Archive for the ‘Google’ Category

The Innovative Educators Conference, which wraps up tomorrow with a presentation by Brian Niles of TargetX fame, has been a great one. Val, Erin and Pam from IE did a great job putting the conference together and keeping everything rolling. The food was the best conference food I’ve had. A night out to the Reds/Dodgers game with all you can eat food and drinks was a nice touch too.

Here are the links I went through for those of you that were in my 2 presentations on Wednesday. Again, if you have any questions, please email me at bradjward(at)gmail(dot)com.

I Can Do THAT With Google?: http://linkbun.ch/gnq

Blogging 201: Taking It To The Next Level: http://linkbun.ch/gnk and http://linkbun.ch/gno

Also, here is the image used during the Social Media Roundtable with Brad and Matt:

(Click Image to Enlarge)

It’s always great to connect with new people. I also got to catch up with Mark, Matt, and Brian and we had several really great conversations about a huge range of topics. I’ve always been big on the value of face time, and this event has not disappointed. I was also able to line up a webinar on this coming Tuesday night with an MBA class at Morehead State University, so it’s time to start on that slide deck.

One month until eduWeb! Who all is going to be there? I’d love to meet more of you.

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It’s Conference Time! Jesse and I both leave the office for the week tomorrow to attend higher ed conferences. Jesse is giving two presentations at the Recruitment Plus User Group Conference in Portland, Maine:

• Going Paperless (Releasing Your Office’s Inner Tree-Hugger) - [Document Imaging]
• Can’t We All Just Get Along? - [RP Interface]

I am giving 2 presentations and co-hosting a roundtable discussion with Matt at the Innovative Educators Conference in Cincinnati, OH:

• I Can Do THAT with Google? - [A Look at Google's many free tools]
• Bloggers 201: Taking It To The Next Level - [Extending the reach/touch of student bloggers]
• Social Media Roundtable with Brad and Matt - [1 hr Q&A session. Can you stump us?]

I am looking forward to meeting up everyone I already know (or feel like I’ve known forever thanks to social media) and meet many new people at the conference. I wish that Matt, Mark, and I weren’t presenting in the same time slot, but look forward to co-speaking with Mark at eduWeb in July and presenting at Stamats in November with Matt, Karlyn, Kyle and several others.

I absolutely love conferences. Yes, they are a great time out of the office, but they are also a time to reconnect and re-energize. A time to hash out new ideas over cocktails, network with others, and share ideas. An opportunity to learn and grow. And isn’t that what higher education is all about?

See you in Cincinnati!
Brad

PS - I haven’t decided if I am going to SlideShare since presentations go so much deeper than a few slides. What are your thoughts? Save it for the conference? I am probably going to uStream the Blogger talk to use as an example of what lifecasting might be like. Maybe Matt and I could uStream our roundtable and take questions from the chat room?!?

Let’s talk a little bit about expectations of an admission website, and the evolving nature of it. I’m going to speak in terms of the Whole Product Concept, which some of you might be familiar with. It looks like this:

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There is one question I typically get when I present a viable option/solution that happens to utilize a 3rd party website/web2.0 tool.
“What do they [the company who's providing the service for free] get out of it?”

It’s a great question, and should definitely be considered. What are we, the University, giving them, the person behind the curtain, in return for their services? What personal information will they collect? What advertisements come along with the product/solution? What if the product later goes to a paid service and all of our data/information that we have built up over the months and years now costs to use?

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Friday’s always seem to be the bloggiest.  No more after this (mostly due to the fact campus shuts down in 25 minutes for the Butler basketball game.)

Google is hosting their annual ‘International Model Your Campus’ competition, with great prizes like iPod Touches and Wii’s for the winners.

You can get all the information here. 

To see an example or learn more about Modeling in Sketchup for Google Earth, check out this post by Jeremy.

It’s Tuesday already? Just another snowy day here in Indy. Today we talk about creating a form in Google Docs. I’ve been using this because I really like how it instantly drops the form’s results into a spreadsheet. No FormMail to worry about, etc. I used it on an email that I sent out on Friday, and so far there have been about 40 responses. Others wanted to see it, so I just copy/pasted into an Excel file and mailed it back. If they had Google accounts, it would have been even easier. And if there weren’t prospective student emails involved, I would have just made it public for them to see.

And here is the link for the form that is shown: Google Form

Enjoy!

Just in: I’ll be giving two presentations on day 1 of the upcoming conference:
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Sometimes you just happen to ‘StumbleUpon’ things at work. Today, for me, it was this:

I wish that I knew what was going on, and I wish I could get an answer more than “ummm I think maybe some professors are playing around with it?” Do you honestly think a school would let a few absent-minded professors “play around” with a full google solution? Maybe I’m naive, but something is gone on here. Yep, I’m excited. I also just wish it wasn’t some big secret on campus. EMBRACE technology, people.

How long will it be until Universities start dropping their expensive hardware (and employees!) and start heading towards free online solutions? (And on the other hand, how long until Google starts charging for their awesomeness?)

Check this article out: http://preview.tinyurl.com/3c4mse

Basically, you can now right click on a document on your computer and send it to Google Docs.  That’s pretty amazing.

We have a ‘unique campus’ at Butler, i.e. we are in the middle of a neighborhood and there is a lack of accomodations in the immediate area.  Visitors have a hard time conceptualizing where they need to go for hotels, restaurants, etc. I’ve been pushing for Google Maps API implementation for awhile, but to no avail.

With Scholar’s Forum coming quickly (where admitted students interview for scholarships, etc), we have been getting the page up for our admitted students who will be visiting.  Rather than continue to try to get the API implemented (we use a home-grown CMS that doesn’t exactly allow me to get into the code…), I went ahead and designed the Google Maps and just used their iframe embedding function.  After some tweaks to the code (Art figured out that a mere < 15 pixels was pushing the maps to the bottom of the page in IE6/7, but not Firefox), we are up and running.

This makes it easy for visitors to see where we are, where hotels and resturants are, and allows them to punch in their address for directions as well.  On the Hotel side of things, I added links to read reviews on each hotel, which I thought might be helpful.  I also included phone #’s to be on the safe side.  Since the information was already compiled, it was pretty easy to copy/paste most of the information over after I geotagged on the map.

Here’s the page:  Go.Butler.Edu < Scholars Forum < Accomodations.

You can use Google Maps for other things as well in your office.  For example, yesterday I had an admission counselor email me with a request to highlight Lake Road on this PDF map (just try finding it) so visiting counselors would know where to park for an upcoming conference.  Instead, I created another Google Map highlighting where they should park, where the building they are going to is, and a pinpoint that opens immediately giving them the option to plug in their address for directions.  Then I gave him a tinyurl for the email, and the request was done.

Tell me what you think! What are you using Google Maps for on your campus?