It’s another great tool you, or your students can use to share images. It mixes up your images and music together and creates a professional looking little video. The results are often somewhat like a movie preview.
Just sign up and follow the steps…
1. Upload images (don’t start with too many, it’ll take a while…)
2. Choose from a range of music, or upload your own
3. Choose create movie and let animoto analyse and ‘mash’ up your images.
If you don’t like the result, you can remix… Go to the Animoto homepage andwatch the preview (example video).
Networking online for both professioal and social reasons has huge potential and will only increase in popularity as a way of linking ‘like minded’ people. As individuals, as teaching professionals and as part of a great Institute team we need to be exploring the advantages of these sites for ourselves and our students. This is a recent article I found related to just this issue:
“If you’ve been joining social networking sites and never taking the time to complete your profile — or if you’ve been hitting the delete button when friends and colleagues invite you to connect on a new online platform, now is a good time to start paying more attention. Here are a few things to think about as you take the plunge or take your social networking to the next level.
LinkedIn has taken hold as the standard for most professionals, but also consider spending time on sites catering to your own industry or profession. Keep up with the trade press in your field to figure out where your peers are congregating online. Specialized communities exist for just about any industry or interest group . . . . “
Flickr is a great tool for backing up your photo’s and sharing them with your friends and family. It integrates easily with Facebook, iPhoto (if you’re lucky enough to have a Mac). Flickr also allows you to do some really great things with your photo’s, like publish a photobook (blurb), business cards (moo), and so much more.
If you use Flickr, please leave a comment here with your Flickr address so we can add you as a contact in Flickr. That way when we next visit Flickr, we can see your latest photo’s.
notes from the Moodle Moot 08 e-Learning Conference…
The Keynote from Professor Erica McWilliam, Assistant Dean (Research), Faculty of Education, QUT. Was so inspiring that I had to do two blog posts about it.
Here’s the first part of this post, with the engaging presentation linked in there for you to have a look through…
And here are some of the notes I took…
Teaching & Learning
Promote Peer-to-Peer feedback. Kids give great (honest) feedback to each other. These days, kids get rewarded for their first attempts at any task (this needs to change), because of this, they can’t accept negative feedback from elders. So using tools to promote peer-to-peer feedback is a really good idea!
Promote errors - we need to make errors to learn or we will become a very ignorant society. Help students fail without shame.
Balance - Too little or too much computing is NOT good learning, there needs to be a balance.
Create self managing learners – In a more temporary environment, learners need to be able to assemble and edit their learning world. With technology everything is editable/ temporary.
Passive teaching is bad. Don’t teach rope learning, don’t care about the answer, care about the learning. Our highest achievers aren’t always our best learners!
Team work – The value of a networked community must be explored. Typically, kids hate group work. So, we need to explain the advantages of group work clearly, i.e.
A group of bike riders go faster than one
A Flock of birds fly high than one
Systemic randomness
Small groups working together look like one large group (bio-teams)
Let Go! - There’s too much information out there, we don’t need to know it all. We need to get experience, involvement in the communities based around our chosen field sooner. Let go of old ideas. Scientists don’t need to know the entire periodic table by heart before they are released into the science community, yet we still insist that they do.
There is always room for improvement – we may master the functionality of things, but there’s always room for improvement aesthetically.
Build Learning Communities - link people in powerful ways
Find comfort in being ignorant, things are moving so fast, we can’t know everything. The place for ‘knowers’ is Noah’s Ark!
Enhancing constraints and removal of inhibitors (creating better guidelines)
Recognise that low percentile groups ‘flock’ together (and consequently give and get bad/ negative advice from each other)
Connect low percentiles with ‘high flyers’ (online systems give us fast and accurate access to this type of information, like we’ve never had before. We can now see who’s disengaged and needs help and intervene earlier. As an educator, this is your opportunity to use your skills.
Creativity is now measurable, we need to model creative dispositions
The Creative Workforce
If you want to know more about Professor Erica McWilliam, you can read about her here.
notes from the Moodle Moot 08 e-Learning Conference…
The second day of the Moodle e-Learning Conference, MoodleMoot, attended by Tracy Young and myself, was brilliantly kicked off by a Keynote from Professor Erica McWilliam, Assistant Dean (Research), Faculty of Education, QUT.
I took so many notes during this session, SOME of which I’ll share at the bottom of this post, but I strongly encourage you to have a look at the attached presentation.
Special thanks to Erica for giving me permission to share her wonderful presentation with you.
Here’s a taste of the brilliant presentation from Erica:
1703 Complaints
Students can no longer prepare bark to
calculate problems. They rely instead on
expensive slate. What will they do when the
slate breaks?
1815 Complaints
Students depend too much on paper instead
of slate. What will they do when we run out of
paper?
1917 Complaints
Students depend too much on ink. They
can’t sharpen a pencil with a knife anymore.
1928 Complaints
Students depend too much on store bought
ink. They don’t know how to make their own.
What happens when they run out?
1955 Complaints
Teachers refuse to accept papers written with
ballpoint pens. A fountain pen is the only
acceptable instrument!
