FITS Newsletter Home

Table of Contents:

• GIS Day 2008
  
• The Mobile Classroom and The iPhone/Touch
• Romancing the Three Kingdoms in Google Earth
  
• Moodle Best Practice (Backing Up Your Course)
  
• Staff Spotlight: Jean Everage

Celebrate the Tenth Anniversary of GIS Day

Contributed by Beth Wilkerson, GIS Specialist (adapted from GIS Day press release)

Held each year on the Wednesday of National Geographic Society’s Geography Awareness Week, GIS Day is a global event that celebrates geographic information system (GIS) technology. Its goal is to make people aware of this innovative technology that uses geography to bring numerous benefits to the world and to highlight the important contributions GIS is making in the fields of science, technology, information, and the humanities.

A GIS is a computer-based system that links geographic information with descriptive information and presents the results on a map. By converting data into visual layers on a map, users can gain a better understanding of the data and can immediately begin to pick out trends or relationships that may not have been discovered using traditional analysis methods.

Although you may not be aware of it, GIS touches our lives daily. It is used throughout the world to solve problems related to the environment, health care, land use, business efficiency, education, and public safety. For example, the power supply directed to homes, the patrol cars and fire trucks that keep neighborhoods safe, and the delivery trucks on the road all function more efficiently because of GIS. Most recently, we have seen how GIS technology can be used to aid Homeland Security initiatives, map the debris field following the Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy, monitor the spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), and track the 2008 U.S. Presidential election. The applications of GIS technology are endless, limited only by the imagination of its users.

2008 marks GIS Day’s tenth year, and this is the fifth straight year that DePauw has hosted a GIS Day event. This year’s event will showcase faculty and student GIS projects as well as introduce GIS concepts via posters, displays, multimedia presentations, and interactive activities.

Join us to celebrate GIS Day 2008, and find out how your colleagues are using GIS!

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

3:00 – 5:00 p.m.

Julian Science & Mathematics Center Atrium

For more information, visit http://www.depauw.edu/univ/gis/GIS_Day_2008/.

Contributed by P. Foss, Classical Studies

Quite unintentionally at first, I’ve realized that the iPhone is a fantastic teaching and course management tool. From portable media, to grading and evaluation, to class communication, I can carry practically everything I need with me in one small and handy package. Not only can I take students and classroom technology anywhere, but I can also take my classroom with me wherever I go, and get things done in those small windows of opportunity that we have. I’ll present some of things I’ve used the iPhone for this term, and will be happy to discuss their pros and cons.

Features:

1. AUDIO FILES. In-class, whether in the classroom or after taking the students outside, I can play music files from iTunes (using the built-in speakers) for students that are directly relevant to class content, and which otherwise would have required firing up the whole tech classroom apparatus. For example, I’ve done this at the Nature Park to play Suzanne Vega’s Calypso and the Soggy Bottom Boys’ Man of Constant Sorrow when discussing the choice of Odysseus in Books 5-8 of the Odyssey whether: 1) to live forever with a goddess on an edenic island, or 2) endure great suffering and no guarantee of success in trying to return home to Ithaka and reclaim his house and family.
2. STILL and VIDEO IMAGES. When discussing Greek culture in the Iron Age (or some other subject with visual material), if I spontaneously think of an object I could show them but I don’t have the media projector and computer already working, I’ve pulled out the phone, done a quick Image search (using the fast Google App [Google, free]), zoomed in on the image, and walked it around the room to show students as I am talking, or to supplement a student’s presentation while they are talking. Searches are saved so they are faster the next time. You can even Save the image (by holding a finger down on the image) from the browser window, and it goes right into the Camera Roll album on the iPhone, so you can pull it or others up later for a slide show if you wish, make a flash card out of it (see below), or bring it over to my laptop the next time you sync the device. Panning or zooming is easy, using one or two fingers. You can also take ‘screen shots’ of anything on the iPhone by holding down the Home button, and then pushing the top button; the resulting image ends up in your Camera Roll album. The same can be done with YouTube clips from films (e.g., Monty Python’s Life of Brian clips for Latin or Roman Civ.); screen & audio quality are quite high, and clips can be bookmarked. Such images, including those you take with the built-in camera, can be combined with text and audio in a Flash Cards App (Jason Wentworth, $2.99) to be used for review or in-class pop quizzes. And if you want more people to see it, a mini media projector (8 x 10 x 6 cm)
with built-in speakers has been announced (Qingbar MP101) and should be available soon.

