| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

Week 8: Utilizing Online Applications and Tools

Page history last edited by sgrimes@... 15 years, 2 months ago

Week 8: Utilizing Online Applications & Presentation Tools

 

Discovery Exercise:                                                                                                                              Thing #18:  Zoho Writer.  Use a web-based online productivity tool to create and share documents without the need of installed desktop applications. Some experts speculate that this emerging trend may mean the death to Microsoft Office and other software-based productivity tools, while others think web-based applications have their place, but not in the school. But no matter which side of the Microsoft Office suite platform you side with, on this both sides seem to agree: web-based apps have their place.

One large benefit to web-based applications it that they eliminate the need to worry about different software versions or file types as you email documents or move from PC to PC. Another bonus is that they facilitate collaboration by allowing multiple users to edit the same file (with versioning) and provide users the ability to easily save and convert documents as multiple file types (including HTML and pdf). And, you can even use many of these tools, such as Zoho Writer and Google Docs to author and publish posts to your wiki which you may want to do because the WYSIWYG editors allow you to format your documents, spell-check them, etc.  It’s this type of integration with other web 2.0 tools that also makes web-based apps so appealing.

 

For this discovery exercise, participants are asked to take a look at a web-based word processing tool called Zoho Writer, create a simple document and then document your discoveries in your wiki. If you’re up to the challenge, you might even export your document as an HTML file or publish it through Zoho to your wiki.

 

Discovery Exercise #18:                                                                                                               Beginner

  1. Create a free account for yourself in Zoho Writer.
  2. Explore the site and create a test document or two.
  3. Try out Zoho Writer’s features and create a wiki post about your discoveries.

 

Advanced

  1. Create a free account for yourself in Zoho Writer.
  2. Explore the site and create a test document or two.
  3. Easily create a Table of Contents for your page by highlighting your title and selecting “Heading 1” from the “Normal” drop down menu. Highlight a subtitle and select “Heading 2.”  Continue to highlight subtitles and select “Heading 2.”
  4. Select the “Table of Contents” icon and watch as your hyperlinked TOC appears at the top of your page.

 

 

 

Exploration

Thing #19:  Zoho Show.  In addition to Zoho Writer, Zoho has an entire suite of productivity and collaboration tools including Zoho Notebook and Zoho Show.  Go to the Zoho home page at http://www.zoho.com/ and choose Zoho Show. 

  1. Choose “Create New” and then, select a theme.
  2. Type in a title for your presentation and create a short description.
  3. Next, tag your presentation so that others can easily find it.  A tag, according to Wikipedia, is a “non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system. On a website in which many users tag many items, this collection of tags becomes a folksonomy.”
  4. Use the “Apply or insert objects” toolbar on the right to insert a basic shape, callout, arrow, flow chart, symbol, and clip art.  To enlarge each menu, simply click on the arrow.
  5. To insert clip art, double clip on the picture you want to insert.  To insert any other shape, simply click on the shape and draw it on the presentation.
  6. You can also insert images by clicking on the “Insert” button on the Zoho toolbar.
  7. To add a new slide, simply click on the “New Slide” button.  Please remember to click the “Save” button as you work. 
  8. To add text, simply click on the “Text” button and select a text box and begin typing.  Changing the color of the text is as easy as highlighting the text and clicking on underlined A and choosing a color.
  9. Explore a few of the ways that you have to export, publish, and share your slideshow and choose one.

 

 

Application

Thing #20: Google Docs.

While Zoho has a superior word processor and presentation tool, Google Docs has one of the easiest productivity tools for creating a form I have ever used.  Forms are an excellent way to collect and analyze data.  You can use forms to collect data about your students or your students can organize the data they collect as either the results of their research or experiments that they conduct.   

