60 or so Must Visit Sites

The ABA TechShow does a presentation each year called 60 Sites in Sixty Minutes.

The Social Media Law Student Blog did a better job on this list: http://socialmedialawstudent.com/twitter/60-epic-sites

Here’s a link to the CALI presentation on 55 Gadgets in 55 Minutes: http://w.cali.org/conference/sites/default/files/Cool%20Gadgets.pdf

Guest Blogger Post: 3 Free Online Tools That Can Help Busy Law Students

A law student’s academic life can be summed up in three words: lots of studying. Whether in lectures, in libraries, or researching at home, law students find themselves consistently buried in piles of data and history. But there are a few online tools that can help law students everywhere juggle class notes and outside research, possibly even freeing up some time for a social life.

 1. WorldCat (http://www.worldcat.org )

 Lexis may be the primary go-to research database for law students, but WorldCat helps makes finding specific physical books and documents easy. The online catalog has records of books in libraries around the world. Simply type in an author, title, or subject into the search bar, and enter the desired zip code. WorldCat will look up libraries in the specified area that have the requested materials in stock. The catalog makes even searching for topics in the law library easier and more efficient.

2. Evernote (http://www.evernote.com)

 A sharpened pencil, hornbook, and loopy longhand may be the law student’s weapons of old, but these days, note-taking has gone digital. Get rid of yellowing spiral notebooks and turn on a laptop. Evernote’s handy free program is a note-organizing wizard that can capture any legible writing and turn it into a searchable text document. This means that students can use their cameras or phones to capture a professor’s PowerPoint presentation or whiteboard scribbling and Evernote will turn it into a Word-like document for them, so that they can focus on what is being said and not worry about scribbling down what is on the board. Word documents can also be integrated into the student’s Evernote account, where he or she can add additional tags and labels to make specific notes easier to find, or search within the content for specific pieces of information.

3. Google Docs (http://docs.google.com)

Students barely have enough time as it is, and having to figure out everyone’s schedules to host a group meeting can be near impossible. With Google Docs, group projects and collaborations are much easier and efficient. Any group member can create documents or upload them online, and other members can collaborate from the comfort of their own homes. Groups can host real-time e-meetings, or add to the project separately. The application also allows individual users to organize their own files, making team work and organization a breeze.

 This post was contributed by Hannah Watson, who writes about the university online courses. She welcomes your feedback at   HannahWatson84@yahoo.com

Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is the latest trend in educational technology.  It represents a paradigm switch in the way schools deliver software.  It shifts the emphasis form locally managed server-client installations and IT-related services to Web-accessible resources on thousands of servers called “clouds.”

Many of the popular tools are free:

• Zoho writer – can share MS Word files
• Google docs – robust MS office suite alternative
• Adobe Buzzword - similar to the above
• Adobe Photoshop Express - 2GB of photo storage
• 37Signals Whiteboard - can copy/paste from Word docs only
• Jing - screen capture
• VoiceThread – create/share multimedia slideshows

How does this impact legal education?

According to LegalWritingProf Blog on May1, 2009: Amazon offers free cloud computing services to educators

To the extent Westlaw’s TWEN and Lexis’ Blackboard (along with GoogleDocs, among others) are already forms of cloud computing, I’m not sure whether Amazon’s service has any advantages that would cause law profs to forego those in favor of this.  For the time being, Amazon is offering up cloud computing access for free and some of you may indeed discover advantageous ways to use it in the legal writing classroom.  Unlike Twitter, which IMHO still needs to prove itself, cloud computing is for real (at least until that too proves wrong).

Kick the tires here.  Hat tip to the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

From AdjuntlawProf Blog on May 4, 2009:

….Seems like this service functions exactly like Blackboard and TWEN except that there are no links out perform legal research. For colleges, this service might be worth a try. However, for law schools, I would stick with TWEN or LEXIS Blackboard. Personally, I prefer TWEN.

In-Class Polling Tool From CALI

With CALI Instapoll, professors ask a question in class and CALI Instapoll (www.cali.org/instapoll) lets them create a poll online.

