Friday, March 28, 2008

Alerts and RSS Feeds

Many of the JMU Libraries' major database and e-journal providers offer the ability to create customized email or RSS alerts. The Bentley Library has created an extensive guide on Search Alerts and RSS Feeds that include step-by-step instructions for creating your own alerts.


Tip: Your initial search results may create a large number of alerts. Google Reader will display the first ten results. At the end of the results, you will see the following links: "Go: Home - All items." All items allows you to view the complete search results.

Google Blog Search makes it simple to create alerts and RSS feeds. For example, I'm looking for ideas on how others are using Google Docs with their students. I did the following search in Google Blog Search: "Google Docs" learning published in the last day. At the bottom of the results are the following options:

Final Homework!

Can you believe we're giving you more homework?

You may remember that part of this experience is sharing what you've learned and what you think about the Google Tools as an instructional tool (and for other uses). We'd like to know when you've presented to your colleagues, written an article for the JMU Scholars Blog, facilitated a workshop or whatever approach you take to talking about the experience.

To "report" your presentation, we would like for you to create a document through Google Docs (could use Document or Presentation) and share that with the CIT Sandbox account (citsandbox@gmail.com). We'll keep a check on it so we don't miss your submission.

The expectation is that you do something between now and the end of the Fall 2008 semester, thinking that you may want to talk about it after you've used the tools in a class.

The CIT Google Sandbox Project Team has really enjoyed this and we look forward to learning more with you!

Monday, March 24, 2008

YouTube & Picasa Resources

YouTube Resources

YouTube provides a built in method for embedding video into any other website. Under Embed you'll find code that you can copy and paste into any nearly website, including Blackboard.

The only problem with using YouTube is that the video may disappear without notice. In that case, you may want to download the video and deliver it another way. GoogleVideo often offers a Download option directly from the page, but YouTube videos require a little extra work.

KeepVid
Keepvid allows you to paste in the address of a YouTube link and then download the video as an FLV file. An FLV from YouTube can be uploaded and delivered by JMUtube, our own video streaming service. The streaming server website has more info about using JMUtube.

SUPER ©
If you want to do something else with your YouTube video (edit, podcast, etc...), then you'll need to convert your video from FLV to somthing else (MP4 is a nice choice). SUPER © can convert just about any kind of video to any other kind of video and is free. It's Windows only, so for Mac users I recommend the free iSquint (which converts just about anything to MP4) or it's $24 dollar big brother Visual Hub.


Picasa Resources
http://picasa.google.com/

http://picasa.google.com/support/ - Picasa Support
http://movies.atomiclearning.com/highed/picasa2 - Atomic Learning resources (requires JMU authentication)

Friday, March 21, 2008

Picasa



Ain't this neat!
Posted by Picasa

Gmail and JMU Email Config

We'll be talking about configuring Thunderbird so that you can transfer your messages from JMU Webmail to Gmail today. Here's some resources that have the configuration info.

Setting up Thunderbird with Gmail.
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=77662

Setting up Thunderbird with JMU.
http://www.jmu.edu/computing/helpdesk/selfhelp/thunderbird.shtml

The short version of what I'll show you is that you can set up both of these accounts in Thunderbird, and then just drag messages back and forth between accounts. Drag all of your messages from your JMU account to your Gmail account, set your JMU account to forward all mail to your Gmail account, and you're officially switched over.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Homework #5

Due 3/28/08 by 9:00 a.m.

Finalize your presentation. Refer to http://citsandbox.blogspot.com/2008/03/homework-4.html for details.

For more information about collaborating in an online environment, review some of the reference materials provided by Mary Ann in the Sandbox Blog. See http://citsandbox.blogspot.com/2008/03/for-more-information.html.

Have a great week!

Sarah

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Google Page Creator Presentation

I have embedded and provided the link to the presentation that I used to introduce Google Page Creator.



Presentation Link