The Tools I’m Using

I just wanted to write a post about the tools I’m using for this class.

The original Learning 2.0 program used a Blogger blog to post assignments. For some time, before I had even heard of Learning 2.0, I had been thinking I would use a wiki once we started offering online courses. I went back and forth between using a blog and wiki as I was designing this class, and I ultimately decided on a wiki so that I could have greater control over how the content was organized. My colleague, Barbara Andrews of Andrews Consulting, suggested that I look into Zoho because it offers chat, which I also wanted to use at various points during the class. I liked the fact that Zoho had so many applications that I could utilize during the course of the class.

One of those applications was a presentation tool, which I briefly used for the first week’s assignment. I had created a PowerPoint to demonstrate the process for setting up a WordPress blog. I could easily import it into Zoho. The custom animations did not work in Zoho, but I think this is common among online presentation tools. The one problem was that I could not find a way to enlarge the slideshow without giving students access to the editable file. I had some small text in the slideshow that was hard to read in the Zoho slideshow. I ultimately switched to the presentation tool offered through Google Docs, which could be viewed at a larger size.

A couple of other complaints about Zoho. There doesn’t seem to be a consistent way that comments are sorted in the wiki. Most of the class discussion is taking place on the wiki, and it would be useful if they were sorted by the post time/date. I posted a question about this to the Zoho forums, but I have not yet received an answer.

I also wish there was a way to add existing Zoho members to your wiki without the necessity of sending them an e-mail with a link they need to click to join the wiki. We had a couple of problematic signups, and it would have been much easier if I could have said – “Add the person with this Zoho ID to my wiki.”

I’ll let you know how well Zoho chat works after our first chat session.

For the second week of the class, I also tried a video demo of how tagging is used in del.icio.us, flickr and technorati. I then uploaded the video to YouTube. This essentially was my way of trying to replicate an Adobe Captivate experience, a piece of software we currently do not own. This may be a future purchase for our office, but if anybody knows of a more affordable alternative to Captivate, I would love to hear about it. I produced the video in Windows MovieMaker, and it turned out OK in its original state. But the quality degraded during the YouTube upload. After a couple of days, I did poste a link to the WMV file, but it does take a while to download. I’ll explore other video sharing options for next week’s assignment.