So what tools would a Government agency consider in the eLearning space?

Oct 21

posted by Mark Christie in Camtasia, Moodle, MS Office, Microsoft, Adobe Connect, Captivate, Authoring Tools, Techsmith, Articulate, eLearning, Agile Learning | 0 Comments Bookmark and Share

We are currently holding discussions across various agencies about learning management systems and delivery of training. I will be providing a list of solutions here that are probably a best bet. Before I do that, let's look again at the problem we are trying to solve or the efficiencies we are trying to achieve.

Common forms of training like orientation, financial procedures, health and safety are delivered face to face, sometimes involving travel and often repeated. These forms of training are good candidates for conversion to eLearning.

Additionally, many of these courses are very similar in nature and content across agencies is also very similar which means that if we can gather a common set of technologies and skills, agencies will be in a situation to share courses and content for repurposing without having to build from the ground up.

We can divide the learning requirements into training and support.

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This entry was posted on October 21, 2011 at 1:58 PM and has received 233 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Service Pack 1 for Adobe Connect 8

Jun 16

posted by Mark Christie in Adobe Connect, Adobe | 0 Comments Bookmark and Share

The new service pack for Adobe Connect 8 is available. We will probably update over the term holidays in July.

Featured enhancements follow:
•New layout bar to easily manage and switch between meeting layouts
•Presenter Only Area Q&A pod
•Support for 200 people split into 20 break-out rooms
•Support for playback of H264 video
•Ability to create screen-sharing black list

A new Adobe Connect Meeting add-in is required for SP1. It will install automatically the first time you join an Adobe Connect 8 SP1 meeting. If you are in a locked down environment, you will need to pre-install the add-in using the links provided here.
 

This entry was posted on June 16, 2011 at 11:13 AM and has received 324 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

A cheap USB microscope for home, the class or the laboratory

Apr 20

posted by Mark Christie in Adobe Connect, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, Microscope, Skype | 0 Comments Bookmark and Share

Dr Brian Thistleton is an entomologist who I had the pleasure of working with while at the department that is responsible for small things that crawl, fly, bite and cause problems with crops. He is also an avid photographer and collector of technical gadgets that make work easier (or are just too much fun to pass up).

An entomologist is a zoologist who focuses on insects...

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This entry was posted on April 20, 2011 at 5:09 AM and has received 501 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Blogging, microblogging, Yammer and Facebook

Feb 14

posted by Mark Christie in Adobe Connect, Web 2.0, blog, RSS, Yammer, SharePoint | 0 Comments Bookmark and Share

My dilemma with communicating to folks is not that I don't like communicating - actually the opposite is true.

But I do like efficiency and relevance. When our son was born in 2001 I would add news articles to our website with simple categories. I discovered blogs in 2005 and thought that they were a better way to capture chronological and category based media pieces.

Blogging came with easy ways to tag entries and easy ways for people to follow the topics they were interested in by using RSSfeeds and Google loves blogs from a search point of view as they are filled with changing content, that is indexed (tagged) and appears chronologically by groups or sub groups. The move to blogs for me occurred in 2006 and as recently as mid 2010 I was still questioning the validity of twitter as a tool I could use.

I have three blogs because family, work and aviation are three major parts of my life where sharing information is something I want to do. Because they have very different audiences and subscribers to a flying club blog didn't want to receive emails about my son's last basketball game, I have kept these three separate.

I write blogs not to be contentious, but to record events in the case of family, to share in the case of this blog and to communicate and promote in the case of the flying club. Because bloggers do make the effort to write, of course they would like as big an audience as possible. This is the thrust of this article...

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This entry was posted on February 14, 2011 at 5:21 AM and has received 523 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Adobe Connect Ports

Feb 1

posted by Mark Christie in Adobe Connect | 0 Comments Bookmark and Share

Here are the port requirements for Adobe Connect. This is for ICT and support folks who might be having problems connecting to our server from a school or insstitution not on our network.

Port requirements •1935 (RTMP), 80 or other HTTP port, 443 if SSL is enabled; 25 for SMTP (optional); 1433 for external database (optional)

If you are running a Connect cluster then you will need ports 8506/8507 open between cluster nodes for the systems to communicate.
 

