Engaging students in interaction during Internships

Finding ways, by which students can stay connected with their mentor and class mates when completing their internship will result in a more engaged experience and enhanced learning. Some of the most frequent requirements for students to stay in touch with their supervisor, instructor or mentor, is to maintain email communication, or to exchange notes, or to write one or several reports and/or present their experience at the end via a paper or oral presentation.
Are these traditional communication techniques still the best way to engage students and create a more permanent memory and reflection of the time as intern?

In a time when social networks are an important part of every student's life, it makes sense to use one of the social networking systems available to allow peer collaboration, live or timely sharing of experiences, peer feedback and social learning.

The following table presents other options that can be used to engage students when they are doing an internship. If you have other ideas about how to engage students while they are in their internships, please share them via comments in this blog.

SYSTEM	FEATURES	ADVANTAGES	DISADVANTAGES	RECOMMENDED WHEN....
Public Blog	Works as a journal Instructor may provide open instructions or create a guide or key questions that students will use to follow in their postings.	1- Students can post updates to their work and the system will order it chronologically 2- They can receive and moderate other people comments 3- It is in the public domain, access over the internet should not be a problem	1- a blog is good for journaling but lacks the tools that a course management system will have such as discussion board, dropbox or file sharing. 2- Being in the public domain may be a challenge, names or other data should not be mentioned, public blogs are easily found and indexed by search engines.	interns are required to provide updates of their work, without other information sharing.
Private Blog (i.e. University of Illinois hosted blog)	Same as above	Same as above except (3) 3- Because it has restricted access by others, interns may share more information and feel better to provide honest peer reviews	1- Same as 1- above	Same as above
Wiki/ google docs	Works as a web page. Organization can be customized by the user: By topics, by dates, by questions, etc.	1. Students will create a web page about their experience. 2- the webpage can last after the program and can become part of their portfolio 3. they can receive comments 4. it may be public or not	If the interest is chronological account of events, this is not the best solution.	The goal is to have a document that will reflect the work during internship, with a customized structure according to the user. Instead of having only a set of chronological posts as in a Journal.
Learning Management System (Moodle, Compass 2G)	Has multiple features hosted in one same place: .Blog or Wiki, .Discussion forum for interaction . Document sharing . Peer assessment and / or ratings . surveys and other poll or assessment tools	1. Allows multiple ways for interaction 2. is private, so privacy settings will not be an issue	1. will not be available indefinitely when the student graduates 2. can only be temporarily part of the student’s portfolio 3. Cannot be shared with outsiders as is because it will contain information about other people as well.	The goal is to have multiple ways of interaction with the student during a finite time (the duration of the semester).
Facebook or LinkedIn (or other social networking option)	Has limited feature for interaction and sharing, but are embedded in the students’ daily communication habits	1. User friendly systems for interaction and communication 2. May have options for privacy settings. 3- Works as an organizer by topic or by date	1- If not private or closed group, may result in a disorganized recollection of events and reflections.	The group of interns has more than 5 participants, who are used to social networking sites, and enjoy working in that environment.

Free Q&A platform

Piazza is a question-and-answer platform designed to communicate with your students or colleagues fast. I think it looks like a web 2.0 version of WebBoard, (remember that?).

The system makes it easy to enroll participants, you can suggest that you only want illinois.edu accounts if your participants have your same affiliation. The instructor may enable 'anonymous' posts too. It has a unique way of handling participants' responses in the sense that it allows multiple responses or only one student answer, in which case the students edit the existing response and have to add to it. And there is a "followup" feature that can be used when responses or questions are not clear or a new thread needs to be added. Posts can also be tagged so that it is easier to find them, and formatting is very simple. I hope you find interesting uses for this platform. I will be testing it with the team and we will have some comments after our testing.

Editing or clipping YouTube Videos

I found that the following sites may be of good help for an instructor trying to clip or use part of a youTube video. The first three provide similar functionality: clipping and providing embed code for a clip in an existing youtube video. They are:
1) TubeChop:  http://www.tubechop.com/
2)Splicd: http://www.splicd.com/
The last one offers more options for editing and interacting with videos. It is called "embed.plus" http://www.embedplus.com and it promises more functions than the other three....

I tested them with this "Milonga"
ORIGINAL POST IN YOUTUBE:

1) One minute edit with Tubechop
Example: http://www.tubechop.com/watch/318894
Tutorial: 

2) One minute edit with Splicd
Example: http://splicd.com/vzPQS5xbTe4/150/210

Submit your comments if you try them... or if you know of others.

Snap! by Lectora

Snap! makes it easy to record audio and video narration for your Powerpoint presentations. It also lets you create interactive quizzes and surveys.

You can export the result as either a standalone Flash presentation for use on any web site, or a SCORM module that can be imported into just about any course management system.

It's very similar to Adobe Presenter, except that it costs only $99 rather than $500.

Free trial here.

Demo by me here.

Taming the eBook hydra with Calibre

It seems that every technology creates a standards war: VHS/Beta, Windows/Mac -- even technology that's been around as long as the automobile still hasn't attained universal agreement about which is the proper side of the road for driving.

The ebook is no different: there are many competing formats and (putative) standards, and every player in the market seems to have settled on a different one. This becomes even more confusing if you have more than one device which can display ebooks (e.g., an Amazon Kindle and a smart phone) or a device that can display more than one format (e.g., an iPad which can run the Kindle app as well as using Apple's own native ebook format).

Calibre, a free and open source package, can help. Calibre organizes your ebooks into a searchable database, will display most common formats, and will even convert one format to another. It will also sync your book collection to your device, and has a nifty packaging feature that lets you convert web feeds into ebooks for later reading on your mobile device.

Transcriptions and Captions - what a headache....

Universal Subtitles claims that they have " built the easiest way to subtitle videos. Add our subtitling widget to your video (or your site) and click the "subtitle me" button. The rest is simple! Totally free, and no software to download"  I saw that it is really easy to use, you select a URL, the video start playing and you start typing. It will wait if you are deleting or stopping, so that you can catch up, and then it will start after a few seconds if you are not typing, so that you can continue. It will start from a few seconds before so you can check what you just typed. Then it provides a very easy way to sync and play and re edit.
The design for entering text is very good and easy to use. However, (there is always a "however", when will the perfect tool be created?) there are some limitations:
1- It will not take any video format, for example, it does not like .wmv
2- You can edit several things but you cannot move or decide where you want the captioning text to show.
3- It places the caption not at the bottom but a little above the bottom, so even if you have left some space for captioning, it will cover the text in the movie, unless you use only one line.. and even in that case it is too high for my preference.
The concept and the project are worth exploring further, they share their code, it is built in HTML5 and Javascript, it is web based, and let you download the script in different formats. Their tutorials are also easy to follow.
The Chronicle this morning has an article about them and they also talk about Scripto, another one in my list....

Let me know if you give US a try!

Wormhole, another web conferencing system

I tested the Wormhole IT web conferencing system today and was very impressed with the quality of video and audio by multiple users. The system offers what most web conferencing systems have: Recording capabilities, Document sharing, screen sharing, Audio, Video (both for multiple users), whiteboard, and chat. It also provides options for document sharing such as: share in the whiteboard, download as pdf (no matter what your original format is) and download in original format. The host decides how to share the documents. This screenshot shows the conference area, with feature icons on top, whiteboard, participants list on the right, chat at the bottom, and one of the presenters' video.

 It is not free or open source. I understand that the cost is way below its competitors (Elluminate and A. Connect) although their production quality is as good as the others we have tested.