LearnShifting

I use a blog tool created by Ray Camden. I love it and use an online editor to create my blog posts. One small annoyance is that I have to upload graphics into my blog and then point to them from the article so that it appears embedded... like this picture of a storm taken from my office window.

It would be better if I, and other folks building school websites using SharePoint 2010 could use Microsoft Word 2010 to creating an article, copying and pasting pictures into the word document as they saw fit and then with a button click or two have the whole article, complete with pictures transported up to the website with the layout they had created in the word document.

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This entry was posted on November 16, 2011 at 6:27 AM and has received 301 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 310 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

I think anyone who has worked in a school has realised that although a website maybe important for a school, whose job is it to create and maintain? I was surprised to find that although I expected teachers with computer skills to be involved, or an enthusiastic parent or possibly even be outsourced to a local company - it was the school Principal who in many cases took a leading role in the look, feel and content of the website.

I hear many of you thinking "We knew that!". But, to add to this revelation is the fact that some principals actually build the website in among the myriad of other tasks involved in running a school.

Here is a typical scenario played out in small schools across Australia (and even further I suspect). An energetic teacher and principal supported by the school council have a website built. Someone is trained to upload content. There are easy parts of the website to maintain (like uploading the weekly newsletter) and there are hard bits like changing the picture of the Principal when they move on or retire.

Many schools close an eye to the out of date content on the website because the newsletter part is still working and that carries the news of the day.

Then one day, the person in the front office retires or moves to France to tend a vineyard. The password to get into the system that is etched in the departing person's mind is forgotten and when the new person turns up 6 weeks later and the first newsletter is due to go out, the website can't be accessed at all.

If that is not your reality in school then you are fortunate.

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This entry was posted on October 12, 2011 at 7:00 AM and has received 527 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

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 663 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

MS Office documents take a long time to load when loaded via Moodle. So if you have uploaded a word 2003 - 2007 - 2010 document and are using one of those versions of MS Office to read these files then there is a problem with the way the document loads.

What happens is that when a user clicks on a link to a word document, it appears to start downloading and sometimes (not always) presents a windows download dialog box which appears to hang, but when you cancel the download, word appears and the document is loaded.

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This entry was posted on March 25, 2011 at 3:46 PM and has received 533 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

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 506 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

There is a trial version of this product available with a very generous 45 day trial period. I think the ITCs working with kids in the younger years and definately in areas where literacy may be an issue should look at this add-in for the MS-Office range of products. I would love to hear if and how it is deployed.

Max's Toolbox 2010 is an early childhood interface to Microsoft® Office suitable for children in grades K through 5. The flexibility of the programs makes them suitable for teaching children of all capabilities.

A suite of three products – MaxWrite for Microsoft® Word, MaxShow for PowerPoint®, and MaxCount for Excel – gives teachers a platform for incorporating technology across a wide range of subjects and lesson plans.

There is a downloadable demo available

This entry was posted on December 1, 2010 at 5:03 PM and has received 327 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.