But there are two easy-to-use programs (both Mac and PC) that are excellent for human and animal figure posing and animation. “Poser” (available for purchase from SmithMicro at http://my.smithmicro.com/mac/graphics.html) and “DazStudio” (available for free from DAZ3D.com) both can be used within minutes of starting and animations  can be easily accomplished in just a few minutes more. Both Poser and Daz formats are popular with independent model designers and you can purchase (often for as little as $.99) thousands of models online or download many free ones (see DAZ3D.com, contentparadise.com, poserworld.com).

Daz images will be used to demonstrate here but the programs are very similar in their layout and tools. Poser has more sophisticated animation capabilities.

1. Models are loaded into the program by selecting from the content folder that holds the models that come standard with the programs as well as those purchased separately.

2. Models include human of all ages and sizes, as well special humans like “The Freak” which is an oversize, muscular male that can be morphed into various monsters. Animals, plants, and props are also available.

3. Pre-designed poses can be applied to the figures or each body part can be manipulated and posed separately.

4. Switching between different views (front, sides, top, perspective) can make modeling and positioning easier. This scene is shown with 4 views and the screen can be split in numerous ways. A background image or color can be added as can complete 3D environments that allow the positioning of figures within a 3D space.

5. A final rendering, as a still image or an animation, can be produced in high quality and many different formats, including with comic book textures.

Daz3D will be demonstrated in a workshop on March 1, 2010 in the Weigle Information Commons, 10am to 11:30am. Register at: http://tinyurl.com/y8fma6f

1. Design your presentation mindfully; plan interactive moments.

Use the interactive features of your web conferencing software to keep your audience connected to your topic and each other.

• Provide a warm-up activity. Share a map on the whiteboard and have participants identify where they’re located, for example, or have participants play a simple word game, like Hangman. Getting participants to use the interactive features right from the start helps set the “ground rules” for interactivity throughout the session.

• Design moments for guided reflection. In her undergraduate World Music course, Dr. Carol Muller plays unfamiliar music to her students and prompts them to describe in few words their initial response to that music using the direct messaging tool.  As the written responses come in, she continues to speak, rephrasing student thoughts using the academic register of her field. Within a few weeks, she notices that students start to use the language of ethnomusicology in their chat sessions.

• Design question and answer sessions into your talk. While Dr. Peter Struck delivers lectures in his Greek and Roman Mythology course, for example, students are encouraged to participate in backchannel conversations with the Teaching Assistant via the chat tool. Every 10-15 minutes, he pauses his lecture, allows the TA to report on what students are commenting on in the chat, and then extends the conversations with the students via the voice and video tools before returning to his lecture.

• Design small group work into your presentation. In Academic Writing and Research Design in the Arts and Sciences, a graduate seminar, Dr. Kris Rabberman uses breakout rooms for close reading and group discussions. In these private spaces, students work with a select number of their peers on an activity aligned with instructional goals. Dr. Rabberman visits each room to provide guidance/feedback. After the group exercise, students then return to the main room to present their findings/conclusions to the larger group.

• Use polls (quizzes) to check for understanding and track participation.  You can design these in advance, or create them as you deliver your content. In the LPS information session for online students, for example, we ask how many users have taken an online course before, whether or not they’ve used the web for real-time interaction, and, if so, which tools they’ve used (Skype, Google Talk, etc.). We then use that data to drive our conversations about how online courses work at Penn.

2. Create visuals that enhance your verbal delivery.

• Share your screen with users. Take participants on a web tour or show them how to use online tools. As a guest lecturer in a graduate seminar, for example, David Azzolina from Penn Libraries introduces students to key databases and resources available in Penn’s extensive library system.

• Create a whiteboard where participants can work collaboratively. Dr. Kris Rabberman uses the whiteboard to help students identify writing conventions and develop peer editing skills. She uploads samples of text to the whiteboard and asks students to use the marking tools to highlight/circle key issues.

• Pre-load images or include them in your lecture slides. In a lecture describing the history of parliamentary land enclosure in Britain in the eighteenth century for her Introduction to Romanticism course, Myra Lotto includes historic maps and images of a pastoral countryside to convey the mood of that period.

