News
E-literacy skills materials
Stacy Gillis at Newcastle has completed a terrific project designing an information literacy skills module for first year undergraduates which has generated a lot of reusable material for all of us. Nine modules were created and each one is a potential source of ideas as well as stimulus for thinking about ideas of your own. The great thing about VLE’s is that they enable you to deliver essential material like this online while your students are doing other things with you in the classroom. Whether used on their own or weaved into existing modules these resources are well worth checking out.
http://tinyurl.com/2rw8p8
What is my Avatar going to wear to class tomorrow?
Just when you were beginning to master teaching in this ‘life’, keep your eyes peeled for exciting new teaching ideas to emerge from Second Life. Second Life is a 3D virtual world that is capturing the imagination of educators around the world. The English and PALATINE (Dance, Drama and Music) Subject Centres have joined up with a team headed by the King’s Visualisation Lab for an EDUSERV funded project. The project involves the importing of a range of pre-existing 3D theatre models, ancient through to Elizabethan, into the Second Life environment and supplementing these with existing and new interpretative content and a spectrum of original interactive tools, scenarios and automated tutorials. The five educational projects which have been selected will provide explorations into the new creative pedagogy of Second Life and include Virtual Poiesis, performance of Renaissance plays, staging of improvisational theatre (Commedia dell’arte) as well as exploration of set design and space.
http://tinyurl.com/2l6gts
Teacher Training Videos
Russell Stannard, a lecturer in ICT and Multimedia at Westminster University, has created a website to showcase his growing archive of training videos for teachers. The videos use screen capture technology and so are extremely easy to follow. Current videos include: How to use Blackboard, How to create blogs, and 24 Tips for PowerPoint.
Well worth a look…
http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/
New Books
Download the free online book (made available through the Creative Commons License): Theory and Practice of Online Learning (Athabasca University, 2004) by Terry Anderson &
Fathi Elloumi (editors).
http://cde.athabascau.ca/online_book/
Tools
Slideshare
is the YouTube for presentations, a place where you can upload your presentation then share it with the world. The downside is that your presentation is saved as a flash file which means no special effects, transitions etc., and just like YouTube people can leave comments. There is also a feature allowing you to embed presentations in your blogs. A useful tool to disseminate a set of slides quickly. http://www.slideshare.net/
EMPRESSR
is a web-based presentation authoring tool. You can actually create presentations online using the tool, upload your assets like pictures, sound etc. and share it with others. If you are constantly having problems with incompatible fonts and formatting in PowerPoint, or Mac vs. Windows issues but you have guaranteed web access this might be a useful tool.
http://www.empressr.com/index.aspx
Wmatrix
is a software tool for corpus analysis and comparison. It provides a contemporary web interface to the USAS and CLAWS corpus annotation tools (grammatical tagging), and standard corpus linguistic methodologies such as frequency lists and concordances. It also extends the keywords method to key grammatical categories and key semantic fields. How about using it with your students? Contact paul@comp.lancs.ac.uk to give it a try.
Quivic
is a quick video converter – get it? Anyway this useful piece of software allows you to download video from YouTube and convert it for playback on a PC, iPod, cellphone or PSP. A demo is available with limited function (30 seconds only) but £10 buys you the program. No need to worry about the web connection anymore!
http://www.wideanglesoftware.com/quivic/
Adobe Digital Editions
is a free eBook reader for your PC. The interface is simple and intuitive to use and there
is a library and reading mode, bookmarks and even bookshelves to organise your books.
Free sample books are available.
http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/
Edutxt
is a tool that enables you to send mass SMS messages to your students. Check first because your university may already have it. To make things easy there is even a Moodle (VLE) plug-in.
http://www.txttools.co.uk/edutxtInfo.do
Focus on…
PRISM
PRISM is a new interdisciplinary learning website produced by our sister organisation PALATINE (the Dance , Drama & Music Subject Centre). Prism allows lecturers and students to view and assemble collections of exemplar works from the subject areas of dance, music, theatre, architecture & design, art and film in some of the influential art movements of the ‘modern’ period in Europe and the United States. Works, productions and artefacts are grouped by movement (or ‘ism’). Exemplars are contributed by subject specialists and each one is accompanied by a rationale that includes examples of how the work might be used in learning and teaching across the creative and performing arts. The resource also allows users to save material in a password protected area and upload new coursework to the website.
http://prism.palatine.ac.uk/
