Yesterday I attended an online webinar run by Microsoft as part of their tech Tuesday presentations for educators. The sessions are recorded and I hope to gather the playback URLs and embed them into our Moodle Learning Management System.

This post raises the question - can OneNote replace Mahara and introduces a new programming language.

OneNote

One of the things presented was OneNote which we have as part of our Standard Operating Environment.

I have heard that it is fantastic from other folks, but personally have had difficulty including it in my daily work... but with this presentation I think the penny has started to fall - albeit slowly.

Onenote is like a giant clipboard that you can arrange and share with other people. By sharing I mean that you can either just share your notes, clippings, research and links with other folks (like your students, or your teacher) or you can place your OneNote file on the intranet, a skydrive or the local area network and have other people in your team collaborate and contribute to the OneNote document. Call it collaboration or crowdsourcing, you have something that could be termed an e-Portfolio if it is a gathering of your own work or a team assignment.

Students could submit their assignments in OneNote and teachers could mark them up with annotations and even video responses to the work.

So, I am rethinking the Moodle/Mahara solution into potentially a Moodle/Skydrive/SharePoint/OneNote solution.


 


 

Kodu

I was also excited about Kodu, a a new visual programming language made specifically for creating games. It is designed to be accessible for children and enjoyable for anyone. The programming environment runs on the Xbox, allowing rapid design iteration using only a game controller for input. This programming language apparently requires no learning. Those familiar with scratch and Alice will also want to have a look at this language. You can download it and work with it on your PC or on an XBox.

Of course I will be unleashing my 9 year old on it to see how it compares to Alice.

This entry was posted on May 11, 2011 at 3:58 AM and has received 662 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.