3. CLASS PARTICIPATION AND COMPETITIONS. Another App is called TallyCount (itention!, $1.99), which basically makes tallies. I have each one of my students as a separate tally, and then in-class or after class, when a student makes a great comment or contribution to class, I can ‘add a tally’ to their total, and thereby keep track of class participation
over the course of the term without worrying if I have a paper and pen handy. I can also easily keep track in a Latin class when I divide up the class into two or three competing groups over a collective translation or grammar contest.

4. MARKING PAPERS. Students are emailing me their papers as PDF files, and I use another App called Annotater (Jim
Brink, $4.99), which allows me to transfer the PDFs to my phone, where I can use the touch screen to mark up the papers
with transparicized lines, checks, circles, comments, and typed notes of any color I choose, and I email the
papers back, thus saving a few trees, and I can do my grading wherever I get a chance, and without having to carry around a stack of papers.

5. READING. Various programs such as AirSharing (Avatron, $6.99) or FileMagnet (Magnetism Studios, $4.99) connect wirelessly to your computer and allow you to transfer PDF, Word, Excel, RTF, Powerpoint, html files, etc. to your iPhone,
where you can read them at your convenience in portrait or landscape format. The legibility is excellent, and you can look over the readings you’ve assigned or catch up on that journal article without having to lug around the laptop or the printout. You can also use Annotater to mark notes on those files if you convert them to PDF.

6. GRADING ON MOODLE. I also can access Moodle on the iPhone, so I can easily grade posts to the discussion forum,
journals; see who has been accessing the assigned readings, consult the syllabus and course documents, etc.

Epilogue
Not only can I take students, and many elements of classroom technology, anywhere (manyplaces outside on campus have good WiFi), but I can also take my classroom with me, in one convenient device that I am going to carry around anyway. It is like the ultimate educational Swiss-army knife. One can also keep in touch by email, texting, and of course, phone.
There are other functions as well; Its built-in GPS and Maps App, with road and satellite coverage, allowing the placing of ‘pins’ to bookmark places as in GoogleEarth, could leverage geographical concepts and contexts. The camera can capture documents, images, persons, artworks, etc. (I could email students pictures of an unknown object as a pop quiz in an archaeology course, or lines from a poem to examine in a lit class.) There is a built-in accelerometer and gyroscope, so it always knows where in space it is oriented, and how fast it is moving (used mostly for gaming). It offers the potential of much spontaneity, and as we are in the early days of the Apps, all sorts of cool utilities are imaginable, and I’m sure I’ve not thought of everything one could do with the Apps that currently exist. But here are just three other useful Apps:

1. Writing Pad (Norman Wang, free): a novel and fast way to take notes, by ‘drawing’ the words.
2. TouchRPN (Daniel Staudigel, $7.99): a full-featured RPN calculator, like those great old HP models.
3. Recorder (Dan Walton, $0.99): a easy and clean voice-note recorder

There are flash-card programs for studying Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and sign language (among many more); graphing/plotting utilities; periodic table aids; astronomical maps, etc. Universities such as Stanford have made their web and e-services available for iPhone/touch.

Contributed by Beth Wilkerson, GIS Specialist

According to Dr. Sherry Mou (Asian Studies), “teaching Chinese culture to students with little or no background in Chinese history and geography can be a challenge”. This fall, students in Dr. Mou’s First -Year Seminar are studying Chinese culture and literature with an added technological twist. Students are not only reading a complete translation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but they also are gaining insight into Chinese culture by using Google Earth.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a classic Chinese historical novel that was written in the fourteenth century. It focuses on events that occurred near the end of the Han Dynasty and during China’s Three Kingdoms era. This massive novel (120 chapters spanning over 2000 pages) includes numerous historical battles and places, and for readers unfamiliar with China, making sense of it all and keeping characters and events straight can be a daunting task. Dr. Mou is helping her students visualize the locations and grasp the cultural significance by using Google Earth to incorporate interactive maps and multimedia content into lessons.

