed the furniture and died or cut ourselves on the metal corners of the dollhouse. I liked taking furniture and putting it in the “wrong” room. Before people were putting making media rooms complete with little refrigerators and microwaves I knew it would be conventient to have the ability to drink and eat in the same room in which you watch tv.

The first time I saw a chessboard I of course had to spend hours arranging the pretty pieces in what I thought were interesting patterns that had nothing to do with the actual game.

Tagging appeals to me because I can “arrange” information, websites, pictures, media – anything you can save; into patterns that mean something to me. Some of my tags may be at least similar to how you would categorize something and some would have absolutely no meaning to you because they reflect a reference that is personal.

You would not understand why I might scan a photo and upload it to flickr and have it tagged pipeline unless you know that I took that picture when we were traveling along with a pipeline crew. At the same time I would probably add tags that would tell you it was a related to Arizona, 1980, and Grand Canyon. With tagging I have a dollhouse with unlimited furniture so I can have my refrigerator in the kitchen, living room and bedroom if I wish and all at the same time!

Now if I could just tag that pair of sunglasses I lost….

I’d like to hear some opinions about Twitter. I have read come comments about it and even though I have a tendency to sign up for every new thing that appears on the internet I have resisted Twitter so far. I used to watch soap operas (yes I know – confession time) but I don’t anymore.

I do however, get attached to characters in tv shows and like to read books by authors who create multiple novels using the same main characters. I get upset when a favorite character gets killed off a show or has a catastrophe befall them in a book. Is Twitter the new version of the soap opera? I don’t think my life in interesting enough that anyone would care what “I’m doing right now” but I can see how I would get the nosy curious side of me fed by peeking in at what others are doing. If you use Twitter and see some use for it for collaboration or education I would like to hear about it. Have I been missing out?

Web 2.0 In Nine Weeks

The Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County has set up a blog called Learning 2.0. This blog contains a list of links containing 23 learning 2.0 things. The list is spread over a nine week period and contains links and tutorials to help you learn about blogging, Flickr, rss feeds and feedreaders, online image generators, library blogs, tagging and del.icio.us, technorati, wikis, online productivity sites, YouTube, and some sites for finding podcasts. The blog targets librarians but anyone who would like to get a “big picture” kind of tour, would find this a great starting place. If you follow the list of 23 things the way it is presented you will start your own blog and as you go through the rest of the list you will post on what you are learning.

If you go to their site make sure you check out the 7 and 1/2 Habits of Lifelong Learners presentation – it’s a wonderful presentation and the mission statement of the website is “Expanding Minds, Empowering Individuals, and Enriching the Community. You don’t have to take nine weeks to go through the list, but it is a great way to break down the pieces and give yourself a little time to reflect and play with what you learn. I love the way it is broken down and plan to learn from their example when I take some of these tools to my own campus. Thanks to them for doing such a great job! Thanks to Off The Shelf blog for point me to this great resource.
If you are confused about all this talk about web 2.0 or just want to let out your “inner geek” click over to this website and join in the fun.

Google Presentations are Unofficially Officially On Their Way

According to the Official Google Blog they are going to be releasing their presentation piece soon. I haven’t seen a date yet but knowing Google if the word is out then it really shouldn’t be long. According to a blog on ZDnet by Garret Rogers there will now be more compatibility between Google Docs and Microsoft products due to a new company Google has acquired called Tonic.

While Google claims to not be in competition with Microsoft these pieces together make a nice substitute for students who don’t have access to pricey office suites and make it much easier to collaborate.

Google has also acquired JotSpot – a wiki application, though as far as I can find, it is not out to use yet.Â It would be great if it would integrate easily with Google Notebook.Â Sounds like some interesting new tools this summer!

Pageflakes for Reading Online

I am reading about web 2.0 in education and want to thank the comment contributors that gave me suggestions for places to look. As usual, when I start searching I end up going down rabbit trails and this one led me to check out page flakes. I have tried several feed readers and ended up using my Google personalized home page as a place to read my favorites. After I discovered that you could add tagged pages I was hooked. I like the visual layout of having the feeds I read all the time showing all over the page so I can just quickly skim down through the headlines and read the ones that catch my attention. Last night I may have found a new way to get all my reading goodness,

I checked out Pageflakes and after playing with it for a few minutes, signed up for an account and started creating pages and adding feeds. The layout looks very similar to the way the feeds display on my Google page but right away I found I could create more pages to help me organize my feeds by category. I was able to find feeds through their website and also copy and paste the urls for the sites I wanted and have it discover the feed and add it to my page. I was able drag and drop feeds into different tags and arrange them on the page.

Another reason to love Pageflakes is that once you have the feed on your page you can click on edit and choose export and Pageflakes creates the html file that will allow you to insert the “flake” onto another webpage. There is an example of my work blog on my footer. I tried to embed it in this post but it made the page go all wonky so I will need to work on that.

Google Custom Search Engine

I played around with a tool that’s fairly new to me today. I now have a Google custom search box at the bottom of this page that will let you search this blog and my work blog. I wanted to see how easy it was to create a custom search engine using Google’s Co-op and found it completely painless. You follow the link and the click on the custom search engine link and then just follow the steps. They consist basically of giving your search engine a name, a brief description, keywords, and URLs you want it to search. Google creates the code and you paste it into your blog where you wish it to show up. The only thing I changed was adding tags to get it to display in the center of the footer.

I will make one that searches all my favorite blogs. I’m not sure if there is a limit to how many URLs you can add but I wouldn’t be surprised as there was a limit to the suggested keywords you could associate with your search engine (7). The search box is wider than I would like for my sidebar which is why it lives at the bottom of the page. You can even “brand” your searchbox with an image you have uploaded to the web if you like. You can open it up for people to collaborate – either publicly or just those you invite. There is also an option to have it added to your personalized Google homepage.

Combining this custom search engine tool with Google Notebook, Google Calendar, GMail, Google Docs and Spreadsheets and tabs on your personalized homepage gives you a free and very practical research and productivity center.
It would be useful to add a custom search box to a classroom blog that limited your students research to sites you designate. This requires you being able to edit the theme of your blog. Some other ways to use this tool would be to create a search engine to browse items you are looking to buy and limit the search to places like ebay, amazon, and buy.com. A search engine that only returned results from designated newspapers would be useful for debate students.

I hope you found some useful information here and that you will give the Google customized search engine a test-drive. Search some blogs from my education category

One Foot in the Future, One Class Stuck in the Past

I’m going to do a little complaining and the names have been omitted to protect whoever!

scenario 1: A class that entails completing paper lessons and recording audio on cassette recorders and sending them through the mail to be graded. The students must purchase said cassette recorders and blank tapes, record themselves, put the cassettes in envelopes and then postage has to be paid to send them to the appropriate person who must then put the tape in another cassette player and listen to grade the student. Several processes, several costs, and quite a bit of time is entailed here.
scenario 2: Student records audio on a Mac using GarageBand, sends it to iTunes, exports it as an mp3 file and I upload it to a webpage where the appropriate person needs to do nothing but click to listen. Or the student can record on a PC using Audacity and saves as an mp3. No extra cost, no extra procedure comments could be added immediately with each assignment.

The world may be flat but some colleges prefer scenario 1.

We are trying to bring our teachers and students into an age of literacy at the high school level but how frustrated will they be when they get to college and find out that those skills won’t be put to use? Probably as frustrated as I am right now.