Pecha Kucha presentations

PK were designed to avoid boring and long presentations to force speakers to make them shorter and enthralling. The design of a Pecha Kucha motivates speakers to center their subjects in very different ways.

What is a Pecha Kucha?
This curious Japanese word means informal conversation or chitchat. It is a type of presentation created by two architects in Tokyo, tired of long and boring PowerPoint presentations.

The aim of a PK is to force speakers to prepare shorter and more attractive presentations. A PK makes the speaker to center his presentation on the topic. To accomplish this goal a PK has several features:

• Only 20 slides are allowed and every slide lasts 20 seconds. (6 minutes and 40 seconds at most).
• Slides advance automatically without human interaction.
• Slides are visually appealing and not text-heavy.
• Text and image should be complementary: each one should have its own unique value.
• Speakers should spend more time practicing their presentations.
• The audience should have plenty of time to ask questions at the end of the presentation.

Using the Pecha Kucha presentation format in the classroom
You might find it useful to use this presentation format to stimulate your students to prepare their own presentations. Students will feel involved in a kind of game.

We provide a short list of clues to successfully use the PechaKucha presentation format in the classroom:

• Present your own Pecha Kucha before students to make them understand what it is.
• Provide students some links to interesting Pecha Kuchas.
• Emphasize the importance of practicing the presentation with other students.
• Advise students not to abuse text slides.
• Encourage students to find striking images to create interest in their topics.

More info

You can find online examples at the official PechaKucha web site: http://www.pecha-kucha.org/

Vicente Sangrador

Project Manager

vicen@uic.es Ext. 4400 

Fotor: Online Photo Editing Tool

Fotor is an online photo editing tool that lets you do almost anything you want with your photos: basic edits (crop, rotate, resize, curves, tone, colors, ...), effects (classic, lomo, vintage, b&w, cool, ...), frames (simple, film, stamp, shadow, museum, ...), hdr, text, collages, ... When finished you can save the image in jpg format. 

I like how easy it is and all the possibilities, with the advantage that you do not need to install anything on your computer.

Give it a try!

Jordi Xavier Prat

Network & Systems Manager

jxprat@uic.es Ext. 4405

«I'm a penguin, I eat apples, I drink wine and I close windows ...»I've always been involved with technology. I remember my beginnings ... With over a decade here, @UIC, always in the Computer Science Department. Using Linux from the beginning (more than 40 floppies!!!).

QRizing the University

Recently we've been involved in a project to help the students know the timetables of the classrooms in situ and other info on other university services. We decided to put a QR code for each item (classroom, library, secretary, service, etc.) with and url encoded. This url redirects the petition to a proxy web application that  depending on the type of the item shows a mobile adapted web site. For example, if a student scans a QR code placed in a classroom, the web shown will display the timetable of that classroom. Another example could be scanning the QR code of the university restaurant. It could display the timetable and the menu for that day. This method can be applied to many purposes and it's easy to generate QR codes and put them in whatever you want.

Joan Molina

IT Developer

Joan Molina

joan@uic.es Ext. 4403 Blog: Unobtrusive Javascript Applications

«I've been working for the web since 1995, when Mosaic was on stage. Since then, It's been a great experience to have undertaken the development of the complete academic and economic management information system (MIS) of our university with open source technology. I also like making play-dough figures tosoothe the spirit. »

Carles Rius

IT Developer

Carles Rius

crius@uic.es 

«My professional background has always been related to education and innovation. In the past I worked as an engineer in a public university research group but also in private multimedia R+D departments. I’m an enthusiastic of the new technologies and how they can improve my personal and professional environment. Apart from this, I like playing the violin and the guitar, collecting old and rare books and jogging or doing other fitness stuff.»

Groupware with Google

Analysis of different collaborative software. The project is conceived to help people involved in a common task achieve their goals in a collaborative way using online tools. We'll test some  Google Tools for a Groupware solution.

Google forms

Google Forms is a tool contained in google docs. It can help you easily gather information from a large number of people without having to send and receive multiple emails. 

With Google Forms you can create a form and keep track of the answers. All the answers are added to the results spreadsheet.

Interactive data visualizations

In this project we analyze more convenient ways to transmit a message effectively through non conventional data representations. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years. Mind Maps, Tree maps, Hyper Trees, and other will be examined to exploit its practical usefulness. View Demo.

Add voice to a web page

VozMe is an utility you can add to your browser that reads any selected text in a web page aloud. You can select male or female voice. The installation of this utility (technically called bookmarklet) requires one step: drag the male or female link to your browser bookmark bar.

The most amazing thing is that this service has a gadget for iGoogle, even a plugin for WordPress so that our users can listen to our posts. It also includes an API for use in our websites and convert text into voice.

http://vozme.com/bookmarklet.php?lang=en

Cloud computing with Amazon

Evaluate Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to provide resizable computing capacity in the cloud. This project is intended to make web-scale computing easier for developers and systems managers.

CaptionTube: adding captions to your youtube videos

It is always interesting to make your youtube videos more international by means of captions or subtitles. Youtube provides an online tool to make subtitles easy to add to any video. 

It is worth trying!

Customer Relationship Management System

We are working in the selection of an open-source CRM software for managing the university's interactions with its current and future students. Sugar and vTiger are being used in a testing environment.

Document Management System

To have an effective paperless office, we need a system to manage these documents. We'll test different document management systems to find out the one that fits best to our needs. Nuxeo or Alfresco are some of the possible open-source options.

Electronic locks

This integration project is deviced to develop a PHP API that communicates with our electronic lock provider's API. The PHP API will also communicate with our ERP.

Internet Fax

We are changing the way to send and receive faxes throughout the university services in order to reduce costs. With an internet fax service, you can send or receive a fax using your email program. No installation of modems or fax servers or phone lines. The management of faxes is easier and cheaper.

Content Management System

We want to select an outside vendor to create a new web portal. Different CMS will be examined: eZ Publish, Drupal. Special attention will be given to the ease of integration with our ERP.

Degree and Master's Final Project

In order to complete a graduate degree or a master's degree, according to the Bologna process, students must defend a final project. We are building a software application useful for students, teachers and staff members to keep track of all the projects.

Introduction

The ITLab has developed a computer program to manage a special type of subjects in the study plans named "Degree Final Project" or "Master Final Project". The implementation of official masters and degrees make it mandatory to finish all studies adapted to the European Higher Education Space with the preparation and defense of a final project.

The program's goal is to manage administrative tasks involved to monitor progression in the different studies taking into account the particularities of each degree or master. To do so, we've designed a form shared by all the degrees in which we ask a few questions that provide the basis to meet the requirements of each study. The results obtained through this form allowed us to make a flexible development adapted to the differences.

The information of the form is contained in a GoogleForm. It contains 30 questions to be answered by a person with a manager profile in the topic under study. Link to the form (spanish).

We wanted to give a generic name to the program. It couldn't be tied to any particular academic activity or associated to any type of study (degree or master). The APM initials match the requirements. APM stands for Academic Project Management.

Underlying technologies

Programming language: PHP 5

Programming environment: Zend Framework 1.11

Javascript Framework: jQuery 1.7

Database engine: PostgreSQL 8.3

Adapter authentication: LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol)

User authorization model, RBAC (Role-Based Access Control)

Current version:1.0

Application overview

In order to know the general approach to the final development of a new application, you can read the APM-slide document and the APM-notes document. The latter adds notes to the APM-slide.

Application Packaging

We try to create a controlled environment to package some of our applications in order to make them easily deployable for other companies. Thus, we'll contribute with the open source community sharing our own applications.