Shall the government or microsoft stimulate better?

Warner Crocker makes an interesting point... (click here)

Using Slideshare, Twitter, Facebook and FriendFinder in Economics Teaching.

Economics 2.0

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: slideshare facebook)

Ink Annotations Float in Word. How Can I Grade Papers with my Tablet PC

A question that came in recently was:
Today I marked up documents my students had submitted to their dropbox. I used the pen feature on my HP tablet PC. My plan was to send the papers back to my students using the Feedback feature in dropbox. However, when I later checked on those files going back to my students I found that for some of the documents my markings had slipped down on the document and therefore made no sense. My editing marks were not in the right place on the document. I'm not sure but I believe the problem was with files that were in Word 2007 (docx). I am using Word 2007 but I have noticed that the pen feature does not work the same on 2007 as it does on 2003. In fact my pen seems to work a lot better in 2003 than it does in 2007. Has anyone else run into this problem and, if so, do you know of a solution?

My Answer:
The problem is the way Word formats and treats annotations versus text formatting. You can usually see this by marking up a Word document (2003 and 2008) and then going back to the beginning of the Word document and adding text -- usually the annotations move.

What is the best work around? Well there are two, one free and one that will cost about $30 (for academics).

The free solution. Retrieve and open the word file from the drop box. Then select File/Print and select the printer called Journal Note Writer. This will copy the word file to Microsoft Journal and allow you to use your pen and annotate the document on each and every page. When finished you must print the Journal file to pdf (using Adobe Acrobat Pro) or supply the students with the free MS Journal Reader (click here for the web page) so they can read the files. This requires the students to be genuine MS Windows users.

The best solution and the one I use is Bluebeam PDF Revu. This will cost about $30 for an educational discount pricing and is the best $s I have spent on software since my Sudoku download to my phone (thanks Astraware.com). Bluebeam Revu will allow you to annotate the word documents (or any other document and save and return to the students in a pdf format that everyone can read if they have Acrobat Reader.

Why not use Adobe Acrobat Professional and then how does one use Bluebeam Revu?

Adobe Acrobat Professional has terrible ink annotation tools, but you are welcome to prove that to yourself if you already have it. Adobe Acrobat Professional is also expensive. Even the on campus discount price is many multiples of the Bluebeam PDF Revu Educational Discount Price. See a video of Bluebeam.com's reason here (The Acrobat Alternative). Full disclosure-- Bluebeam.com has chosen to highlight my review on one of their pages, but it was not compensated. Perhaps this professor's review was ... click here for his electronic grading solution.

To use Bluebeam PDF Revu, open the document (Word, Excel, ... anything) you want to mark up. Then open the document as a pdf file using the printer 'Bluebeam pdf" which is installed with the installation. That is, if you have a Word document open, select File/Print from the menu, choose the "Bluebeam pdf" printer and the word document will be saved to pdf and opened in the Bluebeam Revu product. The pen annotations in Bluebeam's product are excellent and will allow you to grade the paper and save the annotations in a pdf file that all the students can read.

Information on Bluebeam PDF Revu:
http://www.bluebeam.com/web07/us/products/revu/standard/

Free download:
http://www.bluebeam.com/web07/us/downloads/standard/

If you like it, then buy your license here for $30. You get two seats (one for your work computer and one for your home). Buy the standard edition unless you use CAD software.
http://www.bluebeam.com/web07/us/store/education_store.asp

I presented how to grade with a Tablet PC at the 2008 CELT (see here for the full presentation -- choose the first presentation under CELT 2008) and blogged about it (actually did a review of Bluebeam on October 2007 (here)).

Let me know if this helps or if you agree or disagree with this electronic grading fix.

More on Note Taking with One Note

On the Student Tablet PC, Robert posts on Note Taking using the Cornell method in One Note. It is a good reference.

Bluebeam Revu prefered over Adobe Acrobat and PDF Annotator?

Bluebeam Revu site
Bluebeam Revu discount(from Student Tablet PC blog)
Bluebeam Revu review (from Got to Be mobile blog)
PDF Annotator (from my previous post)

(links fixed 10/24/07)

Last Friday I downloaded Bluebeam Revu which is a PDF creator, has a PDF print driver, and has great annotating and markup tools. I think this could kill off Adobe Acrobat Pro from my computer and has seriously pushed to the back my previous purchase of PDF Annotator. I really like how it works and the pen tools are quite good. At first I disliked the highlighter until I discovered you can toggle it between highlighting the text and just marking up with a highlighter. This software is designed for me and the way I work. It installs a toolbar in Microsoft Office, but I can not yet figure how to get it to be the default viewer in Internet Explorer. It atomatically installs in the "SEND TO" option of the right click options in explorer. You can right click on a word document, or any document, and choose to open in PDF ala Bluebeam Revu. I do not use AutoCAD, but it you do there is a premium version to support that program.