Google Earth is a free, downloadable virtual globe application that allows users to virtually fly anywhere on the face of the Earth. The Google Earth globe is completely covered with spatially referenced aerial imagery, and via Google Earth’s navigational tools, users can zoom in to explore specific locations as well as tilt the view to see the terrain or topographical features of the Earth. In addition, Google Earth allows users to create custom content that can be shared with others, in this case, with students in a First-Year Seminar.

In preparation for the seminar, this summer Dr. Mou, Ryan Johnson (DePauw student), and Beth Wilkerson (GIS Specialist) worked to create Google Earth content to accompany the Romance of the Three Kingdoms novel. In particular, placemarks (point locations in Google Earth) were created for locations mentioned in the novel. Not only do the placemarks provide a geographical frame of reference for what the students are reading, but by embedding images, text, and audio-video clips in the placemark description balloons, students gain a broader comprehension of the culture and its relationship to location. In addition, maps from the novel that portray troop movements, battles, or other significant events were spatially overlain on the Google Earth globe. Although the hand-drawn maps may not precisely correspond with exact locations of Chinese landforms and cities, students are able to get a sense of the role of geographical elements (e.g., mountains, plains, rivers) and how those features impacted the characters in the story and the events being described.

Because the seminar is still in progress, it is difficult to ascertain the full impact that Google Earth will have on this course. However, it is safe to assume that the incorporation of this interactive spatial technology will “not only illuminate the old stories, but also provide an exciting inter-textual adventure through the varied interpretations”. [Mou, CLTA Abstract, 2008]

For more information on how you may use Google Earth in your class, contact Beth Wilkerson at bwilkerson@depauw.edu.

By Lynda S. LaRoche, Assistant Director of Instructional & Learning Services and Moodle Support Coordinator

By now you know the importance of periodically creating a backup copy of your computer files, especially if you’ve been through a system crash, power outage, or computer virus that wiped out your hard drive. However, have you thought about regularly backing up your Moodle gradebook and course site?

You may be thinking “The Network Team routinely creates a backup of the Moodle server, so why do I need to do it, too?” First, good practice - creating your own complete digital copy of your Moodle course at a particular instance of time is good practice. Second, comfort - knowing you have your own backup and physically holding it in your hands is comforting because you know you do not have to depend on someone else if a problem occurs. Third, recovery time - accidental deletion of material is rare, but it does happen and Moodle does not come with an easy to click “Undo” button. Pulling lost material off your personal backup is much quicker than relying on someone else to search through several server backup files that contain thousands of Moodle sites.

To create a backup of your Moodle gradebook:

1. Click Grades in the Administration block of your course.
2. Under the View Grades tab, click the format you want for your backup. Note: ODS format is an OpenDocument Spreadsheet (click here for more information).



3. Save the backup to your hard drive, the network, a USB drive, CD, DVD, etc. and keep it in a safe and secure place.

To create a backup of your Moodle site (including the gradebook and user information):

1. Click Backup in the Administration block of your course.
2. The default setting is to include all materials, including all user data. Keep these settings, and then click Continue.
3. The default name for the backup file includes your unique course name along with the date and time of the backup. You can keep this name or rename the file to something more meaningful to you.
4. Scroll to the bottom of the page, click Continue à Continue.
5. The backup file will be placed in the Files option of the Administration block of your course under the backupdata folder.

A backup of your Moodle site only contains quiz questions if at least one question from their category has been added to a quiz. Also, scales are only backed up if they are used by at least one activity. To ensure all questions in your quiz pool and/or all scales are backed up, you may want to consider creating a mock quiz and/or activity that is not visible to your students. Once you are done with your backup, you can delete these mock items.

Losing course materials is a very rare occurrence. Although you are not required to periodically create a personal backup of your Moodle gradebook and course site, it is a “Best Practice” I strongly encourage you to consider.

Jean joined the FITS staff as its new Secretary in August.  In her current position, she works mornings in the Academic Resource Center and afternoons in the FITS office.  She had previously served as the Assistant Director of the Bonner Scholars Program at DePauw for several years. Before joining the DePauw staff, Jean was the Director of Membership and Chapter Relations for the Society of Professional Journalists, a national nonprofit association formerly headquartered in Greencastle.  She earned a bachelors degree with a major in Psychology from Franklin College in Franklin, Indiana.  Jean is a lifelong resident of the Putnam County area and currently lives in a rural area near Eminence.