Occasional Thoughts on Educational Technology and Life by Judy Brophy

Monday, January 25, 2010

When did the Play Triangle Disappear?

I was recently trying to create a graphic that meant "video" and went to YouTube to get a screen shot of the greyed out screen with ugly play triangle embedded in the middle.
Imagine my surprise when I couldn't find one. They all seem to be gone. The most I could find was a discrete blue arrow in the lower left corner.

The "go arrow" used to mean "this is a video, click here to view." Now everything is assumed to be a video. It is evidence for Mashable's predictions for what the web will look like in the near future (http://tinyurl.com/ybpl5jf)
1. Accessible anywhere.
2. Not focused on the computer.
3. Media-centric (text will become "minor component of our web experience.")
4. Largest area will be social media.
The "near future" is here.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

The Wiki/Blog bottleneck

Many teachers would like to use blogs and wikis in their classes. They understand that the more students write, and share what they write with an audience, the better. There are many many ways to do this, lots of free software out there. For the intrepid that just choose one (they all have their advantages and disadvantages) the inevitable bottleneck is the time and complexity of setting up and administering of these accounts.


Setting up individual wiki pages and giving each student access, along with the teacher takes time. If you’re using Google applications you need to gather the google account signons of each student. Most applications require that you enter an email address of some kind to give student’s access. Need I say that this kind of “clerical” work is not what most faculty will take on, even with the carrot of a useful class tool?

What we need is a quick and easy way to gather student emails and have them available for pasting into whatever application we want to use. Solving that issue would hugely increase use of these technologies.