Brent Warner 0:00
What tools are available at IVC that won’t cost you any money? We’re blasting through 12 tools to explore over the summer. This is the Higher Ed Tech Podcast Season 6, Episode 20.

Tim Van Norman 0:24
Welcome to today’s Higher Ed Tech Podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the Instructional Technologist at Irvine Valley College and Adjunct Professor of Business at Cypress College.

Brent Warner 0:32
And I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL here at IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.

Tim Van Norman 0:40
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us.

Brent Warner 0:43
Last episode 20. Alright, we’re going on summer break after this. So we got through our 20 episodes for the year, which is another achievement for us. Tim, congratulations, six seasons. Wow. I can’t believe it’s been that long, but yeah, so we were talking a little bit about some of the things, like, how are we going to wrap up? And our timing was a little weird, because the semester is technically over at the point that this episode is out for us anyway, but we still have people listening, checking things out, and we thought maybe some conversation around tools to just explore, because IVC, for our faculty, does pay for a number of tools, just like every school out there has something that’s available. So if you’re not an IVC faculty member, sorry, this episode might not totally apply to you, but you should check with your own IT team and see if any of these are things that you have access to as well.

Tim Van Norman 1:39
That and a lot of these, we’ve done a lot of research, we’ve found that these are tools that work really well for us. So if you’re interested in something like what we’re talking about, look into those, because that might be something really useful.

Brent Warner 1:56
Well, and also, they’re already vetted, so they’re in. If you’re a California community college, you already know that they have ways to get vetted into the school. So another easy way. But we gotta move fast because there’s a lot of things to get covered in a short amount of time. So are we ready to go for it? 12? Let’s go for it. Alright. So I’ll name them off. You tell me what to do, and I’ll add anything if I got anything. So the first one is Adjust All.

Tim Van Norman 2:23
One of my favorites. I wish I had it at Cypress College, in fact. So what this does is it allows you to adjust all the dates in your class on one screen. Pull out a calendar at the beginning of the semester and okay, week one, I’ve got these assignments due. I’ve got this module happening, all of that stuff. When are announcements going to go out? All of that can all be done on one screen, just flowing right down through it. It’s really nicely laid out. I love that particular tool.

Brent Warner 2:53
Yeah, I’m going to point out very quickly it is very nerdy for that to be your favorite tool.

Tim Van Norman 2:59
I love it. The number of hours that it saves.

Brent Warner 3:03
Yes, that’s a good reason for it to be a favorite.

Tim Van Norman 3:07
I like several of the others that we’re going through, but that one just really hits me there.

Brent Warner 3:14
For sure. Okay, next up is Annotate Pro.

Tim Van Norman 3:17
Well, that one actually, I’m going to have you go ahead and talk about because you’re much more familiar with it.

Brent Warner 3:21
Yeah, so I think a lot of people will. I used to promote on campus a tool called E-comments, which was great. It was a little Chrome plugin where you could highlight any section on a Google Doc, click a button, and it could leave a comment that was kind of pre-populated. So for us, it was like error corrections around grammar, but it could be anything. Unfortunately, E-comments went out, kind of shuttered its doors, but they kind of move some of their stuff over to this tool called Annotate Pro. Basically does the same-ish thing. It’s a little bit more complicated. There’s a little bit more of a learning curve to it, I have found. But if you have a lot of repeated comments and you’re just plugging things in, you can build a little library of those things and put it into pretty much anywhere on the internet. It doesn’t just have to be a Google Doc. It can plug in and you can use it on any site or any place where you’re interacting. So if you have predefined comments or predefined notes that you want to put into places, it is a really great way to do it. I use it again for grammar stuff, composition, etc.

Tim Van Norman 4:29
Nice. Next up, Brisk.

