A Web Tool For Today

Prezi: Online Presentation Tools

2010-04-05T23:33:00.000-07:00

Making presentation to select or general audience is becoming a necessity for most of us. Either we are students or professional learning how to make presentation is a must. Web today has many tools for helping us make interesting and impressive presentation. One of the online presentation tool that I have been recently refered is prezi. It is a very interesting tool that not only helps you create presentations but also publish and share them. In addition user can also have provision of editing presentation offline. A sample of online presenation is available as showcase. Basic features of Prezi are available free. However for advanced or power user, premium feature are available at additional cost. Prezi is worth looking tool for your presentation needs.

(This tool was brought to my notice by Jeevan Dongre, Thanks Jeevan)

Talk Your way to the World

2009-04-21T22:46:00.000-07:00

Publishing blog is a great way to announce your thoughts, ideas and opinions to the world. Blogs have global access and multi-lingual reach. Many a times people may want to to listen to the blogs post rather than reading it. The reason for this may be varied. The reader may be visually impaired or may he/she is illiterate such as toddler or grandmother. Well web 2.0 does not disappoint us in this regard. There are many tools that allow your to render your posting in voice. One such tool that I have found useful is Odiogo and an alternative is talkr. I have used this feature in many of my teaching and general blogs including this. Why read further just click on the button on the top of this post

Quiz makers and Publishers on the web

2009-03-15T19:39:00.000-07:00

Listen to this Blog Post

Quiz is a general purpose testing tool used in many occasions and in different forms. In a quiz show or a competition it is an activity in which participant answers questions given by quiz master. Example include Master Mind India. In academics a teacher may use it as a short test given to a class such as a math quiz. Sometimes it is a sportive catechism or a general knowledge test. Occasions for using quizzes are many. However preparing quiz questions, finding alternative choices, conducting them and finally evaluating them is tedious process when done manually. Conducting quizzes when group size is a large (such as a class of 120 students) becomes a practical challenge. In a changing educational environment such as autonomous institutions quizzes are becoming a regular student assessment tools. For this reason teachers need a better and efficient way to conduct them

Fortunately for us, web has a great number of tools that help quiz masters such as teachers or event organizers to manage entire process of conducting quiz. One of the free web quiz tool I have begun using is in action at IP Quizzes and the tool is provided by Proprofs.

Sketch up : 3D Modelling Software for ALL

2009-02-21T22:37:00.000-08:00

Computer aid designing (CAD) software are used for 2D and 3D models. One of most intitutive 3D software freely available today is Sketchup by Google. It is a is a 3D modeling program designed for architects, civil engineers, filmmakers, game developers, and related professions. It also includes features to facilitate the placement of models in Google Earth. SketchUp was developed by startup company @Last Software, and later it was bought up by Google and now it is called Google Sketchup.

Google Sketch up has been designed with many audiences in mind. According to a write up at Google for Educators SketchUp is a great tool for easily teaching kids to construct 3D models of buildings, trees, cars, and the like. You can use it as a stand-alone tool, or in conjunction with Google Earth and the 3D Warehouse.There are any number of lessons – from learning about area and volume to studying building and community design – whose concepts are best illustrated in 3D. SketchUp is one of those products that will easily get kids learning – and thinking they're just having fun, as your classes apply SketchUp to geography, social studies, history and industrial technology. Students can use SketchUp to visualize geometry and other mathematical concepts, create models to learn about architecture, and design everything from games and toys to models of spaceships and cars.Theater and film students can use SketchUp to conceptualize their sets. Students can use it to participate in community development projects that involve CAD, GIS, or other design applications. SketchUp can help math students at all levels to better understand geometric concepts. And 3D design can easily be added to any number of classroom projects that aren't directly design-related, from designing a set for a Shakespeare play to creating visualizations of historical settings or getting students excited about history by building a virtual history museum.

Blogging and Teaching

2009-02-15T16:33:00.000-08:00

Blogging is a kind of personal publishing. In its earlier days and initial forms blogging was meant as a journal where in a blogger recorded and published contents concerned to herself and a select community. Over the years, "possible" applications of blogging have expanded and varied in their scope and nature. In the earlier times, when blogging technology was proprietary and available only to people within an organization, its usage in terms of people using it and purposes served were limited.

The advent of free blogging services such as blogger or Wordpress have changed the blogging landscape once for all. Individual entrepreneurs or small businesses have explored blogs to create community of users. Some have used it as a common point of information dissemination or share or notice board. Even some others have used blog to launch new products/services and conduct follow up actions. There are instances in which some companies have used blogs to offer tech support.

Even teaching community has not been left behind. Many technology savvy faculty have used blogging as a crucial component in their overall teaching process. There are even cases of some faculty using blog as a sole means of communication and content delivery for a set of students whom he has never met.

My personal interest in blogging started some time ago. Although I was experimenting an integrating other web tools such as online docs in my teaching activity (see Using web resources for conducting seminar), I was not aware of full potential of blogging as an effective teaching means. In some western universities blogs have been used by faculty as an extended class room.

Currently I have begun harnessing the potential of blog in my regular teaching process. I have created a blog as an extended class room for the course Management and Entrepreneurship that I am currently offering at SDM CET, Dharwad

Social Networking Sites

2009-01-25T15:53:00.000-08:00

Communication is one of the fundamental value propositions of the web. Emails serve people in communicating on one-to-one or one to many basis. Chatting helps people conducting conversations in real-time basis. However communication enabling potential of the web is much more than these. It allows creating of communities. Communities are group of like minded people or people sharing common interests. On the web web such communities are called Social networking sites. Some of the well known social networking sites are : Facebook, Orkut, Myspace etc

Since their introduction, Indian social network sites (SNSs) such as Minglebox, Bigadda have attracted millions of users, many of whom have integrated these sites into their daily practices. While their key technological features are fairly consistent, the cultures that emerge around SNSs are varied. Most sites support the maintenance of pre-existing social networks (such as inviting contacts) but others help strangers connect based on shared interests, political views, or activities. Some sites cater to diverse audiences, while others attract people based on common language or shared racial, sexual, religious, or nationality-based identities. Sites also vary in the extent to which they incorporate new information and communication tools, such as mobile connectivity, blogging, and photo/video-sharing.

