Unique Ed Techie

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Second Life Virtual Field Trip - Another homework post

For the final assignment this week we have a choice of one of the following projects:
1. Online Virtual Reality Project using Second Life
2. Cloud Computing Projects using Google Docs (now Google Drive)
3. Blog Project using any blog tool that allows public access.

I am using my blog post to document the Second Life activity. Multi-user virtual environments have a place in the learning environment, although not on the .mil domain. I have participated in conferences and visited NASA and NOAA sites through Second Life but never truly embraced the tool in the learning environment beyond my own educational participation.

Second Life (SL) has a place in education and by the resources available one may be surprised at the educational organizations using Second Life to collaborate. From the Second Life Education Destination Guide to the Second Life Education Wiki.

The image of my teleport visit to ECU (required).

EdTech Island

Bloom's taxonomy steps

Underwater after stepping off of the submarine in NOAA's virtual island

This was another fast and fun exercise in EDTC 7030. I believe the activity benefits the participants who work in the CP32 career field as they discover a variety of tools that may not be familiar or available to them.

These activities support these course goals:

1. Explore and use Internet tools used to deliver web‐based instruction.
2. Apply instructional design components in developing web‐based instruction
3. Identify and demonstrate knowledge of selected Internet technologies and apply them to course development

Thanks to everyone who supported my participation in EDTC 7030. Comments, recommendations, reaction box checks and +1s are always welcome.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Paper Rater

I came across Paper Rater after one of Richard Byrne's posts on plagiarism tools from August 2010. He recently ran an updated post on eight resources for detecting and preventing plagiarism in June 2012 and Paper Rater is still on his list.

From Paper Rater's About page:

PaperRater.com is a free resource, developed and maintained by linguistics professionals and graduate students. PaperRater.com is used by schools and universities in over 46 countries to help students improve their writing. PaperRater.com combines the power of natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, information retrieval (IR), computational linguistics, data mining, and advanced pattern matching (APM). We offer the most powerful writing tool available on the internet today.

Since I am taking a short course and creating Lab Reports in APAv6 I thought I would give Paper Rater a try. Enter the title of your paper, copy and paste the text of your paper in the text box, copy and paste your references, bibliography, and works cited in the Reference box. Then select the education level of this paper's author, the type of paper you are submitting, originality detection (optional), and read and agree to the terms of service.

Depending on the amount of text inserted, report type selected, and your network connection the results will display. You have the option to print a summary of your results or step through the recommendations.

Paper Rater will check your submission for plagiarism, spelling, grammar, style, vocabulary and give you an opportunity to like them on Facebook. I would put them in a circle if they were on Google+. Depending on the type of paper you submit there is an option to view a grade. Selecting Lab Reports does not produce a grade but I can select Research Paper and the Grade option is available.

The additional components that I like about Paper Rater are:
Bad Phrase Score which is based on the number and quality of trite or inappropriate words, phrases, and cliches found in your paper.

The Style section includes the transitional words score, sentence length, and word usage.
Transitional Words Score based on quality of transitional phrases used within your paper.

The Sentence Length section provides a summary that includes sentence info includes character count, number of words, average length, characters=syllables, number of sentences, average length, percent and number of short sentences, percent and number of long sentences, number of paragraphs, average sentence length, number of questions, and percent and number of passive sentences, and the number of the words in the longest and shortest sentence.

The Word Usage section provides a summary of verb types which include: to be and auxiliary then calculates the percentage of conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions, and nominalizations and sentence beginnings which include the number of pronouns, interrogative pronouns, articles, subordinating conjunctions, conjunctions, and prepositions.

The Vocabulary Score section provides a vocabulary score, vocabulary word count, percentage of vocabulary words, and a list of vocabulary words used. They recommend their vocabulary builder to improve just one word a day in your vocabulary to encourage you to improve your vocabulary score to 60, which will make your paper stand out.

So if you have a paper that you want analyzed, give Paper Rater a try. The site provides a different perspective of your writing.

Paper Rater has a user suggestion improvement site, a blog and a Facebook page. I would like to add Paper Rater to a Google+ circle if they were there.

What is your favorite part of Paper Rater? Are you using it with thesis/dissertation assignments, blog posts, biography, correspondence, book reports, movie or book reviews? Comments, recommendations, reaction box checks, and +1s are always welcome.