Embedding Google Presentation in Your Blog

One of the greatest features of Google Presentation is that it can be shared with others. You can embed the presentation in a blog like I did below:




You can also access this Google Presentation through this URL.

When you access a Google Presentation in this way, you can actually become 100% engaged in the presentation because you can add your ideas through the chat window. This requires you to sign-in with your Google account, but you become part of the discussion.
I have borrowed instructions in how to do this from the Tech Tips Tuesday blog.

Here's how it works:

1. Go to http://docs.google.com
2. Upload you PowerPoint file to Google Presentations (up to 10MB from your computer)
3. Warning: Not all formatting features from Design Templates will always be preserved and there is NO animation.
4. When you publish your presentation to the Internet anyone will be able to access and view it online. They will also be able to join the presentation online and chat with others also viewing the presentation. Your document will be assigned a unique address (URL) on google.com. To do this go to Share button (upper right of screen) and choose Publish.
5. Click on the published link and this will open up your PowerPoint online and a chat window will appear on the right side of the screen.
6. In order for audience members to discuss the presentation, they will need to log into their Google account so their name will appear in the chat window.
7. Google Presentations also provides you with the embed code if you want to place your Google presentation in a webpage, blog or wiki.
8. Click HERE to view a sample presentation and its chat window.

Perhaps the best part of this using this Presentation program is that you can have multiple people working on it simultaneously. This means that you and a colleague can be in separate rooms in separate cities in separate countries working on different pages of the same presentation. I especially enjoy doing this while using Skype or Google Chat to verbally discuss what we are doing (and make funny faces at my friend while we work.)

What sort of experiences have you had with Google Presentation?

Z

Twitter Satire and Spoofs

I just found some Twitter comedy that I wanted to share with you.

Twouble with Twitter is a short video that takes a sane look at us insane twitterers.













This is a video about a new offshoot of
Twitter called Flutter.

It is Nano-blogging.




Enjoy!!!!


Do you have any other suggestions for Twitter comedy?



Check out the Official Twitter song, "You're No One If You're Not on Twitter"

Here's a song from Ben Walker that YouTube featured on its front page, so it has 185,711 views at last count. My favorite part is when he says "If you haven't been bookmarked, retweeted and blogged . . . you might as well have not existed."


Z

Habitudes with Angela Maiers is a GREAT Success!!!!

I told you that Angela Maiers was going to share her work on Habitudes tonight at the University of Northern Iowa. It was FANTASTIC!!!!

I must admit that I don't have time to reflect on it right now, but Rob Galloway has posted all of the links to the streamed videos and archived chats.  I will add my opinions about this Habitudes experience later in the week.

Z

Habitudes for College Students - Angela Maiers

Are you ready for tomorrow? It's almost time. Time to put all the years of schooling and studying to work. Some students have already begun dipping their toes in the water. Some have already jumped into the pool called the life/workforce. Whatever depth you're at today, it's a good idea to take inventory. A self-awareness exercise to make sure you're ready to weather any possible storm, to equip yourself with mental ammunition to create and innovate into a world where the only constant is change.


What habits and attitudes - Habitudes will carry you to heights beyond your vision? Your success as a 21st Century student, worker, and citizen lies in your passionate:

• Imagination
• Curiosity
• Perseverance
• Self-Awareness
• Courage
• Adaptability
  

Join us for a Habitude conversation at the University of Northern Iowa College of Education and the UNI Educational Technology User Group (ETUG) at 7 p.m. Monday, March 30, in Schindler Education Center room 252 at UNI (virtual map).

I'll be co-presenting with my good friend, Andy Drish, a recent graduate who lives his life in Habitude abundance. Our presentation will focus on the differences between being creative on occasion and living each day creatively as a habit and attitude.

For more information about the event, contact Leigh Zeitz (zeitz@uni.edu), associate professor of curriculum and instruction at UNI. (319) 273-3249

The information is free and open to the public. Join us! Join us for a conversation about the Habitudes.

IT WILL BE STREAMING!!!!

We are happy to announce that we will be streaming Angela's presentation. You will be able to watch it live using Real Player.
You will also be able to interact with us through our live online chat.

You can access the presentation or the online chat at the our Habitudes homepage at UNI.

StoryBlender Can Animate Your Photos

StoryBlender is a new on-line utility that will animate your photos. Tony Vincent twittered that he had tried StoryBlender so I thought that I would wander over and see what was happening.

StoryBlender provides you with a wide assortment of mouths/lips that you can place on photos of your choosing. You can change the size and angle for these mouths so you can make them fit the face. You will see that I placed a set of lips at an angle on my face. (It appears that you can only add one set of lips per photo.) Took a while to get the right fit, but it seems to work. Still looks a little dorky but I have seen worse on the David Letterman Show.

Students could use this technology to animate historical pictures. Imagine having them add voices to George Washington or Madame Curie or Leonardo Da Vinci? It would require them to research what they would have said and how they would have said it.

What do you think? How would you use StoryBlender to bring animation into your educational setting?

Halloween in Second Life

Halloween takes on a WHOLE different meaning when you are in Second Life. I was just looking around The Ivory Tower of Primitives tonight when I ventured upon a Haunted House (left). It is similar to Mr. Toad's Wild Ride at Disneyland. You sit in a car, pay $10 Linden (about 2.5 US cents), switch to the Mouse view and it will take you on a 4 minute ride of special effects. Quite innovative. Here is the SLurl http://slurl.com/secondlife/Natoma/34/255/27


There are other Halloween experiences like the haunted Pumpkin Patch in Shanghai City. It is filled with scary experiences. It is best to turn your "Environment Settings" to midnight.

What have you found?

Wordle: Turning Text into Art

We live in a visual world. Pictures are processed 50,000 times faster than works so anytime that words can be replaced or augmented by images, then new insight and deeper meaning can be conveyed.

Wordle is a "word art" tool that analyzes text or websites to produce a visual representation of the content. Wordle analyzes the "important" words and then creates a "word cloud" where the size of the words is determined by the frequency of use. Here is an example of a Wordle graphic that has analyzed the Dr. Z Reflects site.



How Can Wordle be Used?
Wordle is cool, not doubt about it, but what are the practical applications for it? Obviously, Wordle is a tool that can be used to provide an objective analysis of our writing.

• Do we tend to use He more than She?
• Am I using I a great deal as I write about what I believe that I should be doing with my eyes?
  
• What words do successful authors use that makes them so appealing?
  

Let's see what Wordle-using educators have to say:

• Angela Maiers talks about Wordle in the Classroom.
• Maggie Harnew in Oxfordshire, U.K. is madly in love with Wordle. She shares a variety of applications that she has developed. Says that she needs to "justify the time" she spends on Wordle. She is using it to create a series of language arts activities.
• I even found one place where they created a visualization of all of Metallica's lyrics.
• Jonathan Feinberg, developer of Wordle, even writes a Wordle Blog.
  
• Rodd Lucier shared his Top 20 Uses for Wordle in his The Clever Sheep blog.

Here's a Wordle created using the Qur'an:















Do you use Wordle? If so, how? What do you see as prime applications for this tool?

Z

Related articles by Zemanta

• The One Wordle I'll Ever Create (evilgeniuschronicles.org)
• Dangerous wordle (kelleyeskridge.com)
• Putting Images in Your Wordle (angelamaiers.com)
• Our Biases? (anamericanstudies.com)