Someone in my e-Learning network on Twitter posted a link to a very useful site - Sloganizer!

Sloganizer allows you to put any keyword into a box, hit the Sloganize button and voila - your own slogan!

What a great tool for brainstorming, creating project slogans and much more. Here are some of the Slogans I tried;

2009 is the year of Action for me

Supporting Colleagues

To reinforce and refresh my own learning I’ve started to roll out sessions with my colleagues especially in Retail, Community Pharmacy & Personal services.

This year I have had demand from colleagues who previously weren’t engaged are now asking me for help.  Which is fantastic because they knew where to go to for help.

Adobe Connect has been engaging my Community Pharmacy colleagues who are looking at viable ways to deliver workplace training especially in distance locations.

In Retail my colleagues are asking for help with: online resources, wikis, how to do powerpoint and use a data projector for face to face delivery to engage their students.

Personal services have asked me to help them establish units on Moodle.

This year has certainly started off to be a year of action!

Supporting Industry

Another exciting moment I had recently was being approached by a pharmacy. The business wanted to establish how they could learn to use technology because they would like to run instore health promotions in store.

After assessing their needs I was able to match a unit of competency to the desired training and incorporate it into Cert IV in Community Pharmacy traineeship for the senior staff member.  The unit is called ‘Select an eBusiness Model’. Initially, I put together a presentation of how they could use moviemaker as a stepping stone and to build their confidence in this area.  Last week they were so impressed, they can’t wait for me to show the trainee how to do this and then apply her learning to the pharmacy, they believe that both the business and the community will benefit from this.

It is so rewarding to share my learning from The Learning Technologies Team to our customers.

Being apart of this amazing team has given me so much knowledge which now I can share confidently with my colleagues and customers.

Hi All

Thought this site had great material for engaging students and teachers in discussions around children’s rights, use of the media and cartoons to get a message across, text types etc. It is the UNICEF site: cartoons for children’s rights

http://www.unicef.org/crcartoons/

Each cartoon listing is illustrated with a still image from the original animation, and has the following information:

• Number and theme of the cartoon
• Which Article of the Child Rights Convention the cartoon is based on, originating country, production house, and credits.
• Links to online clips, if available for that cartoon.

When you click to watch them online a box comes up asking you for a username and password for the unicef site – just click ‘cancel’. Then another box will come up asking for your DET username and password – enter these. The cartoons need to be played on Realplayer which comes on all the institute computers however if you have not opened it before you will need to register.

Call me if you have any problems and please pass this to staff who might be interested.

Cheers

Kate

Hi

I got my hands on an e-beam for the Gen Ed section at Great Lakes - how great are they! Teachers who where very ambivalent about technology were immediately engage, especially when shown all the fantastic Activstudio flipcharts that are out there that they can use.

One of the stumbling blocks for a lot of Gen Ed teachers is the literacy level of a lot of our students. Teachers don’t feel that giving computer activities to students helps when they are reluctant readers and writers. Flipcharts are colourful, interactive resources that you can use with the whole class. And if you have an e-beam you can direct everything from the whiteboard. Check out the Activstudio flipchart resources at http://www.prometheanplanet.com/ (You need a flipchart reader - download from TaLE www.tale.edu.au)

Cheers

Kate (WeLC, Great Lakes and Taree)

Check out the Australian Flexible Learning Framework E-learning Innovations 2008 Profiles.

This tool will allow you to view summaries of all funded 2008 projects nationally, it links to the project sites, all project documentation and presentations are shared.

This site is by an Australian moodler Tomaz Lasic. Tom has some great little video tutorials on how to use and set up a range of resources and activities in moodle.

See them here - http://human.edublogs.org/moodle-tutorials-2-minute-moodles/

Thank you

A big thank you to Julian “Moodleman” Ridden for helping us sort out the issues with our NCTAFE Moodle theme. The choccies are on their way Julian!

The CS&H Faculty are holding 3 geographical meetings in first Semester 2009. The Faculty Manger - Di Paton - has invited me as the FeLC to present at these 3 meetings.  Exciting hey!  

