Creating beautiful memories with dual monitors

• A lot of us have dual monitors for our computers
• Windows does not have a very good built-in multiple monitor management tool
• When we travel, we take lots of snapshots with our digital cameras but these don't do justice to some of the majestic sights
• Panoramic shots would be great but we don't all have appropriate lenses
• Mobile phones have built-in apps to help take panoramic shots but they cannot match a good camera for results on individual photos

So....

How can we take great high resolution panoramic snapshots and then make them a desktop image spanning 2 monitors?

Step 1.

Take panoramic shots with your camera overlapping successive frames while keeping the camera level and without changing the settings as you swivel left to right to capture the vista.  A suggestion I have is to try and set up the camera to enable the tallest structure in the panorama to be captured.  You don't want to change the field of view in the middle of the panorama.  In addition, wait till there are no moving people in the field of view.  Otherwise you will capture the same person in two or more frames if s/he moved while you were taking the shots or get "chopped off" as in the photo below.

At Chichen Itza

Cropped image

You will also need to do some centering, straightening and cropping of the stitched image. With some efforts you can convert the above image to look like this:

Step 2.

Download the pics to your computer and use Hugin [http://hugin.sourceforge.net/] to stitch these together.  I posted about this earlier.  Lifehacker has a great post on this. Hugin is a free utility with great features.  It has a bit of a learning curve but well worth the efforts.

Step 3.

Use Display Fusion [http://www.displayfusion.com/] to load the panorama you created in step 2 and span it across 2 monitors. Display Fusion is a free download (though there is a premium version with more features).  (Macs apparently have this functionality built-in and don't need this tool).

So there you go, 2 free apps to make your vacation memories stay alive on your dual monitors.  All you have to do is remember to take overlapping photos with your camera while keeping the camera settings constant.  The rest you can do when you get home!

Here are some other panoramic shots:

Backyard

Soccer fields

Lesson from Agatha Christie: Rediscovering Windows Tablet and OneNote for education

In the last 3 months I feel like I am living an Agatha Christie murder mystery.  Agatha Christie had several tricks for preventing us from guessing who the murderer was.  One trick she used multiple times was to have a person be the prime suspect early on in the book.  Then they would be exonerated and we would start thinking of someone else.  In the end, that would be the person who would be revealed to be the murderer.  So what is the point of this?

Instead of a murderer, suppose the question is "What is the right computer and software for (medical) students?"
Many years ago I had thought it would be a convertible Windows tablet computer with OneNote.  After trying it out for 2 years our study showed that students did not find it useful.   Since then having explored many other options, including netbooks, PDAs, regular laptops and iPads, I am gravitating back to the Windows convertible with OneNote.  Why do I say that?

Lets start by identifying some requirements:

1. A device that is portable (relatively speaking) - size, weight, battery life
2. Has both a keyboard and ability to write on the screen - ideally with both stylus and finger - drawing concept maps, take notes, 
3. Options for installing from a wide menu of open source useful software.
4. Capture digital information from multiple formats (documents, presentations, web pages) and store it for annotation, highlighting etc.
5. Flexibility in organizing all the artifacts in various ways - at various levels - e.g. move things around easily on a page, organize pages under sections etc...
6. Share working material with multiple collaborators and with multiple computers 
7. Allow multiple collaborators to work on same document
8. Be able to work online and offline - with automatic/seamless syncing of material.
9. Mechanism for someone who does not have the software to be able to at least see the material.  (The assumption in this model is that all students have the same setup.

So the solution I am looking at is a smallish convertible HP elitebook 2740p with Windows 7 and Office 2007 or 2010 which includes OneNote.  

The HP 2740p has a screen that supports both stylus and multi-touch.  It has a very slim unobtrusive battery that extends its life to 10 hours.  

OneNote has terrific features - everything I mentioned above - with some outstanding features being:

1. The file organization is built into the software itself - thus no need to look for the file explorer to find what you need 
2. There is a superb search feature - that catalogs every artifiact
3. You can grab any web page or part of it with a screen clipping tool
4. Handwriting recognition tool
5. Print to OneNote option from your list of printers
6. Ability to move artifacts around on a page like post it notes
7. Awesome and flexible heirarchy of organizing - Notebook>Section Groups>Sections>Pages>Subpages
8. Internal hyperlinks to any page or artifact on a page
9. Live sharing by IP address with anyone over the Internet
10. Shared notebook feature for working with collaborators
11. Audio narration, video captures
12. Tag pages/artifacts with question mark, star, to-dos
13. Am sure there is a lot more.

Here is an example of me working on my thoughts regarding Google+ and how it is similar to and different from Facebook and Twitter.

I created a new Social Media Notebook

Created sections for each of the 3

On page one of Facebook you see a list of topics I planned to write about. 

2 of them are checked off

There is a diagram of who sees whose posts on Facebook.

On the next page I am collecting artifacts that I can use to think about the Facebook privacy settings.

These are screen clippings with my annotations - was quickly able to scratch over the identifiers on the screen clipping.  

In the last few months I saw the HP elitebook 2740 with it stunning features and immediately recalled the thrill I had felt in the early 2000's when the first windows convertibles came out.  

I saw how one of our medical students used OneNote on a regular windows (non-tablet) laptop to collect all the information he had come across in year 1 of medical school

I saw how a local middle school has every student use a similar convertible laptop to collaborate with each other and with the teacher for 4 years, collaborating on group projects even from off campus, submitting assignments by sharing sections with the teacher who can annotate the assessment in a shared space and build their portfolio of learning.

I saw how we can keep a shared notebook on a shared folder on dropbox and use the live.com online OneNote app.  

Sometimes the best solution is the one that is right in front of you.  Just like an Agatha Christie book, the solution was the first suspected one!

OneNote might be the best software that did not get marketed!  It may be time to rediscover this. 

Faculty development on Using Technology in Education

One of the challenges we face is helping faculty get comfortable using technology. We can try and do hands on workshops to train faculty on certain techniques. The problem is that faculty can have varying levels of expertise in the use of the Web and computers.

One way to solve this problem is to get all workshop participants to review a computer and Web skills checklist prior to the actual session. In addition we can provide links to some good tutorials if they need to brush up on specific skills.

I have put together a skills checklist and links to some tutorials that cover basic Windows skills here.