LearnShifting

I did what most folks did, downloaded ibooks 2.0 and read about the new features... I was going to paste the link but I am sure Apple won't mind if I promote iBooks 2.0 by copying in their promotional text. It is a free download for your i-everything from the app store.

Introducing iBooks 2 — now with iBooks textbooks.

• Experience gorgeous Multi-Touch textbooks designed for iPad
• iBooks textbooks are filled with interactive features, diagrams, photos, and videos
• Tap to dive into images with interactive captions, rotate 3D objects, swipe through image galleries, watch videos in full screen, and more
• Use a finger as a highlighter when swiping over text in a textbook
• Take advantage of Study Cards to help you memorize important highlights, notes, and glossary terms
• Tap glossary terms to see definitions of key topics and concepts without leaving the page

The iBookstore offers textbooks on Algebra, Biology, Chemistry, Geometry, and Physics from McGraw-Hill and Pearson.
These textbooks are currently available to customers in the United States. Textbooks from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are coming soon.

iBooks textbooks are created with iBooks Author — now available as a free download on the Mac App Store.

Along with iBooks 2.0 comes a new and free authoring tool called ibooks Author, which only works on a mac and the books you create only play on an iPad... so there is an immediate dilemma for a school jurisdiction with only 3% of our computer fleet consisting of iPads.

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This entry was posted on February 1, 2012 at 10:37 AM and has received 45 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

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.

I have been on this quest to offer a solution to teachers that would enable them to create a talking book. I had a few criteria though.

• You had to be able to use free tools to do it.
• It couldn’t be something that teachers thought was too difficult and not worth the effort
• It had to play on the iPad
• It had to play on other devices as well, including Windows
• As the book was read, words would highlight. (Don’t get too excited by this – it is not there yet, but more on that later)
• I also wanted teachers to be able to share the books with students and other teachers who had iPads without going through iTunes

I need to tell you that this has been a long time coming and I feel that out of our teaching community, about 90% would be able to create an eBook without audio after about ten minutes guidance (ie reading this blog entry) and of that group, half would be willing to have a go at adding audio and video to their book.

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This entry was posted on August 21, 2011 at 5:26 PM and has received 497 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

 When we think about teaching something, we will normally look, from a formal sense at the outcomes required and then apply a treatment or method of delivery that will hopefully engage the intended audience. Some may call that contextualisation if they have a VET background.

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This entry was posted on June 22, 2011 at 8:36 AM and has received 320 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry. Download attachment.

Three things rolled up into one blog entry...

• IE 9.0 Release Candidate available
• Finding out how fast your connection is and what ports are being used
• Partners in Learning links to applications and solutions

This is a bit of a Microsoft Entry. I meant to write about this on Friday and things go out of control. Firstly I downloaded and installed the Internet Explorer Release Candidate 9.0. It is quite good and now we have a complete set of browsers that support the <video> tag and most of HTML5.

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This entry was posted on February 14, 2011 at 1:31 PM and has received 433 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

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.

 I have been using Microsoft's tag reader and it is great, especially when you want to create your own tag that points to content. In Tom Khulman's latest blog he has a graphic of an admission ticket to an event in Phoenix . The ticket had a QR Code on it and the code also had a hyperlink which took you to information about the event.

http://www.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/heres-how-to-help-your-subject-matter-experts-build-better-e-learning-courses/ is where the article is and I recommend the article as it talks about working with Subject Matter Experts in an eLearning context.

Back on topic... Microsoft tag reader couldn't read the tag, so I downloaded another reader called mobiletag which is in the app store or you can visit their site at http://www.mobiletag.com.

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This entry was posted on January 12, 2011 at 5:32 AM and has received 260 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

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.

Moshi Monsters is popular with young children and the creators of this website have also created a free site for maths and english or literacy and numeracy depending on what you prefer. Much like mathletics, it allows children to compete against each other. I suspect it is good for kids up until about grade 4 who are achieving good grades in school. You can try it out at http://tutpup.com/ .

The other free website I came across is a story creating site that allows you to create a comic book story. The focus is on myths and legends. The resultant file can be played on an interactive whiteboard or on a computer.

http://myths.e2bn.org/create/

E2BN is the Learning Grid for the East of England and regional provider of the National Education Network. E2BN supplies Schools with broadband services and innovative online learning projects.

This entry was posted on November 1, 2010 at 5:02 PM and has received 214 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

In my previous post I mentioned that eBooks can be published to a variety of platforms and for distribution purposes, the more devices that can read your books the better. An organisation that prepares and distributes your eBooks to channels like Amazon and ITunes store for free is Smashwords. Using their Microsoft Word template (actually a document I edited from one of their books) and AFTER reading and understanding the free how to guide on how to publish on Smashwords.com.

As I am writing this, I hope that smashwords is quietly working in the background converting my small two page book into an eBook. Don't forget that you will need to create a book cover. With the template above, you get a free Mark Christie chilli recipe thrown in - my TLC sauce.

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This entry was posted on August 6, 2010 at 6:35 AM and has received 247 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.