We’re planning on showcasing what people are doing with their course delivery and to try to inspire others to give it a go.  The first meeting is in being held in Port Macquare 10th March and I’ll do updates as how it goes.  The LTT might find some of my expereinces (!!) helpful.

Hi all,

I know Linda Johnston uses Second Life for her beauty therapy students and possibly there are others out there that use it as well so, I thought this paper might make interesting (holiday) reading.

It was presented at the 2008 Annual ASCILITE (Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education ) conference.

Here’s the abstract to give you an idea of what it’s all about…

Regulation, governance and harms stemming from the use of virtual worlds and other Massive Multi Media Online Role Playing Games (MMMORPGs) in higher education, are poorly understood and under-researched issues. Second Life, developed by Linden Labs, provides users with a series of generic ‘terms of service’ and codes of conduct, yet place the bulk of responsibility on individual users or groups to report misbehaviour or develop their own behavioural codes, enforcement procedures and punishments suited to their particular needs. There is no guidebook to assist users in the processes of risk identification and management. As such, the various benefits of MMMORPG technologies could be offset by the risks to users and user-groups from a range of possible harms, including the impact of actual or perceived violence within teaching and learning settings.

While cautioning against the direct translation of real-world regulatory principles into the governance of virtual worlds, this paper suggests theoretical and practical guidance on these issues can be taken from recent criminological developments. Using Lawrence Lessig’s (1999) landmark work on cyber-regulation as a starting point, this paper examines the literature on video-game violence to illustrate the need for educators show awareness of both real and perceived risks in virtual worlds as a core element of an emerging educational pedagogy. We identify how the multiple roles of the virtual-world educator become useful in framing this pedagogy to improve student learning, to dispel myths about the risks of immersive technologies and advocate for their adoption and acceptance in the educational community.

Here’s the paper!

cheers,

Neal

Lindy Kemp, our Acting General Education Faculty Manager has obviously been busy exploring new technologies…

Not your usual Seasons Greetings

This a great example of how LTT members continue to engage staff and the positive effects these tools are having.

An achievement for the CS&H faculty (and NCI TAFE)

How?

Well,  CS&H teachers from:
  Child Studies,
        Nursing and
                  Welfare
met with Alex (from the Hub) .

We were sitting in
  Port Macquarie
      Taree and
          Coffs Harbour.

We achieved great outcomes,
    worked on Moodle course creation, and
           shared destops using Adobe Connect …  

with no travel involved.

The vision is working.

Today I read an inspiring email from Donna, one of our fantastic team members, who is very excited about a Moodle project she has been working on.

The email not only reflected the growth her own capability and confidence levels with the Moodle platform, but highlights her ability to effectively collaborate with her colleagues and encourage resource sharing in the faculty.

General Education Moodle course templates

As the Faculty e-Learning Contact for the General Education Faculty, Donna has been working tirelessly with her team to create some great ‘template’ Moodle courses for all Gen. Ed. staff to use. While these courses already contain some fantastic interactive resources, they can easily be duplicated and customised for other teachers in the faculty to use.

You can have a look at a tour of the Moodle template course by watching Donna’s CGVE Moodle template tour here. Donna gives you a comprehensive look through the CGVE English course and at the interactive resources that are currently available to engage and teach students.

Feel free to contact Donna if you would like to use this course.

In her email Donna says:

“I have to say that getting moodle setup is going to be really exciting- today Lyn Connors rang me with a suggested resource for CGVE- to use the new government anti-binge ads- so with a net search  I’ve located them on a video, also a podcast discussing their effectiveness and many related articles on the net- am putting them into a little work unit with activities to add as a web page in the English moodle- good fun! I am getting less afraid!“

Check out this great new free online resume tool. visualCV.com is a great easy way for students to prepare online resumes that look unreal, professional and will really create an impression. They can include examples of their work, videos, portfolio links and other supporting documents which can then be securely shared with potential employers family etc and it’s all free with no ads (not that I’ve seen yet anyway). They can also have different versions for different jobs.

VisualCV has a section specifically for students and caters for those trying to get their first jobs right through to CEO’s

.