I now officially have my 3rd DyKnow User Group Meeting under my belt. For some reason I’m not always super excited about going, probably because I usually end up going by myself, but I always immensely enjoy being there. This year I found out that apparently everybody from DyKnow knows about my blog. I remember a year ago or so I was looking at my stats and saw a bunch of hits from their domain. I was a little intrigued but kinda forgot about it. Anyways, this has encouraged me to blog a bit more about some of the techie stuff I deal with.
This year they’ve started up a community web site for all of us users to populate with tips, tricks, etc, etc. I think this is a wonderful idea. I love being able to go to a forum for a software package and troubleshoot my problems using other peoples’ past experiences. I should be posting a few things as soon as my account gets activated. I also wrote up a little report to turn in to my jefe. If you’re interested in reading it, I’ve pasted it down below so as not to bore all you casual readers. Some of the formatting is a little off because things never transfer correctly from Word, but it’s still readable.
DyKnow User Group Meeting
DePauw University
June 13, 2007
As always, this year was another great DyKnow UGM. I’m always surprised by what I glean every year I go. I didn’t write down a ton of notes like I usually do, but I’m still going to summarize what I learned.
Key Note Speaker – Dave Berque, DePauw University
Dave Berque is a faculty member at DePauw and is pretty much the guy who came up with the idea for DyKnow. His presentation was titled DyKnow Duos: Past, Present & Future. Dave talked a little bit about how he first started dreaming of pen-based technology and how it could be used in the classroom. He even read us part of an academic paper he wrote back in ‘94 and even showed us a clip that aired on CNN in ’96. He then compared that to what we’re using today and what he would like to see in the future. Above all, Dave stressed collaborating with students and peers and making contacts with those who can help you. He challenged all those attending the conference to make three new contacts today and encouraged us to continue branching out after today as well.
DyKnow 5.0
The new version of DyKnow is out. This is something I’ve known was coming for a while. We’ll need to update our server and all the clients in our labs. There are a lot of new features which are talked about in detail within the documentation for the new release so I won’t go over all of them. Some of them include:
- URL filtering within DyKnow Monitor
- Blackboard integration
- Customizable toolbars
- IE 7 Vista compatibility
- Text boxes enhanced
- Collaboration groups
Session 1: Dive into Group Activities – Michele Villinksi, DePauw University
Michelle Villinksi teaches at DePauw and demonstrated some of the new group/collaboration features in DyKnow 5.0. She broke the crowd up into groups and had us collaborate on word searches, brainstorming, etc. Groups that you create within DyKnow can be saved for later use so you won’t have to keep re-creating them all semester.
Lunch: Jim Vanides, Hewlett Packard
During lunch, Jim Vanides who is a manager for HP’s higher education philanthropy department talked a little bit about educational technology. He talked about technology always being referred to as a “tool” in education. He believes that analogy isn’t quite good enough and his current working analogy is a “tool shed”. Technology isn’t just something used by just person or used alone; it’s something many people use and collaborate with. A tool shed, or work shop, is a place where many people can work on projects together. There are also many different kinds of tools in the shed/shop that can help you complete many different kinds of projects.
Session 2: Collaborative Strategies for Reading and Writing – Diane Hamstra, Park Tudor Upper School
Diane Hamstra is an English teacher at Park Tudor and uses DyKnow for her writing classes. She has been having her students work in groups and is excited to start utilizing some of the new group features in DyKnow 5.0. It sounded like her classes are like writing work shops where students do peer-reviews of writing assignments, work collaboratively and try and grasp different writing concepts and writing skills.
Session 3: Student Seat Chemistry 101 – Vince DiStasi, Grove City College
Vince DiStasi teaches chemistry at Grove City and simulated one of his classes during this session. Vince taught us about hydrocarbons and demonstrated some very interesting teaching practices. One thing in particular was he used private ink to write some of his notes during class. Private ink doesn’t show up on the students’ computers, but will still show up on the screen if you aren’t using projector mode. He said students were telling him if he writes down all the notes, it’s easy to tune out and not pay attention. So even though the students can see some of the answers on the screen, they have to actually write them down to keep them for later. This technique is very similar to leaving blanks in your PowerPoint presentations to get input from the audience.
Session 4: Student Seat Humanities – Andreas Karatsoli, Albany College of Pharmacy
Andreas Karatsoli simulated one of his freshman level, introductory classes and talked about graphs; when to use them, how to know what kind of graph to use, and how to reference graphs in a presentation. He started off with a few polls where he described some data and what you need to do with it. We then had to choose what type of graph would be appropriate from a list. He then broke us into groups and had us do a collaborative project, using graphs, with our neighbors.
Session 5: DyKnow Community – Brian Jones, DyKnow
DyKnow has created a Community site where faculty, tech support, etc can collaborate online to learn, help each other, etc. Included is a knowledge base, forum, user spotlights, etc. In this session Brian and Laura Smalls, president of DyKnow, were asking us what we’re looking for in a community site, how we would use it, etc. I’m all for something like this. When I’m working with a software package and am having problems, I like being able to go online to a forum and talk to other users and administrators that may be having the same problem as me, or have had this problem and have already solved it. The only piece missing right now are users becoming involved and posting content. I told Brian and Laura I would post a few things we’ve ran into/learned while using DyKnow here at Taylor.
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