For the Organizing Your Online Life assignment, I was tasked with reviewing the website/service known as Blendspace. Blendspace is a neat little tool which allows teachers to create interactive and semi-collaborative lessons on almost any topic. Conceptually speaking, they are kind of like "PowerPoint on steroids," with the presentations using the "slide" metaphor ubiquitous to PowerPoint presentations, but augmenting them with the ability to embed live web-views, YouTube videos, and even multiple choice quizzes. Due to the incredible breadth of the website in question, I found it a somewhat daunting task to boil it down into a 25 minute presentation. In order to do so, I had to prioritize.
For starters, I decided to focus on the aspects of the site which were most novel and/or, not as easily available on other platforms. So, although Blendspace does have the possibility of being very similar to PowerPoint, I decided to go for the full monty, and create a sample presentation which showcased all of the various features in ways which would at least seem to be semi-organic.
When it came to the handout, one of the things I noticed a bit cumbersome for novice users was the on-boarding process, which required several steps, as well as access to a pre-existing Google account. As a result I primarily used the handout to help users with getting access to the site in the first place, making the judgement call that after they were signed-up, they could, if needed mess around with the site on their own indefinitely if need be.
It's cool to get your perspective on the site Mark. I was a bit enamored with Blendspace when I did my presentation, like it was my brand new shiny toy. I didn't think about how the on-boarding process might be difficult for users who do not have a facebook or a google account. I had a google account when I signed in, which made the process seem friendly to me. I thought there was an option to create an account solely for Blendspace, but I had not considered that going about it that way might be more difficult.
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