Tim Van Norman 4:29
Another good one, absolutely. I mean, I like several of these. That’s why we picked them, right? But Brisk allows you to give feedback to students quickly. So one of the things as a support person I hear all the time is, “How come I haven’t gotten feedback on my essay yet?” Well, Brisk can help faculty generate that feedback. You can create a rubric, and it’ll give you the feedback as faculty, so that you can then determine if you want to give that feedback. But it also gives you some features, like you can give it a YouTube video, and it’ll create a slide deck from it. It’ll create a quiz from the YouTube video, all kinds of different things just using their Create button. It’s got a whole lot of different features all built into it. And there’s a free version, and we actually have paid for it on campus, because there’s a number of different things that we really like that next level that it provides. So really good tool to just get in and play with.

Brent Warner 5:35
A lot, yeah, and a good one for exploring some of the AI capabilities out there, too. So very cool. Okay, next up we’re going to – we’ve talked about this one before, I know, but Design Plus.

Tim Van Norman 5:45
Design Plus allows you to take that black, that white page, that blank page that is Canvas, and give it some life, make it look interesting. You can load images into it, make your brand, your class, so your class can have a blue bar at the top, a red bar at the top, whatever it is that makes it so that it fits and every single page looks exactly the same. Every time you use a header one, it’s gonna look like this. You can put icons in it, all kinds of different things, and really have your class look like it’s a professional class instead of just a blank page. And the nice part is, you don’t have to know HTML to do it.

Brent Warner 6:28
I’m gonna add in something just real quickly for anyone listening. It might feel like, “Hey, is that really important?” And it really is. Students are big time judging courses based on the quality and the ease of moving through the courses, right? So we have a generation now that is really design sensitive and understanding that the quality of the way that this looks, the ease of moving through things, having it be pretty. And it really is – some of these ones are really pretty, very cool designs. So really well designed, almost turning your Canvas page into like magazine layouts in some ways. So great, but we gotta move forward, so Tidy Up.

Tim Van Norman 7:11
Tidy Up. So if you’ve only had a class for one semester, you probably don’t need this. However, if you’ve had it for more than one semester, Tidy Up goes in and it scans your whole class and shows you the things that you’re not using anymore. So you know how you’ve got 200 assignments, but you only do 20 a semester. It will help you get rid of the 180 assignments, so the pages will load faster and stuff like that. It will go through your documents and identify what isn’t in use. It will actually allow you to swap out documents. So let’s say every semester you have a document called syllabus. What happens in Canvas? You have to go in. You have to refine every place you put syllabus, to fix that each semester. Not anymore. In Tidy Up, you can go in and just simply replace the file, and it will automatically fix every place right there.

Brent Warner 8:08
This is new to me. I know we’ve talked about this before, but it’s totally skipped my mind, and now I’m like, I gotta use this. So absolutely so Tidy Up. Great. Now we’re gonna go bring it way back. I know we’ve had this one for a long time, because I think we interviewed them in season two, maybe.

Tim Van Norman 8:26
Grackle. So Grackle allows you to take Google Docs, Google Sheets, and especially Google Slides, and make them accessible, and then you can export them as an accessible PDF. So one of the things that’s really happening a lot is we’re really trying to push people to make sure that their documents are accessible. This scans your document and make sure that it is accessible while you’re editing it, so that then it will create that PDF that is also accessible. So really a nice feature that’s available in Google Docs specifically.

Brent Warner 9:07
Yeah, excellent. Okay, next up, Lucid.

Tim Van Norman 9:13
Alright. Lucid allows you to basically kind of do a mind map. It’s a canvas for you to design and draw on and identify how things flow. I guess to a certain extent, it kind of can do some of the stuff that Flipgrid could do a little bit. I like Padlet better for that. But Brent, you have – I know people use that a lot more than most of the others on campus.

Brent Warner 9:46
Yeah, because you can treat it kind of like a whiteboard, and you can put little notes. So you can have all your students jump onto it all at the same time. If you’re doing an online class, it’s really powerful. I know that teachers, online teachers, are really liking it. You leave little sticky notes all over the place, then draw lines to connect them together. So you could, as a teacher, set up like, “Hey, everybody respond and put your answers to question number one.” If you’re doing like a KWL chart or something, put your questions in the first box, and then let’s talk about it. And so anyways, it’s basically an online whiteboard/project planning and mind mapping tool. So and it’s available and really quick and easy to use, so worth looking at, at least.

