Week 6 - Office 2.0

Week 6 - Office 2.0

This week we're looking at a range of tools which are all useful for organizing things, so are all good tools for office life, whilst still being useful for the world outside work.

Thing 13 Prezi


Everyone remembers the first time they saw prezi in action. I saw it at a conference a couple of years ago and pretty wow-ed by it; PowerPoint seemed like a tool from the Dark Ages in comparison.

In a nutshell prezi is a presentation tool that keeps viewers on the edge of their seats - it zooms, it spins, it can handle images and short video clips. For visual impact prezi is king. Here's a quick example I knocked up on Sunday morning:

Let's get prezi-ing! on Prezi

Other reasons to have a go?

Don't risk killing by boredom! Image dj badly

• Embedding one in your blog or website can really lift it
• You can show online or download for offline use
• Easily shared - you can work collaboratively on them too
• Easily modified - and once embedded any changes will be automatically done
• Good content can be killed by a bad PowerPoint but in prezi it's probably harder to create something that doesn't look visually exciting (even if the content is a bit iffy...) Remember we're a shallow bunch.
•  You can break free of the linear slide tyranny and tell a story in a dynamic stylish way.
• Access anywhere!

How is it used at City?

The subject librarians use it in Upgrade and Emily has a couple in Learnmore which incorporate video around mooting - Judges: Scary or Softies? and Saying it Right. Of course we also used prezi for our About 23 Things tab.  We have our own subject librarians prezi account so let us know if you want access to this.

Basic pointers

Signup for an account - follow the links for student/teacher licenses as you get more for your money (Oh did I mention this is £0!). Edu Enjoy is free and you get a whole range of benefits including the ability to make your content private and add a logo. Complete with 500MB of storage space.

You can create your own prezi from scratch or re-purpose an existing one via the Explore tab. If the creator has been kind enough to allow others to use and change for their own purposes it will have a 'Make a copy' button under the prezi panel. Look for the search only re-usable tickbox in Explore.

Get started by simply typing in your title. Double-click anywhere for adding more text and again to re-size. Click and drag to move stuff around.

Stripy! CC thanks to sniggetysnags

Clicking on any object will make the transformation zebra appear (alas this isn't really a stripy horse, just a stripy circle - sorry!) - this handy device has two functions:

1. To enlarge/reduce
2. To rotate

Simply click and drag to your heart's content.

Don't rotate too much! CC thanks to akeg

Key Prezi components: 

Creation Wheel - This is the nerve centre of the prezi tool. In the mode shown in the image you're able to write text. Click on the mini circles (Insert, Frame, Path, Colors) outside to do anything extra:

Insert: Prezi has improved this option recently and you can now insert images, YouTube videos, drawings (these are quite cool includes pre-prepared charts, tables, timelines, tree diagrams) and other types of files (e.g. non YouTube videos). Shapes like arrows are also offered.

Frame: Add a frame - can be useful for grouping components together and very handy when you start plotting the path through your prezi ensuring the viewer sees everything in one frame. They can be made invisible too!

Path: Here's how you tell prezi which order you want all the components to run - you plot out the route through via points and they're easy to change as and when.

Colors (grrr....curse the American spelling): allow you to choose a theme - these are pretty limited, which can be seen as a good thing sometimes, but the Wizard will help you adapt the colours in each theme to something less standard.

Want to find out more?

There are some useful Top tips from Ned Potter aka thewikiman, especially around the creative process, Prezi themselves have some useful video tutorials and cheat sheets too. There's a useful prezi created promoting the use of prezi for researchers might offer some inspiration.

Finally the excellent 'How to create a great prezi' prezi!

How to create a great prezi on Prezi

Think, librarians think!!! CC thanks to laurie.mcgregor

So... let's hear your views on prezi - a step up from PowerPoint or just a bit visually disorientating? Do you think you could use it in your work (or have you already done so)? Have you seen one in action at a conference? If you've had a go you could perhaps talk about the functionality.

What do you think? 




~Emily~

Thing 14 use Doodle to schedule a 23 Things tea chat with another 23 Things participant

Doodle is a scheduling tool which allows people to create a poll of dates and times when a meeting or social gathering can take place. It is a bit like the scheduling assistant in Outlook but you don't need to be in the same organisation and is very quick to use.

You don’t need to register to use this but you can create an account if you want to be able to log in and manage your doodles altogether.

This thing is to arrange to meet other 23 things participants or colleagues for a coffee.

1. Go to http://www.doodle.com/
2. Click on the schedule an event button on the main screen.
3. Fill in the form with the details of the event:

4. Click next
5. Select the dates you want the event to happen on from the calendar and click next.
If you want things to happen at a specific time suggest them on this screen (if it is an all day event leave this blank). You can add as many sessions as you need.

6. Click next and decide if you want a basic poll or one of the other options:

• Yes-No-Ifneedbe poll – has an ifneedbe option if you want it so people can show a preference.
• Hidden Poll – only the administrator can see the answers.
• Participant can only choose one option
• Limit the number of participants per option -  If you are registering people for a session you can limit how many people can join. This could be useful for hands-on teaching or restaurant bookings.

