Google Docs Viewer is a handy little service that let’s you view documents and presentations within the browser without having to open a third party application. It eliminates the need for students to have additional applications (such as PowerPoint or a PDF reader) installed on their computer to view PowerPoint or PDF files.

Here is an example. I am using an old PowerPoint presentation on podcasting done by a colleague of mine a few years ago that lives on our web server. The link to the original PowerPoint file (2.2 mb) will either download to your computer, or force you to open PowerPoint to view the presentation (depending on how your browser is configured, assuming you even have PowerPoint). Now, here is a link to the same PowerPoint presentation (which opens in a new window/tab), but this time viewed through the Google Docs Viewer.

It’s important to note that I did not upload the presentation to the Google Docs Viewer site – the original PowerPoint file still lives on our web server. The Google Docs Viewer is not a repository to store documents.  If I delete the original file on our web server, the link to the Google Docs Viewer breaks since the original file is no longer available. I retain complete control over the source file, but the user gets the benefit of not having to download and open a PowerPoint file.

How to use Google Docs Viewer

There are a couple of ways to use Google Docs Viewer; either directly from the site, or you can construct a special url that will link your document with the document viewer.

To use the site, go to the site, enter the url to the PDF or PowerPoint document, and click Generate Link. You then get a few different options, including a link that you can tweet, IM or email, HTML link code that you can paste in a website, blog or LMS, or embed code that will bring the document into your blog, site or LMS (I’ve embeded a PowerPoint presentation at the end of this post for you to see how this works).

The second way to access the service is by crafting your own URL. You can create links that pull documents through the service. You don’t even need to use the website to use the service. To create your own URL start with the base path of http://docs.google.com/viewer, followed by a question mark (?) and the path to the original document (url=path) The path needs to be encoded so no spaces or special characters. Knowing this, I can build a url to any PDF or PowerPoint, so a link to our example above would look like this: http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdisted.camosun.bc.ca%2FDE%2Fpodcast.ppt.

So, Why Use Google Docs Viewer?

Why would you even do this and not just link directly to, say, the original PowerPoint file? Well, from a technical perspective, there are some barriers for students when they try to deal with PowerPoint files (and, to a lesser extent these hold true for PDF files as well, although PDF is by far a more web friendly format than PowerPoint).

• The files can be large, especially if you use animations and transitions.
• They require students to have additional software installed on their computer, in this case PowerPoint or the PowerPoint Viewer.
• Depending on the browser, how it is configured and the security settings, PowerPoint files can cause strange and unexpected behaviours. One user may have their system set up to have PowerPoint open in a browser window, while another may be prompted to download the file. A third may get a security warning that a potentially malicious file is about to be opened.
• The files take a long time to load. In most cases, when someone clicks on a PowerPoint link, the first thing that has to happen is that PowerPoint has to open up, which eats up time. No one likes to wait for content and those few seconds add up to frustration for users.

By using a service like Google Docs Viewer (or Slideshare, another free alternative) , you can mitigate some of these barriers and provide a better experience for students.

Here is the same presentation embeded using Google Docs Viewer.

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As part of my Masters, I am currently reading Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education by Tony Bates and Gary Poole. My cohort is currently working with their SECTIONS model for choosing and evaluating new educational technologies. One of the criteria in the model is Interactivity (I) – what kind of interaction does the technology you are examining enable? As I was reading the chapter, a memory from my adolescence popped into my head – Dragon’s Lair.

Like most kids growing up in the early 80′s, video games were a big part of my life, including a game called Dragon’s Lair. Dragon’s Lair was different than most video games in that the action was high quality animation, not pixelated characters. The gameplay was incredibly clunky and I think it cost a dollar to play (compared to 25 cents for my game de jour Galaga) and since most of the time I ended up falling into a fiery pit of doom within 30 seconds, I didn’t invest a lot of time and money in it. But it made a lasting impression in that it was one of my first encounters with branching video. I loved that I had the direct ability to control the storyline and influence the narrative. It was like I was the Director in some fantastic animated movie.

Just over a year ago, YouTube unveiled the ability to annotate videos and add links to them. While there certainly has been a few problems associated with the annotations (most notably the lack of transparency on where the destination leads to and the possibility of linking to a malware site, as Pandalabs warned about earlier this year), it is really interesting to see how this feature is being used to create interactive stories and games on YouTube, much like the ones I experienced in the arcade hunched over Dragon’s Lair.

A good example of annotations being used to create an interactive story is this recent series of videos done by the Metropolitan Police in London as part of their Drop the Weapons campaign. At the end of each video you are asked to make a decision, which takes you down a different path.

For educators, this ability to link videos creates all kinds of interesting possibilities for creating interactive learning activities. For example, here is an interactive spelling bee.

I can’t imagine how much it cost to develop the Dragon’s Lair video game that sucked up my teenage cash, but I would hazard a guess that it was substantially more than it cost to create branching scenarios on YouTube. The point being that it doesn’t take a big budget to create compelling interactive activities using the technology available to us today. Sure, as the budgets go up so do the production techniques and special effects, etc. But really all it takes is a simple video recorder, some imagination and YouTube to create a bit of interesting interactive content.

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Etherpad is a collaborative document tool that allows multiple users to work on the same document in real time on the web. Think of it as a hybrid of Google Docs (which is not quite as synchronous) and a live chat tool.

I’ve used this tool for many collaborative projects, and for quickly drafting a collaborative document it is fantastic. Easy to use and free and with a document revision history so that you can see previous versions of the document. Today, that particular feature got a nifty little boost – an interactive document timeline. Now you can watch a video of your document, from birth to finished project.