For now I think this will replace both Acrobat and PDF Annotator, but until I am sure, I will keep both of those on here as well. So far the only thing I really do not like is their ico file. Perhaps I am just way too used to seeing the Adobe Acrobat icon in my directory listings, but I suspect it has to do with my love of red and not that shade of blue. Try it and let me know what you think. Download here.

Whiteboarding with Tablet PCs in the Classroom

Jim Vanides of HP and author of the blog Teaching, Learning & Technology in Higher Education has placed two videos on his site so far. In the first he shows how a teacher in a classroom can annotate a PowerPoint session. In the second he suggests that MW Journal is better than PowerPoint in the classroom. I agree Jim, but PPT has its useful place as well. Both of his videos are great and I embed them here for you to see. Don't forget to go read his blog as well.

First video:

Second video:

How to take notes on a notebook computer

While I prefer a Tablet PC, this article by Caleb Schmerge at TabletPCReview is a nice overview of notetaking. I think he overlooks Microsoft Journal and DyKnow Vision is beyond his review, but I agree on his fondness of OneNote. I did a Comparison of Notetaking Software which you might find instructive.

Augmenting Teaching & Learning with Social Software

Steve Greenlaw posts a new website, Augmenting Teaching & Learning with Social Software, to support a presentation he made to the Developments in Economic Education conference. See his blog for those details and see his references for some good sources on social networking software. This link is the paper written for the conference arranged to allow comment by paragraph. Well done Steve.

OneNote

From WhatIsNew.com is this top ten list of what can be done with Microsoft's OneNote. the article called "Living in OneNote" says it all. I have used my OneNote for about everything, but mostly for meeting notes, notes while on the phone, collecting all the arrangements for conferences, and the actual notes I take at those conferences. I particularly like being able to send files via the print driver to one note for collection in one spot and for marking up. If you match versions you can collaborate with a colleague and share and simultaneously mark up a one note page or section.

If you are new to OneNote or would like more, click on help while in One Note and click on the Microsoft OneNote tour menu item.

PDF Annotator -- Why did I not try this years ago?

I just downloaded a trial copy of PDFAnnotator and used it to answer a student's question. I brought up a blank screen and proceeded to draw a graph about measuring consumer and producer surplus. When done I saved and sent back to the student in pdf format. I BCC'ed myself and was able to read it with Acrobat Reader. The pen selections were adequate and the writing smooth and natural (unlike the horrible markup feature in Adobe Acrobat).

Before this I would read a students email and print it to MS Journal, mark it up and then save to pdf (using the full version of Adobe Acrobat) and finally send back to the students. PDFAnnotator saved me quite a few steps.

What it lacks is the ability to read in different formats or to have a print to PDFAnnotator feature. I may still need Acrobat for that. I was able to use the MS snipping tool to cut from a non pdf document and easily paste into the PDFAnnotator screen.

This is a 80% solution. It needs a print to feature or ability to read other file formats. Until then I won't scrap Journal and Acrobat, but I won't likely use them as much.

Here at WIPTE 2007

Second day here at WIPTE 2007 is starting out strong. Joe Tront from Virgina Tech spoke of a large scale deployment of Tablet PCs in the college of engineering. One nice surprise is his discussion and offer of free download of WriteOn at his website. I hope to evaluate this soon.

He also further sold me on PDF Annotator and I liked how he said they preferred it to Adobe Professional.

Also we heard from the audience of the adaptive book project.

All so far so good.

Recording Lectures for Later Playback

Campus Technology reports that "Lecture Recording System Draws Devotees at Temple." Caputuring handwriting is addressed in this story and I think that is essential. I have been playing with a free trial download of ZD Soft Screen Recorder (Free for 5 minute recordings and $39 for the unrestricted version). This allows for the recording of everything that shows on my screen including handriting and allows a simultaneous audio recording. Sizes of the files are very small and can then be sent to a streaming server or made available from download.

There are lots of available options for codecs including their own format ZD Soft Screen Video, "which is designed for generic screen recording purpose. ZD Soft Screen Video provides lossless image quality in extremely small file size. This package is used to make those videos playable in various kinds of media players, such as Windows Media Player, Real Player and etc. The FOURCC code of ZD Soft Screen Video is 'ZDSV'.... Download it here. (from the zdsoft website)."

More later ...