Dr. Thomas Johnson | ict-design.org | education | technology | ai & NOT A.I. | design

If you are a teacher this is how your Facebook settings should be

Attention:

Facebook needs the default privacy settings I have listed below.

Aside to this fact, I have an ongoing argument with a good friend of mine about teachers adding students to their Facebook accounts. My friend feels teachers should not add students because students might see something not meant for them.

I am this wary about anything I put on to the internet. As an educator I do not want anything on the world-wide web from or about me that is anything less than professional. Why are the comments, photos or other things I put on to Facebook any different?

Essentially, if someone who I added as a friend wanted to place my images or text in some other forum they could easily do so. No one should consider Facebook a secure environment to treat as a secret diary.

Nonetheless, there are some major uses for Facebook in education.

Proof:

Patrick Batty has this to say about Facebook in education:

[M]any students, instructors and administrators are using a number of Facebook applications for a wide variety of academic purposes.

Recently we’ve been examining a number of Facebook apps that are relevant for educational use. We’ve assembled a small list of 20 facebook apps here and are happy to have others add additional apps to the list that you’ve found helpful.

Books iRead: Share the books you’re reading, and see what others think of books with this application.

Flashcards: With this application, you can create flash cards to help you study on Facebook.

SkoolPool: Get the lowdown on schools, online and otherwise, with this neat application.

Rate My Professors: Find out what other students think of professors before you register for their class.

BookTag: This app offers a great way to share and loan books out to students, plus create helpful quizzes for studying.

DoResearch4me: This app makes it easy to gather information using your thesis statement, instructions, and more.

Mathematical Formulas: Distribute formulas, solutions, and more with this application.

SlideShare: Create presentations to send to students with this slideshow application.

Calendar: This calendar app from 30 Boxes lets you organize your days, set reminders and share your calendar with others.

To-Do List: Stay on top of your tasks with this Facebook to-do application.

Zoho Online Office: You can keep all of your documents online, and even share them with classmates, students, and colleagues.

UdutuTeach: UdutuTeach allows you to import courses from myUdutu (a course authoring tool) manage which people can take your courses, and track the learners’ progress.

UdutuLearn: UdutuLearn lets you view courses that you have been given access to and shows your progress.

Courses: Courses offers loads of functionality for online education, with features that let you add your courses, post announcements and assignments, search university reviews find classmates, create discussions and form study groups.

Files: Powered by Box.net, this application makes it easy to store and retrieve documents in Facebook, so you can access them anywhere you have a connection.

WorldCat: Use WorldCat to do research, catalog your library’s collection, and share information with students.

HeyMath!: These mini-movies explain difficult math concepts, so these are great to share with students or use on your own.

Study Groups: Get everyone together on your group project by collaborating with this application.

Caroline Lego Muñoz of Fairleigh Dickinson University states, “Facebook is equipped with bulletin boards, instant messaging, email, and the ability to post videos and pictures. Most notably, anyone can post information and collaborate within the system. Recently, Facebook has opened up development of downloadable applications, which can further supplement the educational functions of Facebook.” in the essay, Opening Facebook: How to Use Facebook in the College Classroom.

I try to take the early adoption technique about new technologies and implementation of such. If you want to as well, try the following.

Strategy:

Follow these 19 steps. This will take 1/2 hour to an hour.

Choose Privacy Settings in the top-right corner, like you see in the picture below.

Click on View Settings

Change the Search for you on Facebook setting if you do not want everyone to find you
Definitely change the See your friends list. I set mine solely to myself.
[Side-note: Last night, at a staff party, a colleague of mine was wondering why students I had added as friends were not trying to add her. She said the students all asked if she was on Facebook, as they wanted to add her. She thought the students were a little slow, but then I mentioned I don’t allow others to see my friends list. She thanked me.]