Tim Van Norman 10:30
It’s also built into Canvas. And when you go into Canvas and do it, you get a free account with them, so it’s nice.

Brent Warner 10:41
All right, one of my favorites, Padlet.

Tim Van Norman 10:43
Yes, Padlet is a lot of fun. What’s a good way to describe it? It’s really interaction. Your students are interacting with each other in a discussion type of format, in a way that allows them to communicate and see what each other’s thinking. But it’s not completely linear, like the Canvas discussions.

Brent Warner 11:12
Yeah, so they kind of define it, and I think they still use this term as the digital bulletin board, right? So you kind of imagine, “Hey, I’ve got a bulletin board up here. I can pin things up on this bulletin board.” I can organize that really clean in rows and columns if I want to, or I can have it be messy, but anything that is digital, can be put into your sticky notes, for example, right? And so whether that just be a quick text message, whether you create a video of yourself or spoken audio. I do a lot of audio with my students. They can plug in outside resources, bring in PDFs, anything that you can do digitally, you can kind of use as a way to interact. And then have students add their own tools and ideas to whatever you set up as the baseline. So, really, really powerful. If you haven’t played with Padlet before, I highly recommend. They have a great learning community out there, and there’s tons of stuff to go practice, learn, play with, and just get started with it.

Tim Van Norman 12:15
Absolutely it’s a great tool.

Brent Warner 12:17
Next P is – oh, we’re going in alphabetical order. I didn’t even notice that until now. PlayPosit.

Tim Van Norman 12:23
PlayPosit. We did an interview with them a while ago as well. So this allows you to play a video, pause that video, ask questions. Play it some more. Pause the video, ask questions, etc. This also allows your students to interact with the video, and they can insert video. They can insert questions and comments in the middle of the video. You can grade them based on what they’re doing with the quiz that you built into the video. So it’s really a neat way of turning a video into an interaction and really having the students interact. But for those of you who wonder, did my students actually watch the whole video, you can actually tell.

Brent Warner 13:11
Yeah, that. And also it ties into Canvas’s grade book. And so if you’re saying, “Hey, once they’ve done this, maybe they’ve answered five or six questions in here,” and however many they got right, that grade can go straight into Grade Book too, which is a really nice feature, especially if you’re building a flipped classroom or anything like that. So we got another P, Pronto.

Tim Van Norman 13:38
Alright. So FERPA compliant, Discord built into Canvas, but it also works on your cell phone, separately and stuff like that. This is a great way for you to interact with your students, and students interact with you. It includes video, audio, images, translation. It will actually translate. If you type something in English, it’ll translate it into the language the student wants it to be in. It really does a really good job of feeding that interaction and supporting your students and their ability and your ability to communicate outside the classroom and even within the classroom, but mostly outside the classroom.

Brent Warner 14:21
Yeah, and it’s great. Again, in Canvas, when you have it installed in there, you just click a button and you get a little chat box that is you and your students able to have a chat all together inside of there. It’s really quite nice. So I use that a lot of times in class, Tim, when I’ve got my students have their computers open. I’m just like, “Okay, I’m just sharing the link with everybody in Pronto.” And so that way I don’t necessarily have – if I’m thinking of something on the fly, and I’m like, “Oh, let’s just go look at this thing.” Then I can project it on the wall, but I can just send it to them and say, “You guys can go look at this later, if you like.” So it’s even just for simple uses like that. If I’m not going into depth, I can do that. And then also just point out last thing for it – when you put students into groups, they can then go into their own group meetings and have their own online chats or actual video chats. So they don’t have to necessarily wait that 40-minute limit on the free version of Zoom or whatever, that can sometimes still be a problem for students.

Tim Van Norman 15:29
Absolutely, it’s great tool. All right. Next is Read&Write. We still have Read&Write? Yeah, I love it, and I’m happy we do.

