Saturday, April 30, 2011

Finding images to enhance your presentations

by Dr. Eduardo Mayorga



The brain has 2 kinds of memory: a long term memory where what we know is stored and a short term memory.

When we learn, information enters through visual and phonetic areas into the working area where it´s processed, related to previous knowledge and finally stored to long term memory.

There is a continuos enconding and retrival proccess going on all time, between working memory and long term memory.

Working memory has a very small capacity, it can only hold from 5 to 9 pieces of information at a time.

Working memory has also 2 substorage areas, one for visual information amd one for phonetic information. One way to strech working memory is to use both storage areas.



The practical application of this theory is that when making presentations you should use visuals (images, animations, videos) to facilitate the understanding, processing and final storage of the facts or concepts you want to transmit to the audience.

Most of us use PowerPoint to present and usually add text to the slides. Eventhough, limited short bulleted content can be of some help to learning, text goes into the memory using the phonetic channel so soon your speech and text on the slide overload the phonetic channel, but your visual channel is not fully used.

Every time we finish preparing a slide we should ask to ourselves at least 2 questions:

1) Which words in the text could be replaced or enhanced by a image.

2) What part of what I will be saying, can be enhanced with an image.

These questions will probably bring to your mind many images. So: How can we get the images we need?

Today it´s very easy to find images on the web using Google. The problem is we are usually not allowed to use these images without the permission of the author.

Following is a list of places where you can get images. Some free and some paid. (Many very inexpensive)
This list was originally posted by David Anderson at the "E-learning Heroes" blog.


Most popular stock image sites


Free stock image sites:

Pay-per-image, bundle or subscription:


Published by Dr. Eduardo Mayorga en 7:24 AM 1 comments

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Working together on Microsoft documents: PowerPoint, Excel, Word.

by Eduardo Mayorga

On previous posts we have commented on ways of sharing documents on the web using Google Docs. This is convenient for many things but, on occasions, you may want to work on a Microsoft document such as PowerPoint, Word or Excel and at the same time have others edit it from distant places.
Google has now come up with a way of doing this. All you have to do is download  "Google Cloud" from http://tools.google.com/dlpage/cloudconnect
Google Cloud will install as an add-on in your Microsoft programs, allowing you to share and synchronize with others, the documents you want to share.

Published by Dr. Eduardo Mayorga en 3:38 AM 0 comments

Friday, February 25, 2011

Webstreaming – The Classroom in your Living Room!

Dr. Anthony Vipin
(Note of the editor: In this post Dr. Vipin explains how L V Prasad Eye Institute shares its morning lectures with the world. There are many tools to share live lectures over the Internet. We have covered some of them in the past. If you would like to try a free streaming tool, go to http://www.ustream.tv/)

Access to media both video and audio in today’s world is scaling new heights. The ability of current technology to deliver information to the end user in various forms is getting better by the day. In the education front, the impact of Video is much greater as they say – A picture is worth a thousand words!

Web streaming is the process of delivering multimedia — usually audio or video — over the World Wide Web. Web streaming requires three things: a media source in a format that can be streamed; server software that can stream it; and a client, or player that can play it on a user's computer or other device such as a smart phone.

It can be either streamed in real time or can be made available as video-on-demand for the participants.

A novel concept that we have embarked on is to make our Morning Classes LIVE for the entire world. L V Prasad Eye Institute is a World Health Organization Collaborating Centre in Hyderabad, India in the fight against blindness. Training and Education are recognized as key factors that influence the reach, range and quality of eye health service delivery.

We have begun transmission of our classes held at 7 AM (Indian Standard Time) on the Internet. The registration is FREE for users around the world.

You can click on the following link or can visit www.lvpei.org to register for the Online Webcast for Free.
http://174.122.81.186/patodia/

Confirmation of registration is both by SMS (available only in India) and Email.

We also add in a small document titled “Webcast requirements” in the email to help the users have a better experience. We list all the necessary hardware and software required to view the stream. The most common problem that we encounter is Low bandwidth speed at the user end that causes the stream to buffer and load. A minimum of 512 kbps is recommended.

Access to high quality education and content forms an integral part in improving the standards of training among the residents and fellows alike. Bringing the classroom to the living room truly gives the student the freedom to attend lectures and access world class content at the click of a button.

We believe that this initiative will open up many collaborations between academic institutes for the benefit of Ophthalmic Education in India and also the world.

Published by Dr. Eduardo Mayorga en 1:36 AM 1 comments

Monday, January 31, 2011

Searching for evidence with Google Scholar.

By Dr. Eduardo Mayorga


One of the most important competencies residents must acquire during their training is the ability for searching and evaluating scientific literature.

The search tool we have always recommended, as the first source for searching, is Pubmed, that comprises more than 20 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. 


Being Google the most popular tool for searching, many residents did their searches with it. These searches brought back enormous amount of citations, many of them from dubious sources.

Google Scholar, even though launched in 2004, is not still well known and used for searching scientific articles.

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, and abstracts, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.

Google Scholar should not replace Pubmed for our searches but rather complement them. For those interested in learning more about Google Scholar and how it compares to Pubmed, please click on this link.
Published by Dr. Eduardo Mayorga en 3:20 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Adding surgical videos to the residents' portfolio

By Dr. Eduardo Mayorga


In a past blog we talked about how we use Google Docs for enhancing reflective learning.
Today we will see how we take this reflective learning to the operating room.

At our residency, residents must record on video all their surgery. Every week they must choose 2 segments: the one they feel was their best performance and the one they think was their worst. They must upload these segments to Youtube.

On a Google Docs spreadsheet they record the date, instructor, link to the video and reflection on their performance.



This is  not only useful for the resident that reflects on his or her performance, but it also helps build a video collection for training other residents.

Adequate sharing settings are setup up to assure privacy.
Published by Dr. Eduardo Mayorga en 6:51 AM 2 comments
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