Here are the directions:

1. Click on the ‘Create a Poll’ button
2. If you do not want students to be able to change their answers, uncheck the box next to “Students may change their answer.”
3. Announce the Poll number to the students.  (The Poll# appears both in the upper right hand corner of the screen and below the virtual clicker.)
4. Verbally provide the question and answer choices to the students and ask the students to answer on their virtual clickers.
5. Results will appear on the professor’s screen in the form of a bar graph.
6. To clear the results in order to ask another question, click ‘Reset.’

CALI Launches Legal Education Commons

Yesterday CALI celebrated the launch of the Legal Education Commons, a place for teachers of the law to find, utilize, and share legal education materials.  The LEC is an open pool of legal education materials available under a creative commons license, so teachers of the law can utilize what they find in the LEC to help them teach. Included are 700,000+ federal court cases from public.resource.org as well as 300+ original illustrations from CALI lessons.  More details are available on the LEC website.

Here’s a video tutorial on how to upload and share resources in the LEC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKtB5VhejGk

Playing with the things I learned at CALI

• I made a RSS widget for this blog as well as a Facebook app using http://widgetbox.com
• I made a chat for this blog and a chat room for Albany Law tech using http://meebo.com
• I started a Ning group – http://albanylaw.ning.com
• I already have a Facebook page and there is an Albany Law page (but a former student is the admin).
• I have a twitter account but don’t find it that useful.
• Here is the virtual tour of our new courtroom that I made with  http://www.magtoo.com :
  http://www.magtoo.com/tour.do?method=viewMagShow&id=1214398923968  

Blogging from the CALI Conference in Baltimore

Keynote – Paul Maharq – Transforming Legal Education - http://simplecommunity.org

Keynote summary from Liveblogger, Gene Koo – http://lsi.typepad.com/lsi/2008/06/liveblogging-th.html
Slides: http://slideshare.net/paulmaharq

Session 1 – When to jump on the IT bandwagon, when to jump off… – FSU College of Law

2 librarians surveyed their law students and came up with some bluntly honest comments, yielding surprising results for those of us choosing new IT applications of all types

• good AALL publication on using wikis
• offer a prize to get good results on students completing surveys
• 63% IM, 82% use MySpace or Facebook
• 98% rarely used Second Life, 89% rarely used RSS
• Google  analytic tools – free – put cod on all your webpages

Session 2 – Our Clicker presentation with UTexas College of Law

It seemed to go well – Dan & got a lot of positive feedback.  UTexas uses Turning Point (one of the conference sponsors.)  The only downside of their clicker system is that it only works seemlessly if you are a PowerPoint user.

                                              

Session 3  – Where the magic happens  – Nova Southeastern

• turn off the light and put a lamp behind your monitor!?
• Firefox has cool add-in
• free software tools
  • flickr for photos
  • photoshop express for editing
  • piclens – 3D viewer
  • animoto – slideshow creator ($10-15)
  • eyespot – video creator
  • palbee – videoconferencing (6 users)
  • Magtoo.com - create a virtual tour – html code provided

VARK – one method of identifying learning preferences – the VARK Questionnaire (www.vark-learn.com )

Session 4 – The Nuts & Bolts of using MediaNotes – Gene Koo (CALI)

Great – very Informative!!  I really understand how to use MediaNotes to annotate video, what to buy to make it happen (and I sat next to Paul Maharq).

• red pen for video
• need a laptop and a webcam (logitech top of the line $100)
• camera comes with the software
• hit start & hit stop when done – video is automatically saved on the laptop
• audio is more important than video so if room is noisy, use a headset mic
• have students review their own - give them a set of tags (concepts – ex: closed question, summary, open question…)
• or give them a video of a TV show or movie to use
• can count # of tags, can filter by tag
• tagging is done by the reviewer, filter is done by the tagger
• to start: select new project, find the video, hit + sign and add comment or create a tag (pick a color) and drag onto event, can import tags
• details checkbox shows comments belwo each tag on right
• can separate video in a separate location or packpage the project (tags & video) and save it
• buy 2 GB USB flash drives to exchange files
• upload load speed to CAI spaces is slow
• CALI is going to set up a chain in the next few months (send an email to the next reviewer, etc)
• software is free for faculty & staff (use CALi id on website to download)
• $20 for law students – price will be coming down
• outside services that charge $2/min to transcribe MP3 audio, you can copy and paste the transcript into event
• uses .wmv, mov or mp3 file formats not flash
• tags are shared in to MediaNotes community (interviewing & counseling tags)
• in March – new harware options will be coming out