1960 Complaints
Take away students’ slide rules and they no
longer have the skills to solve a problem!
1980 Complaints
Can students even function today without a
calculator?
2000 Complaints
Students are totally dependent on their
computers. What will they do when there is a
blackout?
2040 Complaints
They have given me a mixed class of
humans, hybrids and transhumanists. How
do I deal with the various learning styles?
2023 Complaints
They have implanted the
Library of Congress in their heads. What are
we supposed to teach them now?
Are you interested?
Then check out the presentation from this session, and stay tuned for my next blog post, which will include some great notes from this session about leadership, creative problem solving, team work and diversification, teaching and learning and much more…
notes from the Moodle Moot 08 e-Learning Conference…
The final Moodle session of the first day, Rich content for Moodle on a Budget, was enthusiastically and entertainingly presented by Rhys Moult, of BJ Network Consulting.
Rhys (an ex-bartender and sommelier who smoothly seduced his way into the hearts of his audience with a glass of Shiraz) looked at various tools (free, media rich, Web2.0 tools) that can be used with Moodle to enhance learning resources and courses.
You can view the session presentation here, or just check out some of the tools Rhys highlighted for easy integration with Moodle below.
GoAnimate!
GoAnimate is a web tool you can use to create animations (learning activities) to embed into your course web space or Moodle course. Here’s an example:
Udutu
Udutu is a tool that represents “a drastic change in online learning and training, allowing anyone to offer training through the already popular Facebook social network”.
From Udutu:
Social Networks as Learning Management Systems
To create a learning organization where knowledge is passed from experts to newcomers and where personal growth is encouraged, you need to create a social learning network. You can impose your own and hope they’ll participate, or you can leverage the one they already use. Chances are many of your people are already signed up!
Don’t fight technology, Leverage it!
Our applications can turn existing social networks such as Facebook. Into a powerful Learning Management System, (LMS, LCMS) and retain all the rich communication and scheduling tools that these applications offer.
Better yet, there’s no upfront investment in either infrastructure or software licensing. You can be up and running tomorrow in the interface your learners already know and use.
Udutu and Moodle
The myUdutu Course Authoring Module for Moodle allows you to easily insert your myUdutu courses into your running Moodle installation. You can download the module from the Moodle site here.
I’ve seen a demonstration of Udutu and Moodle, it basically allows you to create and embed your own learning objects, structure the learning, easily add audio and video, navigation and much more.
Well worth a look!
Jing!
Jing is a tool that some of us have been using already to quickly and simply record audio over screen demonstrations or create screen shots with captions. It’s a free tool, with limited server storage, but you can save the instructional movie as a flash file to your computer.
This slideshare presentation from Cool Cat Teacher (Vicki Davis), from the Conference of Media Organizations held in the state of Georgia, is a very intersting presentation about challenging our definition of literacy and encouraging others to be a part of the redefinition of literacy…
I’m sure it will be of particular interest to our wonderful librarians… and many of our teaching staff.
After a very amusing video that was meant to explain what podcasting actually is (…it didn’t actually explain much, but had everyone laughing and engaged)… Julian demonstrated some great ways of how teachers could use Moodle for Podcasting and some good reasons as to why they should!
Julian has explored two Moodle ‘modules’, the Podcast and the iPodcast module (the activities you select from the drop down box when you’re editing your Moodle course)
Here’s the presentation… (you can watch the version with audio here, which I recommend).
Check out the blog tips from Sue Waters – edublogger, listed on our Blogging Tips page. This page will always be changing, so be sure to come back for more ideas…
Her session was called ‘Diving into e-Learning’, it was a case study about building capability and enthusiasm for using a ‘low-budget’ online learning environment, Moodle.
The course – http://elearning.adas-online.org is for the Occupational Diving Industry, the clients are mostly mature-age, time-poor and experienced in the field.
Image: ‘Jenny is taking the video’ – www.flickr.com/photos/26598370@N00/97206526
Getting divers out of the water and into a classroom proved to be a bit of a logistical nightmare and Bronwyn’s presentation explored some of the benefits, challenges and issues involved in moving the classroom online, into Moodle.
The attached PowerPoint presentation from her session is jam-packed with statistics and data gathered from students of the online course. Grab a cuppa and five minutes to take a look at their journey and statistics!
Next Moodle Moot blog post will be about Podcasting through Moodle, a session presented by Julian Ridden a.k.a Moodleman.
I’ve attached the presentation here (thanks Shane) so you can see the main points covered and the new Gradebook features for Moodle 2.0.
Tip for viewing the Gradebook
One great tip I got (thanks to Kaz Madigan for asking the question), was about the fact that the gradebook is displayed in one long horizontal table. By the time you scroll to the end of the grades, you can no longer see the name of person on the left.
Here’s something that may help.
Before
Click on the cell that the person name is in (if you click there name, you’ll be transported to their profile page). It will highlight the row, so when you scroll, you can see who’s grades you’re looking at!
After
Hope that’s useful.
The next Moodle Blog Post will about about the interesting session ‘Diving into e-Learning’ from Bronwyn Campbell of Active Learning Partners.