A Menu of Search Engines

2009-01-18T19:42:00.000-08:00

Searching has become the most popular activity on the web and Google is the probably the most widely used search engine. Each search engine has its own way of indexing web pages and presenting to them to users. Google's approach is called ranking which practically means popularity. Although Google serves most of our search requirements, many a times a good web page not appear in Google result page simply because it is not popular. It is desirable that a good page must be popular, but it seldom happens that way.

Other search engines such as Cuil work on different approach which can summed up as "Popularity is useful, but not always important" from a particular user perspective. It analyzes web content and not the uses reaching it.

Another challenge with popular search engines is that they provide too much of information for each search request and usually pride themselves with huge about numbers. From user perspective that number has no practical meaning.

Another search engine Kosmix acts as user guide to the Web. It let users explore the Web by topic, presenting a dashboard of relevant videos, photos, news, commentary, opinion, communities and links to related topics.

In summary Google does well for general search but does not fit well with situations when user needs specific information. In such case one may try above search engines and other similar ones

Power Presentations

2009-01-11T17:48:00.000-08:00

In this globally connected world communicating with others is an integral part of our personal and professional life. Be it a student, professional or would be entrepreneurs; all of them need to present themselves to their respective audiences. Many a times presentation has to be made online and need to be co-ordinated with a group of participants. In the past there was only way to achieve this: using Microsoft Power Point. The usually procedure was to edit a presentation, send it via email or pen drive etc.

Times have changed now. With the advent of Presentation facility offered by Google docs, it is now possible to create, edit and share presentations online in real time basis. Students, researchers, organizations are taking advantages of this feature. With its collaboration feature, Google presentations allows presenter to share her presentation with others. She can choose people and restrict them for either viewing or editing actions on the document. Last year about 120 of ours students used Google Presentation to prepare and present their seminars. Faculty can use presentation feature for conducting classes. what is more you can share this class presentation with hundreds of students online during class sessions or even with thousands of colleagues teaching the same course in different institutions across the state. Here is one example.

Online Docs: Publish your way to the World

2009-01-04T16:53:00.000-08:00

Dealing with document is the mainstay of computer work. Crating a new document, editing existing one, printing them are the main activities associated when some one uses computers. Documents are usually created to be read by some one - application for a job to be read by prospective employer or project report to be read by faculty. The normal way of sharing document is to either send a print out or soft copy sent either through an email or pen drive etc. As one needs to share documents with and among more people say batch members of a project or if that documents needs to be turn around - sent back for corrections then it becomes difficult and expensive to use printouts. In addition if documents are to be shared with people who are locally at different and distant geographical locations then it takes sometime to send and receive back the documents.

On-line documents such as Google Docs solve this problem very efficiently. Online document can be created, edited and stored on the web. They can be shared with one or more users for collaboration, comments and corrections. They can even be published for public consumption. Powerpoint Presentations can be published and accessed by the presenter at the lcation of presentation - no need to carry softcopy. and Since these documents can be accessed from anywhere in the world- users can access them at times of their convenience and participate actively in the document creation and building process. Online documents may be used innovatively to meet your specific needs. Last year we conducted entire process of conducting seminar for a class of 120+ using online documents resources.

Web Search Engine: Your Gateway to World Wide Web

2008-12-28T19:24:00.000-08:00

Since its inception web has grown into a veritable and globally accessible information resource. In order to discover information on the huge web, a user needs some tools. Web search engine is designed to help user in navigating and discovering resources on the web. A search engines such as Google or Yahoo provide user a search box in which he can enter one or more key words ("Computer " or " Computer Technology" ) and obtain relevant information he requires. Search Engines on accepting keyword(s) provided by the user, find all matches to those keywords or phrase in their index and display them on user computer screen ( Search Engine result page SERP). Search engine build and keep updating their index by way of crawling the web. Today WWW is estimated have well over 11 billion pages. Both Yahoo and Google claim that the have indexed about 8 billion pages.

Using a search engine is a simple exercise. User has to go the web site of particular search engine say Google or Yahoo and he may see a search box on the home page. He must enter keyword or phrase that best describes his information need and press the enter key. Web pages matching those keywords are displayed on user screen. User may click on those links to investigate further to determine relevance of those links given his information need and move on

Google Alert: A Great way to keep yourself well Informed

2008-11-16T23:16:00.000-08:00

Information is the knowledge applied for work and performance. Using web’s content for one’s personal and professional work and performance is one of the most productive ways to harness web resources. There are many tools that help in getting information relevant to your work and purpose. One of the most productive tools that I have found very useful is Google’s Alert. This allows you to get relevant information and updates in your email. All that you have to do is to set alerts using keywords that best describes your information need. Some time back while working on a presentation preparation, I set an alert for the key word “ web 2.0”. I was very pleased to get information relevant to my presentation that helped me refine the same.Not just me.
.One of my colleagues who has just enrolled for an MBA course has just set up an alert for “principles of management” and is says he very impressed by this service.
· Recently a student of mine set up an alert for keywords related to a conference she was planning to attend and present a paper. She was exposed to a great number of resources by this great service

As a student, researcher, or in whatever role you are expected to play, Google alert can help you keep well informed.