Brent Warner 15:29
Yeah. So this is an accessible – we purchased it as an accessibility tool, but I like the fact that it’s not just for accessibility. It actually provides access for everybody. So it will allow you to play whatever’s on your screen. So you’ve got a Word document, you’ve got a web page, whatever – you can have it play that and you can hear it. You can also look up individual words. “Wait, what was that word?” And it’ll look it up in a dictionary. It’ll try to tell you, give you an image of it, if it can, stuff like that. So it really becomes interactive, and it’s on the spot learning for somebody who maybe doesn’t, especially the English learners, but for anybody who just needs to have that additional level of information coming in while they’re reading something.

Brent Warner 16:29
Yeah, you kind of think of it like a screen reader, slash interactive picture dictionary, slash accessibility tool for any page on the web, on the internet. So that’s the part that I really like too, Tim. You mentioned it briefly, but you can highlight words on whatever page. So if you’re on Wikipedia or whatever, and you can highlight all these words, or I don’t know if you can do it quite in Wikipedia, anyway, but you can click a button and then it will create a vocabulary list of the words that you’ve been looking for, or whatever else it is. So lots of cool things that you can play with. It is really powerful, especially if you want to continue to support students with different needs, and doesn’t have to be problems. It can be English language learning needs, or it could be learning issue needs, whatever it is. So really great. And then the last one here, Tim is Screen Pal.

Tim Van Norman 17:26
So this is one that I actually do buy myself. I purchase it myself for my own use. For use at IVC, we’ve got it available, and it used to be called Screencast-O-Matic. But what it does is, and they have really started improving some of the stuff that they’re doing, so it can do a number of different things. One is, you can record your screen or your camera, or both at the same time. And as you’re recording the camera, one of the cool things is, when you’re editing it, because that’s number two that it does is edit the videos. You can turn the camera on and off while you’re editing. You can also – while you’re editing – I had to do a video, and for part of the video, I needed to do it on my cell phone. So I put Screen Pal on my cell phone, and I recorded that part on my cell phone, and then I was doing stuff on my computer. So to edit it, I needed to cut them back and forth between them, but when I’m doing stuff on the cell phone, I really didn’t want to be talking because I didn’t know how that was going to work. So what I did was I was quiet while I had my cell phone up, and so I actually put in – cut in the audio. I did a voiceover, and it allows – it stretched the video to match my voice. And it really did a nice job, and it was simple to do it. So that’s one of the things it does. You’ve got the ability to hit a couple of buttons, and it will actually create captions for you. Now, these are not – they allow you to edit the captions to make them compliant, but they’re auto-captioned, so it’s not quite compliant at that. However, you can take those captions and have them translated into another language and now Screen Pal now does video dubbing as well.

Brent Warner 19:38
Oh, okay, so there’s all sorts of things to play with there. Love to explore.

Tim Van Norman 19:44
Play with it, enjoy it. One thing I would say, dubbing – somebody described it as the old karate videos and stuff. So be careful with mouth moving and dubbing. But it’s a really neat tool to do a lot of different things, but specifically recording and editing of videos. It’s amazing, and it’s not nearly as complicated as any of the other tools that we used.

Brent Warner 20:15
All right? Well, there we go. So that is 12 tools we’re going to send you all off to go look at those. If you can’t remember them, we’ll put them in the show notes. So don’t worry, you can go back and take a look at them, and we’ll have links to all of them as well. But I think if you want, if you’re an IVC member, again, we have access to them. So just reach out to Tim to make sure that you know how to get it if you’re not sure.

Tim Van Norman 20:40
Absolutely. Thank you for listening today. For more information about this show, please visit our website, at thehigheredtechpodcast.com.

Brent Warner 20:51
As always, we do want your feedback, so please go to thehigheredtechpodcast.com and let us know your thoughts.

Tim Van Norman 20:57
For everyone at IVC that’s listening. If you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC technical support. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please stop by A-322, or contact me, Tim Van Norman at tvannorman@ivc.edu.

Brent Warner 21:11
And if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at Brent G Warner.

Tim Van Norman 21:15
I’m Tim Van Norman

Brent Warner 21:17
and I’m Brent Warner, and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. This is the end of season six, so we’ll see you in August for season seven. Have a great summer. Thanks. Bye.