• Use PowerPoint strategically. In Calculus 2, Nakia Rimmer uses animated slides to guide students through solutions to complicated problems. Read Edward Tufte’s work if you want to learn more about the effective use of Power Point and the design of visual information. He’s bringing his one day course on Presenting Data and Information to Philadelphia on March 16, 2010.

3. Control your verbal delivery.

• Speak a little bit slower and a bit more emphatically than you might normally speak in a face-face lecture session.
• Vary the volume, rate and tone of your speech.
• Incorporate pausing to highlight key ideas, transition between points, and/or recapture the audience’s attention.
• Worried about whether or not your participants are following along? Establish techniques for collecting frequent feedback from participants. Have students use the “My Status” tools (shown on the right), for example, to let you know whether you need to speed up or slow down, speak louder or softer.

To learn more about effective practice in designing presentations using Adobe Connect Professional, visit:

RIT Online Learning, winner of the New Media Consortium’s 2008 Center of Excellence Award.

• Student Engagement Strategies
• Best Practices and Technical Tips

Adobe’s Resource Center provides tutorials on features and best practice advice:

• Read through the User Quick Guide or watch a video about how the web conference tool works.

• Best Practices for Delivering Virtual Classroom Training

Please consider sharing what you learn by submitting comments below.

I found it interesting – but difficult - to teach this way. I spent much time preparing handouts (sample spreadsheets of “before” and “after”) and worrying about pace and structure. I chose a traditional approach where I shared my screen and manipulated Excel and then asked participants to “watch and repeat” on their own computer.

The technology worked quite well and the participants all seemed to keep up, and be eager for more. But being the presenter, I had this odd sinking feeling that I was shouting down a deep, empty well.  I have presented at several conference sessions online – but I have no expectation of audience participation when I am lecturing. It felt much stranger to conduct a small-group hands-on workshop completely online. We are planning to try this again in January and suggestions for how to structure the activity to be more interactive and less didactic would be most welcome!

It’s no surprise that most of the technologies (and the pedagogies behind them) that we’re recommending  are the very same things we already advocate as effective ways to enhance teaching.  You can see a summary of these recommendations on the SAS Computing web site at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/teaching_resources/flu

Hopefully, we won’t face a true emergency situation this fall.  But I am hoping that the threat of a flu outbreak will motivate more instructors to take advantage of services that are already available, and get them interested in new ways to engage with their students.

Many of the technologies we recommend are very basic, such as using Blackboard to make announcements, distribute documents or collect assignments.  Others involve more creativity, such as using discussion boards, wikis or collaboration tools.  Blackboard is the obvious first place to turn since it’s already tied into Penn’s registration systems and we’ve got good support systems in place.

But I’ll take this opportunity to put in a plug for one of my  favorite technologies which is rarely used but could be enormously useful – even when everyone is healthy.  That is, creating “screencast” movies to record basic lecture materials or technical demonstrations.

By moving some lectures outside of the classroom instructorss can free up more time for discussion and problem solving.  Those using special software such as Matlab or SPSS in their classes can record tutorials on how to perform important functions.  Screencast movies can  demonstrate how to use Library resources for research.  Basically, if you can do it on a computer, you can make it into a movie.  Details are explained at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/teaching_resources/record_lecture

I decided to wait before posting about this tool until it had a few months to mature, and until I had time to really kick the tires.  Now that I’ve done that, I agree that it can be a powerful tool and that faculty in certain fields should be aware that it exists, but I don’t think that it’s going to make homework obsolete.

Since Wolfram Alpha is based on the computation engine of Mathematica, that’s where it does best.  If you enter “integrate x sin^2 x dx”, you get

But a link also appears to “show steps”, which explains each of the steps in the solution, essentially doing the students’ homework for them.  This isn’t really new, since sites like http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ have offered step-by-step solutions for some time, so people who teach courses that assign these types of problems are probably already aware of these resources and take them into account in their teaching.  But so far, mathematical problems are the only type of input that results in a solution with steps, so instructors in other fields need not worry.

