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About Me

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Hi there! I just got married this summer. My husband and I both teach at Northwest Local Schools, a small rural community in southern Ohio. We have two dogs (we call them our children), Harry and Ginny. I am a third year PhD student at The Ohio State University. I have been an elementary librarian for 5 years. Juggling work and school has been challening to say the least! My research interests include how Appalachian literature can increase cultural awareness.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Final

This course has introduced me to several tools that will be useful when I begin analyzing data for my dissertation and for next quarter's class. I was very excited to learn about Transana since transcribing is a long, daunting task. I also liked the fact that it is cheap in price too. I think it was helpful, for me, to be able to compare a couple different tools that did similar tasks. For example, Transana and ExpressScribe both were introduced as tools for transcribing. Perhaps my favorite session was learning about Audacity and MovieMaker. I know several people that are quite good with these programs, but I have never taken the time to learn how they work. This class gave me a nice introduction on the 2 programs and motivated me to keep learning more.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Software Summary

Software: NVIVO
Uses/Advantages
•I learned that NVIVO allows you to stream line your analysis. One advantage to this program is that a free trial offer and web demonstrations are available for new users.
•Several users of this software agreed that the search tool is NVIVO strong point. For instance, this program produces matrix tables which provide a view of the data so you can see if patterns are emerging between different groups in the study.
•This software is also valuable when analyzing literature reviews. Hyperlinks can be inserted into a document and linked to another document.
•PDF documents can be easily used in NVIVO.
•NVIVO allows you to work with documents in several different formats including: .doc, .docx, .pdf, .rtf, .txt.
Cost
•A student license can be purchased for $199.00. This can be installed on one computer and can be used for twelve months.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Tools I have tried

I tried the Survey Monkey. I thought this was fairly easy to use. This tool was very helpful since Dr. Lather's class had to create a grounded survey. I did not like that fact that I was unable to print. A screen popped up saying that I would have to pay for an upgrade in order to print the survey as a PDF.
I also tried the concept mapping tool-VUE.This tools seemed similar to "Inspiration," which is kid friendly concept mapping program. I think this tool will help keep my thought organized, especially for a paper, presentation, or power point. I can see many uses for this.