For educators, this is a really handy evaluation tool. If you are trying to monitor group contributions to a collaborative project, this feature will be incredibly useful. All participants are colour coded so their contributions to a document are highlighted by colour, which let’s you quickly see who made major contributions to the document as it was being constructed.

In addition, the video timeline allows you to see the groups progress on the task at hand. If they got off topic, you’ll be able to see where they went wrong, in what context (what changes were happening that might have led them to the diversion), and who might have brought the team back on track (if they did). It’s a transparent way to quickly view the process unfold.

Unfortunately, the timeline view is not available on the free public version (which allows many concurrent users), but you can get a free professional version for up to 3 concurrent users that does include the timeline.

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Screenr is a web-based screencasting tool that allows you to quickly create screencasts. Free and web-based, there is no software to download, unlike Jing, which Screenr is very similar to. Videos are limited to 5 minutes and Screenr will host your videos, providing you embed code to put the videos where you want. You can also tweet the screencast out on Twitter, download an MP4 version, or publish the final result to YouTube.

Here’s a demo.

Besides Camtasia and Captivate, the two mainstream commercial products that allow you to do very sophisticated screencasts that include interactivity, post production editing, and branching, there are a number of free screencasting tools similar to Screenr out there, including Screenjelly and Screentoaster. For Firefox users there is also a handy FF plugin called Capture Fox.

In my mind, the difference between Screenr and these other tools is that Screenr is coming from the e-learning world and is suported by Articulate, a company that makes a very succesful line of e-learning application products. And, as Articualte CEO Adam Schwartz says, the cost for Articulate to run Screenr is:

…really cheap for us. We’re hosted on the Rackspace cloud, and the cost for doing this is like two orders of magnitude less than it was when we looked at this two years ago. It would cost more as a marketing fiasco to shut this down than it would to keep it running.

From the same article, Schwartz also said that Screenr

is a first step in the company’s creation of a new group of e-learning products, which he compares to the popular software-based screencast products from Camtasia. But with Artculate’s focus on education, the tools will be “more about interactivity, branching, learning, and simulation.” His fully developed screencast tools will have the capabilities for grading and quizzing, and will be integrated into more fully formed educational suites.

So it sounds like Articulate has some pretty big plans with Screenr and this is just the beginning.

You do, however, need a Twitter account to use Screenr as the service is completely integrated with Twitter. This might deter some who have been reluctant to take the Twitter plunge, or might be the deciding reason for some to start using it. A big part of the idea of Screenr is to allow people to quickly make a screencast and then publish it to their network via Twitter, reinforcing the idea (for me at least) that one of the core values of Twitter is as a network notification (distribution) system.

• 4564 Commentshttp://clintlalonde.net/2009/08/22/screenr-free-web-based-screencasting-tool/Screenr%3A+free+web+based+screencasting+tool2009-08-22+17%3A37%3A53Clint

I just finished an assignment that was a first for me – assigning my own grade. What a strange thing to do. Now, I am sure I have had dedicated teachers in the past, but I feel pretty confident that none of them have ever spent as much time pouring over one of my assignments as I have done in the past week.

The assignment was in 2 parts. Part 1 was to keep a reflective blog during my 2 week residency. Okay, I think I can handle that part. I actually went a bit overboard in the end and the blog morphed into a way to share resources with my cohort in addition to the self reflection piece, but hey what the heck.

The second part was a bit trickier – the self assessment. When I started going through the criteria and comparing it to the blog, I began to fear that, despite my prolific output on both my own and my cohort’s blogs, I might have actually missed a significant piece of the assignment. Not only was the blog to be a reflective tool, but it was supposed to be specifically reflective about research and questions arising during my Introduction to Research class.

Now, just so you don’t think I am totally dense and didn’t know what class I was in at any given time, I have to say that the residency was a pretty homogeneous event with sessions and classes blurring together into one mass. Our instructors team taught and would appear in each others class regularly, often both facilitating at the same time. Research blended with Learning Theory, which blended with lunch which morphed into team building that somehow ended up back at Research. The lines were fuzzy, a point underscored during our final group presentations when 6 out of 6 presentations did a bang up job of presenting wonderful research for an assignment for our Learning Theory class – a point not missed by our Learning Theory Instructor. As a class, I think we all slightly missed the mark as to what class we were actually presenting for. So, I don’t think I was alone in my class confusion.

Back to the blog. I agonized for a few days whether I had enough information about research in my blog. I did touch upon it here and there and actually did have a couple of posts that spoke to research directly. But on the whole it felt pretty light in the research department. So I ran my blog through Wordle, a tool that takes a block of text and turns it into a graphic based on the frequency of keywords in the text. The more often a word appears in the text, the larger it is in the graphic. The results on whether or not I addressed research in my blog? Well, I’ll let you decide if I missed the research point or not.

I find this image interesting for a few reasons. First, it convinced me that I didn’t miss the research angle and I used it in my assessment to talk myself up a grade point from where I originally had myself pegged.

The second thing is the prominence of the word think. I went back and read some posts and realized I used the phrase ‘I think” quite often and I found this very validating. I went to an intensive 2 week Masters residency and guess what I did? I thought! And apparently I thought a lot about technology. Pretty appropriate for a Masters in Learning and Technology.

Finally, I have been agonizing over whether or not I should pursue a thesis or go the course work/major project route with my Masters. I am leaning towards major project. Now, if you have ever used Wordle you’ll know that the placement of the words is random. Note the placement of the words “think” and “thesis”. Is this a sign that I should think thesis?

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