Uni of Adelaide iPads for in-lecture polling. Whist “clickers” faltered due to the need for students to all have one, this simple but clever solutions means the students just put their hand up, and only the lecturer needs the iPad.
See page 13 for the article
Dave Cummings at Victoria University is blogging about his Teaching Space project. They’ve just finished doing the walls and floor in IdeaPaint. They have to wait til friday for it to dry/cure before then can use it. But then…. it’ll be cool. Here’s a YouTube about IdeaPaint:
After months of planning and testing, the Skype pilot kicked off today. With slick new high definition web cams, and the help of the “how to” login sheet, the french language students connected with other students in Noumea. And the French conversations began to flow.
While many staff members have had Skype installed and working fine in their offices on their individual managed desktop machines (ie supported centrally by ITS), up until know it has been impossible to intall and use them “en masse” for use by students in an ITS managed teaching computer lab. But, thanks to the hard work of everybody involved (especially Krstan Risteski, ITS Labs Manager and Liz Burns, ITS System team) a special ‘software package’ was developed, tested, tweaked, and re-tested. Now Skype can be remotely installed in labs by ITS Support staff, with the correct network and software settings so that it actually works within the confines of a teaching lab. The only last minute hitch was that each new web-cam purchased by Arts (they are for use in the new Bld 19 Language labs) needed to have the software drivers manually installed, but thanks to Krstan, this was achieved in time also.
The group identified people, groups, projects and ideas to address the challenges we faced. Then we voted on them, and came up with the top 8. NMC will write it up and email us the next steps. A productive day.
This pilot project over in the new Digital Media Centre labs at iC is going very well. Ably supported by lab support technician Glenn Alexander, research into tweaking the lab setup is underway to ensure that when students logoff in the labs their software is re-set to an appropriate “clean-slate settings” state on the shared lab machines, and their data is saved on their USB or portable hard-drives.
I visited the class yesterday in person, and saw the colour animated graphics that the students were creating in the Ubuntu/Linux operating system using the Scala programming language. Look forward to seeing how the student projects develop.
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?
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…
I met with Rob Wright from HB&s/Nursing on 29th March and he told me of the success he had been having with creating rich media teaching resources by building on PPT with products from Articulate, see http://www.articulate.com/
Rob said that he can integrate quizzes and output the lot as Flash files (swf) and import these into Equella collection (under development) for sharing and re-use. He said he is starting with some Science Education modules, with the aim of moving from lecture based resources to self-paced online learning materials. He also notes that the product has a strong user support community from both industry training and education sectors with regular blog postings around educational process and practical ‘how to…’ posts.
I will contact Rob again and see if he can post some screen shots of the Flash modules that he has been able to output with this software. I am also talking to staff at ITS about the similarities and differences between this suite of products and that being offered by Adobe for media creation.
I like the fact that the board is so big you can use your whole arm to operate the huge scroll-bars and pulldown menus from the projected computer image. It gets you out from behind the lecturn more. You can stay out front and more in touch with your audience until you need to go back to keyboard on lecturn to type any text into a dialogue box or form.