Dinner & tour of the aquarium

Guest Blogger Post – Research Made Easy: Top 5 Online Citation Tools

Whether you are writing a college paper in APA, MLA or another format, there are many rules to abide by when citing sources. Luckily, there are online tools that can help you to create proper citations and bibliographies. By using the sites below, you can focus more of your time and energy on actual research and composition.

 

1. BibMe – This is a fully automated, free bibliography tool. By simply entering a book’s title, author or ISBN into the search tool, BibMe will create a bibliography. You can even choose between APA, MLA, Chicago or Turabian formats.
2. Citation Machine – This is one of the oldest citation tools on the Web and is commonly used by students and educators worldwide. Here, you can easily create proper bibliographic and in-text citations for free. It supports MLA, APA, Chicago and Turabian formats.
3. NoodleBib – This is both a note-taking software and bibliographic composer. NoodleBib is considered to be one of the most comprehensive MLA and APA citation tools. However, it is only available to paid subscribers.
4. Citation Creation Machine – This free MLA and APA citation tool from StudentABC is user-friendly and makes Website citations particularly simple.
5. Zotero – This open source Firefox extension allows users to collect, manage and cite references while conducting online research. The tool is integrated with your Web browser for maximum convenience.

 

Even the most seasoned researcher can make the odd mistake when citing references. Some standards even change from time to time, making the tools above even more valuable. A reliable bibliographic and in-text citation builder will save you time and give you more confidence in your research papers.

  

Heather Johnson is a freelance writer as well as a regular feature contributor for Distance Degrees.com, a website which helps students in getting distance learning degrees. Heather invites your writing job inquiries as well as comments and questions at her email address: heatherjohnson2323@gmail.com.

MediaNotes Webcast

CALI has made Blue Mango’s MediaNotes software – (http://www.medianotes-app.com ) available to law schools. The full-featured version is free to faculty, librarians, staff, and $20 for students.  To download the software, go to: http://www.cali.org/tools/medianotes (You must use your CALI web credentials to login).

MediaNotes is a video/audio tagging application which allows you to easily analyze and annotate video/audio performances. CALI is also be providing webspace for students and faculty to share these videos.

What I learned today…

 Lawyering skills  can be compared to sports skills – if you see yourself, you can correct yourself.  MediaNotes adds reinforcement and provides feedback to would-be lawyers.

For  each event (video segment)- you have the option for text comments as well as adding tags

The best way to use it is to have the students make the first cut and do the annotations and then have the professor read the student annotations and add his/her own.

There is a tag palette where the tags are stored.  You have to create your own tags that are connected to the content of your course.  You can download the tags created by Larry Farmer  from the CALi website.

Recommended uses: interviewing skills, negotiating skills, trial practice/court skills

It works with any video file except flash – .mov and .wmv most common because students can play the video back

It also works with just audio – the file size would be much smaller – sometimes video is not necessary

The software can be downloaded by any faculty member and installed on one lab computer for FREE.  Students can download the software at a cost of $20/student.  Many law schools are absorbing the student cost.

File size – needs to be small in order to be able to upload and download (esp students with bandwidth issues)

In order to reduce file size, you reduce the quality of the video – the audio is always more important.

Ex.  25 minute mov web cam recorded file = 50 mbs

Minimum Technology requirements:

• Inexpensive webcam ($50) – they all come with recording software
• Headset (with microphone)   ($15)
• Flash drive to move from the computer hard drive  ($30)
• MediaNotes software
• Existing laptop or desktop

     

Poll Daddy

Another neat free tool –Click HERE to Take My Poll.