To honor free comic day…

As many of the more geeky EduGeek readers know, last Saturday was Free Comic Book Day. I took advantage of this by catching up on Marvel’s fun and compelling Sinister Six (which was not free, by the way). This event has me thinking of a tool that I have used in the past which allows anyone to design, draft, and publish comic book strips. This is another entry on tools that instructors might use to appeal to visual learners: the tool I highlight this week is Bitstrips.

Bitstrips are an easy way to embed information visually to your students

Bitstrips are quick to make and they can convey information to your students visually without much effort. It is also a simple way to create a static avatar for your course.

Bitstrips can add a bit of visual  flair to:  your syllabus,  your learning  management system,  your orientation  handouts,  even exam instructions.

Bitstrips are not just for instructors, either. You could assign comic strip writing as creative exercises. A great thing about Bitstrip comics is that they can be edited by more than one person, if the designer desires. Therefore, students can work on creating a strip together. For example, a group could design a strip reflecting their interpretation of something that motivated a character to do what she or he did in a novel. Or perhaps they could draw up a case study graphically reflecting a prescribed course of actions.

Example of a bitstrip giving advice on how to ask effective questions.

Bitstrips are easily transferable, both on-line and off. They can be embedded into websites, downloaded as a image file, e-mailed and/or printed. Clearly this flexibility makes Bitstrips quite open as an assessment opportunity.

So, with that being said, I would be really interested to know what uses for this you might have. Send me a note @clongstr on Twitter and I will gather them to post later.

Introducing Cool Iris

When we want to move our student’s learning environment into the ether of the web, we can be hard pressed to go beyond simply assigning more reading.  In the days of multimedia, interactivity and all things web 2.0, assigning links to on-line articles will not cause many students to leap up for their netbooks with joy and glee.  There are a couple of web-based tools that I would like to posit as potentially very useful when we want to appeal to our students who learn best visually and experientially.  This week, I would like us to take a look at Cool Iris.

cooliris2

Click this link for a Cool Iris Demonstration
A brief summary of Cool Iris; it is a free(!) browser plug-in for MS Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Flock (that’s right, dear reader, Flock).  The browser add-on throws open a 3D wall that lets users rapidly browse hundreds of images instantly, using image results from search engine sites.  Default search engines include Google, Yahoo!, Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube, and even Hulu.   “Hulu?” I hear you ask. Weirdly enough, it was surprisingly enlightening to do a quick search on ‘autism’ in Hulu to see what Hollywood threw back at me. Plenty of learning opportunities there, my friends…

But wait, folks, there’s more.  Cool Iris is not limited to the default search engines.  It is enabled on a variety of other websites such as Getty Images, Facebook, the LA Times and many others.  Beyond being a very fast method for gathering and viewing a large collection of photos and videos, users are also able to collect images into a “Favorites” basket – useful for later recollection and/or presentations.  Moreover, Cool Iris allows users to send images they find to others.

How might one use Cool Iris in a blended environment?  When I first presented this tool in-class, I had students do a search in the Flickr search engine within Cool Iris using the three terms ‘Chinese, Buddhist, temple.’  chinesetemple When their 3-D wall popped up, I asked them to scan the photos for about 5 minutes asking them to take stock of what they saw – colors, features, architecture, statues, whatever they thought was striking. We then had a quick discussion and in about 10 minutes time, my crew had a pretty strong grasp of many of the common features of Chinese Buddhist religious architecture.

For homework, I then assigned my students to go home and using their web browsers do a similar exercise using the terms ‘Japanese, Buddhist, temple.’   In this assignment, they were required to take notes that took stock of features they saw in Japanese Buddhist tempes as well as make comparisons with the Chinese temples.

japanesetemple The next time we met, my students were very proficient at distinguishing Japanese and Chinese Buddhist temples from one another. They noted that the Japanese temples tended to be more integrated into their surroundings, that the colors were more neutral and that the exteriors tended to be less ornate than their Chinese counterparts.  This allowed me to then talk about the predominance of Zen Buddhism in Japan as well as the influence of Shinto religion on Japanese expressions of Buddhism.

The sheer ease of this tool has plenty of potential for an all on-line classroom environment.  Give it a try, I bet you will agree.