After you have changed those settings, go Back to Privacy

Choose Customize Settings

Assuming you consider what you write when you post, you shouldn’t need to limit the Posts by me for your friends – who may be students.
Consider your Relationships, Interested In, and Religious and political views as private
Take note: You can edit Privacy Settings for Photo Albums and Videos here

When you Edit privacy settings for photo albums, you have the options seen below.
If you only want specific people to see, choose Customize

IMPORTANT:
You want to limit what others post about you

Choose Edit Settings for:
Photos and Videos you’re tagged in
Can see wall posts by friends, and
Friends can check me in to places (You never know where someone might check you in)

Choose Customize

Choose Specific People
This will take a while – You need to go through your friends list and choose who can see. I usually start typing “a” and Facebook auto-completes with friends with an “a” in their name. Then I type “b”, then “c”, and so on, up to “z”.

Good luck. Report back if you think I missed something or if you would do it differently. Cheers.

A website worth featuring

27 May

Attention:

I don’t do this often, but the Academic Earth website it definitely worth featuring. The website features videos from some of the best educational courses the world has to offer. For example lectures from: Berkley, Columbia, Harvard, Khan Academy, Maryland, Michigan. MIT, Norwich, NYU, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, UNSW, UCS and Yale are all embedded within it.

The site is simple, intuitive and to the point. Videos load quick as they are often embedded directly through Youtube.

Proof:

I am not going to get into the debate about whether education is good for you or not.

However, I am going to point you to a study that actually says that online learning could be better than learning in a classroom. The study is called Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning. It is summed up well in this article by the New York Times.

The Bakers Guide also supports this theory. Alas, they are an online learning community and could therefore be viewing their evidence with a bias.

Whichever way the debate goes, you can’t go wrong with watching a view videos from the Academic Earth for educational growth, as opposed to the latest on the television. So what can you do?

Strategy:

Save Money. Instead of spending thousands of dollars for courses that you would like to take, go to the Academic Earth website and view the best of the best
Search by Subject
Search by Top Rated Instructors
Search by Top Rated Lectures
Search by Top Rated Courses
Search by Top Rated Playlists
Read more about online free learning here

Get better at Youtube

25 May

Attention:

Did you know that you can become more efficient at watching videos on Youtube? That’s right, you can. If you spend a lot of time watching videos through this forum you might as well get better at it, and I bet you hadn’t even thought about something like this.

Proof:

On videos, YouTube allows users to select from 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p, and 1080p. These are all resolutions.

Without going into too much detail, this number refers to the vertical resolution of the source video in pixels, and generally the larger the number the more crisp the video. H3xed

Strategy:

Click on the bottom right number, possibly showing 1080p, 720p, 480p, 360p setting and choose the lowest number, which is probably 240p
Try clicking any place on the loading bar. The video should load from there.
Allow the video to load first by pressing the pause. You know it is loading because the red line should appear all the way down to the end
NOTE: Sometimes you might notice the video is loading at a slow, but steady rate and all of a sudden the red bar jumps to the end. This probably means the video is truncated. Refresh your browser to load the video again
There are other options to install accelerators and downloaders that this eHow article mentions

I hope that makes your already pleasant Youtube viewing day a bit pleasanter. For a few things that you can learn on Youtube, check out this Tomash.Soup blog. Happy viewing!

Here’s a quick way to get attention, give proof, and have a strategy

24 May

Attention:

Read this now to understand my gripping way to write. This article showcases the formula for how I will post in the future. Within each article I will follow a casual, strategic, useful and therefore an easy to follow style of writing. After grabbing your attention like I did already I will make you want to read on because I will systematically give you proof like the following.

Proof:

In the jump article by ProBlogger, “making posts easy to scan” and “consistency” are two points that I will also use in my blog posts. Chris Brogan reiterates making posts easy to read with the idea of structure. He says:

Note that I use the “strong” tag to separate segments throughout the post. There are a few reasons to do that:

It gives your eyes a way to skim.

It breaks up the post.

It rolls into an easy summary

Strategy:

In each blog post, you will notice that I will:

be compartmentalized into the three categories: Attention, Proof and Strategy because it is simple, formulaic and logical.
use bulleted lists as often as possible, as they are easier to read and glean information from quickly
highlight important information within articles, to allow for people to skim fast through articles for the most relevant information
support reasons with sourced, recent and relevant evidence as this University of North Carolina article points to as having impact.

You too, can write good articles by following this simplified strategy. Read more at the jumps listed earlier or do some relevant and recent research by searching for: “How to write good blogs”. Tell me what you think of my new approach to blog writing.