7. Click next and decide if you will send the invitation or if Doodle will send it using Google or Outlook address books.

If you decided to send out the poll yourself you will receive two emails. One with the link to send to participants and the other is an administrator link so you can change, close or delete the poll. You can invite using Twitter or Facebook.

Once you have closed the poll the most popular date is displayed:

Helen

Thing 15 Survey Monkey

What is survey monkey?

Survey monkey is a free online survey tool. It is very flexible and you can link it to your google and/or facebook account to ask a series of questions.

Ask your fellow 23 things colleagues their opinions or recommendations on a topic related to your blog or find out which is the best venue for your coffee meeting.

Sign up for your free account



Follow the three step principle 1Choose theme, 2 Add questions then 3 Collect the responses

1 Choose your theme from the options in the drop down box,


then proceed to
Step 2 Select the most appropriate question type from the list. Now just type in the text of your question

Don't forget to include your answers, if you opted for a multiple choice question

Keep adding questions until you have asked all your questions, then click on the 'send survey' button at the bottom of the page

You will be given a link to your survey which you can send to anyone of your chosing or post to a webpage, facebook, blog, twitter account, etc.

Now you can sit back and wait for the results to come flooding in. Don't forget to check your responses

and

Happy surveying
Verena

Cool Extra Things (this week we have two because they are both so cool).

Remember the Milk

Remember the Milk (RTM) is a To-do list which you can access online or on a mobile device and link to Gmail (and if you are still sticking with it iGoogle). For the cool extra thing this week create a list and share it with other 23 Things Participants.

You can also link it to Outlook but you need a plugin which requires admin rights to install.

RTM allows you to create various lists so you can separate your to-do lists. The default is personal, work, and study but you can create more in the settings section.
This is our 23 Things List showing the different weeks as individual tasks. Details of the different tasks are in the notes section and the tasks have been tagged with the initials of the people doing them so we can search for our own tasks:

You can share tasks amongst a team by adding other RTM users as contacts (they also have to add you back). Tasks that have been shared with you appear in your inbox.

It is possible to add a location to a task and these are linked to Google Maps so you can view them all on a map. You have to create the location before you can use it but once it is created you can keep using it.

Watch this quick video showing how to set up an account (or connect to your google account).

To set up an account go to: http://www.rememberthemilk.com/.

Remember the Milk has a great Getting Started Guide and blog which have lots of helpful hints.


Google Docs

Google Docs (http://docs.google.com/) is the ultimate Office 2.0. It is a free service providing wordprocessing, spreadsheets, forms and slide shows. It can be used merely as a back-up you can access anywhere or it can be used as a fully functioning set of programmes allowing collaboration amongst many people spread all over the world. It is possible to import and export via Microsoft Office (although some formatting can be lost) and has a lot of the basic functionality of Microsoft Office.
This short video explains Google docs in plain English (via Common Craft).



Google also have a slideshow on how to get started which takes you through the basic steps of how to use Google docs.

One of the major features of Google docs is the ease of collaboration and you can also publish items so they can be embedded in webpages or blog posts. To do this you need to make sure that they are shared either to your collaborators or to the public by clicking share in the top right of the screen.

If you know the people you want to share this with you can add people in the Sharing settings screen or you can click change next to the Private option. This takes you to a second Sharing settings screen.

Select “Public on the web” to share on a blog or website.

Select “Anyone with the link” to share with anyone.

To get the code to embed something you need to select Publish as a webpage from the share button in the top right hand corner.
Click Start publishing.  Then the box will change to this:

Select HTML to embed in a page to embed the item in a blog or web page.

If you have access to a website which allows php code you can create searchable databases (but not on Blogger or Wordpress.com). An example of a spreadsheet embedded in a blog page is visible here. It updates when the google docs spreadsheet updates.

Other than the ease of collaboration one of the other features which makes Google Docs different is Google Forms.

Google Forms takes away the need to collate lots of data. They can be used as a registration tool (as we did for 23things) or a more complex survey tool.

This post by Katie Piatt gives step-by-step instructions on how to create a google form.

Helen

Prezi image credits as follows:

Cat (Jason Farmer) http://www.flickr.com/photos/23975475@N04/3504704523/ 

What can I do now (Christopher Verdier) http://www.flickr.com/photos/cverdier/4867811579/

Surprise (dameskates) http://www.flickr.com/photos/dameskates/2297579613/

Edge of seat (Brad Montgomery) http://www.flickr.com/photos/bradmontgomery/4319123610/

Yikes (smartblue) http://www.flickr.com/photos/smartblue/4111622772/

RSS (RSS rafa[EU]) http://www.flickr.com/photos/rafaelrf/3531293278/

iPhone (theOOBE) (http://www.flickr.com/photos/peko/351943963/ 

iPad (meedanphotos) http://www.flickr.com/photos/meedan/5356419464/ 

Waiting (Josep Ma. Rosell) http://www.flickr.com/photos/batega/3775180564/