Post-Day 2 of DyKnow training

All I can say is. . . WOW!!  I had a great time on day two!!  My mini-lecture went really well, I really like the authoring tools, and though I am disappointed with the conversion of Powerpoint to DyKnow, I am happy to regenerate lectures using Dyknow instead of PowerPoint.

 I am also impressed with how fast one can generate assessments.  I had imagined having to generate all these in advance, but it is clear I don’t have to. 

I have two questions for those out there who read this and are using DyKnow already. . . 1) How big are your classes that have students using tablets.  what is the largest class you use this technology in? and 2) how have you assessed the use of tablets verses not using tablets in your class? 

Thanks for any input you may provide.

Software installs

For those of you who have heard of the troubles with VISTA, let me tell you. . . .

For an operating system that was “already installed” let us just say it took an hour straight just to get the tablet up and running and that was not including the Office 2007 install and the DyKnow install. Vista seems to have difficulty (slow) in actually starting up sometimes. I get an Explorer error occasionally. . . I have disabled the “are you sure you want to do that?” prompt made famous by the MAC computer advertisements, and now my security settings are telling me that I am less secure. . . Obviously this operating system is made for the general public (and Microsoft) who are paranoid about such things like installing software from a CD. I even got the prompt when I was installing Office 2007, a Microsoft product!

I grew frustrated with trying figure out where all the settings are and will try to set it up to look like my XP machine in my office tomorrow. Vista is just SO different than XP in appearance and file arrangement.

Right now I am charging my long life battery (supposedly good for 10 hours of use) overnight.

Tomorrow, a plane to Rhode Island!!

DyKnow Software

We had a conference call with a rep. From DyKnow a couple of weeks back.  Melinda Kraft, Aaron Miller, David Seely and I were given access to upload the software, play with it and them work with the rep for 90 minutes to put the software through its paces.  Aaron, as you may know, has used Classroom Presenter 2.0 and 3.0 for the past 2 years.  I have used both for the past year, so we we had some biases going into the DyKnow meeting.  Here is what we found.

1)  We loved the instant feedback capability where students can check a box, one of three choices(I understand, I sorta understand, I have no clue).  DyKnow then collates and provides a either a pie chart or list with responses of the classroom at anytime during the lecture. 

2) We loved the fact that students can replay our slides as animated movies and that voice can be captured and saved as well.

3) We did NOT like, at all, the fact that point to point writing is NOT possible for students. So, in doing a presentation, each pen stroke appears after it is completed, so direction of lines drawn is NOT seen.  This is because Dyknow communicates over the web, and with something to do with bit rates and stuff I do not understand.  If the student replays the presentation as an animated slide, the point to point IS shown.  Not sure why they cannot do this for both live presentations and for replay. . . Hmmmm. . .

4) We liked the Monitor feature that DyKnow has (for an extra fee) that allows the prof. to see the computer screens of each student. (so if they are checking e-mail or AIMing folks we can know this and Bust them with an individuallized warning to pay attention)

5) We REALLY like the feature that will allow us to project multiple slides of our presentation onto the two screens on our lecuture hall.  This will stop the “can you wait a second while I finish copying your slide” that slowed me down last semester.

All and all we have decided to adopt DyKnow for this year.  I am excited about starting to learn how to really use it.

Aaron spoke with teh DyKnow developer and he told me that ther a rtelots of features the rep. did not know about. . .   looking like a steep learnign curve, but we’ll manage!!