LearnShifting

 We have been enjoying considerable success establishing SharePoint 2010 as the school website building tool of choice for a number of reasons explained in a previous posting here.

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This entry was posted on March 26, 2012 at 6:25 AM and has received 124 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Someone sends you a file with a video embedded in it... Hoe do you get it out? Solution is easy. Change the file extension from .pptx to .zip and extract the video from the media folder within the resultant zipped archive.

Longer Microsoft step by step technote here

This entry was posted on January 4, 2012 at 3:15 PM and has received 162 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

 Joe completed an assignment on Chinese mythology this week and in one of his slides he had pictures embedded into shapes. Some of his classmates asked him how to do it and it made sense to create a small movie. These little movies can be created with camtasia if you have the software or jing or community clips from Microsoft, or screenr from the folks at articulate.

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This entry was posted on September 1, 2011 at 10:24 PM and has received 355 views. There are currently 1 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.

Graham from Microsoft sent through a very comprehensive list of software solutions and websites that are aimed at educators. Normally I would forward the list on and hope that teachers and educators would work their way through the list.

Being the first day back at school for them it is probably the very last thing on their mind.

So I have taken some of the pain away and decided to evaluate some of the more interesting ones myself. I have started with Mouse Mischief because it reminds me of a similar solution used in a smart lecture theatre to poll students for answers to questions posed by the lecturer.

Mouse Mischief is an add on to PowerPoint that allows students to control a PowerPoint slideshow. When I first read this, I thought - No way is a teacher going to hand over control of a PowerPoint presentation to one student - let alone 25 of them.

Then I thought how do you connect twenty electronic rodents to a single computer anyway?

Finally I wondered what tools were available to make a lesson like this interactive?

Oh there was one other thing - cost.

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This entry was posted on July 19, 2010 at 8:16 AM and has received 530 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

My eLearning colleague from Health sent me a link that I really need to share. At Health they are evaluating some different authoring products and between our group in Education who use Presenter and Captivate and Health who are using Articulate and Lectora, we have some of the more popular tools covered.

The link sent through was an eLearning course about building eLearning. It even comes with a small pdf that is worth keeping just a shortcut away... like this

http://www.articulate.com/community/showcase/Avoid-Death-by-Elearning/data/downloads/elearninghandout.pdf

The presentation can be viewed here and is a real credit to the creators, the authoring tool and also Trish who contributed by sharing. Please look at it and thank you Trish.

http://www.articulate.com/community/showcase/Avoid-Death-by-Elearning/player.html

There are more examples of eLearning created for an online showcase of Articulate content here...

http://www.articulate.com/community/showcase/

...and although this is included in the presentation, another link for the eLearning locusts :-)

http://beyondbulletpoints.com/

This entry was posted on July 7, 2010 at 12:06 PM and has received 253 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

I was doing some work on an orientation course for our human resources division and was importing a PowerPoint into Captivate, which is an authoring program from Adobe. Previously everything had been fine, but now when the slides came in, they were tiny.

Culprit is the latest version of the Adobe Flash player 10.1

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This entry was posted on June 30, 2010 at 3:38 PM and has received 812 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

I have witnessed great presentations in PowerPoint 2007 and some of these have been marred a little by the "runaway presentation". That is the presentation that moves onto the next screen or slide automatically before you have finished talling about the current slide.

The presenter is under pressure already and when this happens there is a made flurry to find the menu item that turns it off and unfortunately in PowerPoint and I am talking about 2007 here there are are couple of areas and one of them is a red herring - meaning that after you appear to have turned it off it continhues to present in slideshow format with timings.

So I hear you say, how do you do it?

You'll have to visit the blog to find out...

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This entry was posted on May 27, 2010 at 11:54 AM and has received 256 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

A good friend of mine recently had problems with the Lesson Activity block in Moodle. I hadn't used it before and reviewed content from Moodle.org and even dialled a friend (our partners from NetSpot who manage our Moodle installation).

http://70.86.170.226/en/Adding/editing_a_lesson (information on the Lesson Activity)

I was excited by the prospect of being able to import PowerPoint slides as we can with other authoring tools like Adobe Presenter, Camtasia and Adobe Captivate.

Alas... disappointment.

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This entry was posted on May 4, 2010 at 4:42 PM and has received 717 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

There are a lot of tools we can use to create online learning. Everything from MS Word through to Articulate's range of products. What I have at the following link is a ranking of tools by satisfaction. http://elearningtech.pbworks.com/ToolSatisfaction These charts group tools into authoring, rapid elearning and simulation and include another chart of how many people responded, suggesting usage rates for the tool.

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This entry was posted on April 13, 2010 at 10:56 PM and has received 325 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.