  1. Go to Google Docs and create an account if you do not already have one.
  2. Click the drop down menu for “New” and select “Form.”
  3. Title your form, “Independent Reading Survey.”
  4. Type in directions for using the survey in the box that says, “You can include any information that will help people fill this out.”
  5. Type in your question in the box that says, “Question Title.”  For example, you may want to ask, “How many hours of independent reading do you do each week?”
  6. You can include “Help” text like, “Do not include reading that you do for school.”
  7. For “Question Type,” select “Scale” and then change “Scale” to 10. 
  8. Check “Make this a required question” and then, click “Done.”
  9. For your second question, you might want to ask, “How much do you like reading independently?”  Again, you could add “Help” text like, “Remember that this includes reading on the computer, or in magazines and newspapers.”  For “Question Type,” select “Scale” and then change “Scale” to 5.  This time fill in the labels to make a Likert scale.  Label #1 “Very Much.”  Label #2 “Not Very Much.”  Check “Make this a required question” and then, click “Done.”
  10. For your third question, you might want to ask, “Which is your favorite genre to read?”  You could define genre in the “Help” text.  For “Question Type,” select “Multiple Choice.”  Enter mystery in the first text box.  As soon as you have entered text in the first box, a second one appears and so on until you have all of the choices you would like to provide.  Do note that you can have students provide their own answers by clicking the link.  Check “Make this a required question” and then, click “Done.”
  11. Add two or three more questions and experiment with other question types. 
  12. When you have finished, you can preview the finished form by clicking the link at the bottom that says, “You can view the published form at ….” 
  13. Next, you are going to embed the form on the PBwiki for your school.  Close the window that popped up with the published form and click the “More Actions” button in the top right hand corner.  Select “Embed.”  Right click and copy the code that you will paste in your wiki. 
  14. Login to your wiki and click the “Edit” tab.  Click on “Insert Plug” and then, “Pbwiki Magic.”  Select “HTML/Java Script” and paste the code you just copied into the box.  If this seems familiar, it is because you pasted code in Week 2.  Click “Save” and your survey will appear.  Students can complete the survey and you can check the results, presented in lovely graphs, in Google Docs.

Reflection & Transfer

Login to BCPS 23 Things wiki and go to your page.  Choose one of the questions below and write a short reflection:

How might these tools be used to increase not only opportunities for students to write for a real audience, but also to critique and collaborate?  How does/does not the ability to collaborate with peers in an online environment approximate the conditions our students will face in the workplace? 

 

Comments (3)

Roxanne Dean said

at 10:10 am on May 13, 2009

I have used zoho writer and have posted an example on the Prettyboy school sites. I had students create Rainforest Scenes in Pixie2 after seeing an assembly on the rainforest and looking at a flipchart on the rainforest. Then we exported the pictues so that iw was saved as a JPEG. I put them into the slide sow and had the link posted on our school website. If you want to see what they looked like here is the link: http://schools.bcps.org/schools/ces/prettyboyes/related-arts.html
You can also link to it directly to see what it looks like. i would like to use some of the other feathures they have too. It was very easy to use and it is free.http://show.zoho.com/public/roxdean/Rainforest3. i also looked at the google documents and did not have much luck finding the examples of what I asked for so I need to play with that some more.

Roxanne Dean said

at 10:12 am on May 13, 2009

I have used zoho writer and have posted an example on the Prettyboy school sites. I had students create Rainforest Scenes in Pixie2 after seeing an assembly on the rainforest and looking at a flipchart on the rainforest. Then we exported the pictues so that it was saved as a JPEG. I put them into the slide show and had the link posted on our school website. If you want to see what they looked like here is the link: http://schools.bcps.org/schools/ces/prettyboyes/related-arts.html
You can also link to it directly to see what it looks like. i would like to use some of the other feathures they have too. It was very easy to use and it is free.http://show.zoho.com/public/roxdean/Rainforest3. i also looked at the google documents and did not have much luck finding the examples of what I asked for so I need to play with that some more.

Roxanne Dean said

at 10:12 am on May 13, 2009

I have used zoho writer and have posted an example on the Prettyboy school sites. I had students create Rainforest Scenes in Pixie2 after seeing an assembly on the rainforest and looking at a flipchart on the rainforest. Then we exported the pictues so that it was saved as a JPEG. I put them into the slide show and had the link posted on our school website. If you want to see what they looked like here is the link: http://schools.bcps.org/schools/ces/prettyboyes/related-arts.html
You can also link to it directly to see what it looks like. i would like to use some of the other feathures they have too. It was very easy to use and it is free.http://show.zoho.com/public/roxdean/Rainforest3. i also looked at the google documents and did not have much luck finding the examples of what I asked for so I need to play with that some more.

You don't have permission to comment on this page.