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Helping your Community of Users
Some great things are happening with the Edublogs pilot. We can now see great communities breaking out.
One particular Administrator of these communities has made a quick little video to help their users.
What else are you doing to help develop your community of users?
Lady Gaga + Librarians
University of Washington’s Information School Librarians take their cues from Lady Gaga and produce this interesting video clip.
tomato
digital voice recorder
obviously not a ‘new’ technology, but if I had to name the one techi thing that changed life in my corner it was the nifty usb recorder I started using five years ago…. what it means in practice is that the linguistically vulnerable student seeking advice about their writing (those using English as an additional language, for example) can instantly get a copy of the consultation (no cables, just pull it apart, stick it in their laptop) which they can listen to repeatedly at their own pace, and thereby learn so much more than from a single exposure which they may or may not well recall when back at their desk trying to put into practice the pearls of linguistic wisdom showered upon them… their feedback assures me this was the best investment for teaching I ever made…
xmarks
For those of you struggling to juggle your digital life between the home office and computer supplied by the workplace (which may not be your first preference of machine, c’est la vie) is so much easier with…. xmarks – which like Dropbox is an add-on to Firefox. And one of our UOW staff users has found that (unlike Dropbox), adding xmarks to your browser doesn’t seem to require admin – you can do it yourself. And it’s great – because it syncs all your bookmarks. So you can have your essential websites at your finger-tips no matter where you’re working today. http://www.xmarks.com/
Dropbox – a cloud with a difference
Synchronisation of files across multiple computers & mobile devices, web-based access to files, managed sharing of folders with other dropbox users, url creation for public documents for emailing links, web-album generation, event history tracking of your dropbox (file restoration) etc …
Well worth a look and a boon when travelling and you need access to storage or sharing items with international contacts.
Hosted externally, which brings along its own considerations, but this type of thing would have great potential for groups of students working collaboratively on a group assignment, sharing progress between themselves and tutor etc…
Currently free for up to 2GB of storage, plans beyond that.
Omnium – great collaborative online space
This is a great product developed here in Australia by the University of NSW, College of Fine Arts (COFA) about 5 years ago. http://omnium.net.au/
I like their metaphors for the different spaces. Each student has a “filing cabinet” which is their personal files.
To share these they “publish” them to “The Wall” which is a shared gallery space for the equivalent of your workgroup/workspace, where you can add comments. This works best when the files are images or video (which is what it was designed for, developed by/for the College of Fine Arts.) Then if the teacher thinks your work is great, they can publish it to a “Class Wall” for the whole class to see.
The best work in the class can be published to a Public Wall, ie a virtual art gallery space that anybody can view. Great promo/marekting for COFA.
Would you like to be able to promote your student work in this way? With their permission of course…
Grad Diploma Education
I met with Sharon Tindall-Ford from Faculty of Education today regarding The Grad Diploma Ed. It’s an intensive 10 month program with about 350 students in each intake ie per year. It is taught across 4 different campus: Wollongong, BB, SH and Bega.
The students spend 55 days in the classroom – about 20% of the total learning time.
Their program consists of core subjects from Wgong in the main plus eduStream for large classes and some video conferencing (vcf). Sharon said they are moving away from co-ordinators in each location, hence they have an ESDF project to harness appropriate technologies for Multi-location teaching, and ongoing professional development for interactive teaching ie 2-way approach even in the large classes. Richard Caladine working on this aspect with Tess Snowball. They are looking to move from eduStream to interactive vcf even for the large classes.
New requirement: Sharon wants to offer scheduled syncronous staff/student consultations to facilitate feedback and reflection on the classroom prac experience. Could be one-on-one, could be scheduled for tutor to whole tutorial, could be opt-in sessions on key topics eg Maths lesson plans, Classroom management. Also good for interventions for students struggling and under strees, to keep them in the program.
Who else wants this kind of facility?
Flip video camera
I’ve borrowed a Flip high-definition camera and am experimenting with it. I took a few short clips on wednesday, then down-loaded them quickly and easily onto iPhoto on my mac at home. From there it was a drag and drop into iMovie.
The Flip has a pop-out USB connection, so the whole device plugs into the computer like a large, shiny silver USB key. And the interface is so easy to use, only 4 buttons, can’t go wrong. I like!