This entry was posted on February 1, 2011 at 3:41 PM and has received 563 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Articulate or Captivate

Jan 28

posted by Mark Christie in Authoring Tools, Adobe Connect, Articulate | 0 Comments Bookmark and Share

Articulate Studio 09 and Adobe Captivate 5 are two eLearning authoring tools in our stable. Both have their good points and in this post I just want to highlight some things that have worked for us in education. First of all our environment. We have a diverse and largely remote spread of more than 170 schools. All are connected by internet and many are connected by a reasonably fast internet connection given the remoteness of the location.

Classrooms use electronic whiteboards and children have access to a variety of devices from the small XO laptop to personal computers, laptops and yes, the iPad.

Channelling learning objects to students via teachers over the internet is done in a number of ways. Moodle is our Learning Management System of choice and Adobe Connect and REACT are two of the video conferencing or webinar solutions we have. We do have others - webex, OCS, Polycom and even Skype but for the purpose of discussing Articulate and Captivate, I will focus on Adobe Connect.

I am not going to provide a head to head comparison of the two products... here are a couple of threads for you to visit http://www.articulate.com/forums/general-discussion/6681-articulate-vs-adobe-captivate.html and this great mashup at http://www.elearninglearning.com/articulate/captivate/

I want to talk about two projects, one where I used Articulate and another where I used Captivate. Ironically, I started both projects intending to use the other product.

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This entry was posted on January 28, 2011 at 3:53 AM and has received 1010 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

An Adobe 8 tip - sending an email link to a resource.

Jan 25

posted by Mark Christie in Adobe Connect | 0 Comments Bookmark and Share

I needed to demonstrate a Captivate package that I had uploaded to Adobe Connect 8. The URL assigned to the package could be viewed if you had an account, but, if you didn't have an account and you sent the URL, an external user without an account wouldn't be able to view the content.

Now you can have adobe connect create a token that it adds to a link that you can email to a viewer and it will permit viewing of the resource without logging in. This is really useful for reviews of content where the reviewer doesn't have an account.

Of course you can make the content public, but sometimes that is not an option. This may have been available in earlier versions, but I have only recently had the need for such functionality.

Also seeing as it took me a little while to locate the Adobe desktop manager, I thought I would share the link with you.

http://www.connectusers.com/downloads/ is the location to download the Adobe connect desktop manager for meetings which is an Adobe Air application. Additionally there is a plugin for Outlook so you can book meetings directly from within outlook.

http://www.adobe.com/support/connect/gettingstarted/index.html The getting started page provides a bunch of assets including cheat sheets and what's new videos to fast track you on your path to becoming an expert with Adobe Connect.

This entry was posted on January 25, 2011 at 12:39 PM and has received 181 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

I've only got three things to say about the new Adobe Connect 8!

Jan 19

posted by Mark Christie in Adobe Connect, Video, Adobe | 0 Comments Bookmark and Share

  • Fast
  • Great Quality Video
  • Easy to use intuitive interface

Version 8 is a monumental leap from version 7 and 7.5.

The backend administration pages don't look much different although in addition to addition teleconference call providers in to blend teleconferences with your connect session, you can now blend in SIP audio video streams which means that we can connect Office Communication Server into Adobe Connect as a stream.

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This entry was posted on January 19, 2011 at 7:42 AM and has received 381 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Adobe Connect 8 release - review and video overview

Nov 18

posted by Mark Christie in Adobe Connect, Web 2.0, Video, eLearning, Adobe | 0 Comments Bookmark and Share

We are strong users of Adobe Connect 7.5 and are very pleased with the value it adds to our eLearning environment in the Northern Territory. Well Adobe has released version 8 of the product and rather than me try to interpret the reviews in great detail, I will provide the links.

http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/584/

 

 

When are we planning to migrate? Possibly before the start of term next year depending on a number of factors. Have any readers deployed Adobe Connect 8? Let me know what you experience has been.

This entry was posted on November 18, 2010 at 12:46 PM and has received 198 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

When flash doesn't play even where it is supposed to

Nov 4

posted by Mark Christie in Authoring Tools, Adobe Connect, Flash, Captivate, Adobe | 0 Comments Bookmark and Share

We use a number of authoring tools (Captivate, Articulate, Hot Potatoes) to create eLearning pieces that are produced as flash. We had been generating one of these pieces and although it played perfectly on my computer and other computers, it wouldn't play on another computer in our office.

This was my fault finding approach...

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This entry was posted on November 4, 2010 at 10:05 AM and has received 269 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

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