On the other hand, Wolfram Alpha employs a wide variety of data sets, so if an instructor thinks that an assignment will send students to the library or to a particular electronic resource where they’ll have to hunt for information and interpret it, they may be surprised.  For example, how did the Consumer Price Index change between June 2008 and June 2009?  Just enter “consumer price index june 2009 / consumer price index june 2008″ and you get the result:  98.57%, or a drop of 1.43%.  And if you have a large data set, Wolfram Alpha will curate it for you – see http://www.wolframalpha.com/participate/structureddata.html

There are a million other things that Wolfram Alpha can do, too, like:

• balancing a chemical equation:  enter “C3H8 + O2 —> H2O + CO2″ and you’ll get You’ll get the result, but you won’t get the steps required to get there, so students can check their results but it won’t do the work for them if the assignment requires that you “show your work”.
• calculating the nutritional value of my favorite smoothie recipe (which makes 2 servings):  enter “calories in 1 banana + 3.5 cups strawberries + 0.5 cup milk + 0.5 cup orange juice + 3 teaspoons sugar + 1 teaspoon lemon juice” and you get the full nutrition information in a format that looks very similar to the panel on all packaged food products.  You also get a place to choose what type of milk you want to use and to make other ingredient choices.

I’ve used Wolfram’s Mathematica software for more than 10 years now, and I’m very interested in the ways in which it might make a positive contribution to engaging students with course material.  If you’d like to talk about ways that you might use it in your course, please contact me!

Fortunately, there are now lots of ways that instructors can have students build web sites using free services that are available to the public.  Below are links for just a few of these services.

Of course, before creating assignments that will generate publicly-viewable web sites, instructors need to make sure that the assignment will not invite students to disclose confidential or personal information.  I’ll have more about that topic in my next post.

http://www.blogger.com
It’s easy for students to create accounts and start posting within just a few minutes.
OK, a blog is not the same thing as a “web site,” but in many cases it gets the job done.  It’s one of the easiest ways to get information posted in a timely way.  Contributors can post to their blogs via email, making it possible for them update content from almost anywhere via mobile devices

http://sites.google.com/
Google Sites lets almost anyone build a site without having to know HTML.  Everything the students need to do happens in a standard web browser, so there’s no need for special software like Dreamweaver.  Many students already have google accounts, so they can get started quickly.

http://www.webs.com/
Webs  is another free service which provides an impressive array of supported features, including calendars, photo galleries, forums, various widgets, statistics tracking and much more.  Sites created through webs.com will include an advertising banner, but if you can live with that,  it’s a great resource.

http://freehostia.com/
Is an internet hosting site that offers a basic service tier for free with no advertising; there is a $10 per year fee for registering a domain name (e.g.  myclassproject.org). This is a good choice for those who want the complete flexibility for developing a site from scratch, without having to use preformatted templates, etc.  It requires that users understand how to transfer files via FTP, etc.   But it does offer a traditional Unix hosting environment for free for sites which don’t need a lot of storage space of expect large numbers of visitors; sites can be upgraded to accommodate more space and traffic for reasonable fees.

He also discusses his experiences in the Center for Teaching and Learning’s Teaching with Technology Seminar.  These seminars are discussion groups aimed exclusively at faculty where they can discuss why they use technology in their classes.  There are people on hand who help with questions about how to use the technology but the real focus is how technology can benefit student learning. These events are a useful place to send faculty who are interested in using technology or who want to use technology more effectively to engage students. I would advocate sending any faculty who use PowerPoint to the upcoming event on PowerPoint (Monday October 20 from 2:00-3:30 in the seminar room of the Weigle Information Commons). I used to malign PowerPoint but after the conversation with Drs. Mike Kaplan (Biology) and Jay McInerny (Classical Studies) I have come to see how it can be a great tool for engaging students (rather than letting them sleep in the dark while the slides pass by).

So far, we have held several beginner workshops (how to walk, chat and fly in Second Life) and one building workshop by the builder of our space, Tim Allen. There seems to be broad interest in Second Life as people try to figure out what role it could play at Penn. Our online resource links to some educational resources.

This Halloween, we will try our first SL event – an avatar contest to go with the Penn Reading Project’s Inner Fish activities. Do you have suggestions on how to reach students who may be interested in Second Life avatar building?