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Category Archives: Mobile and multi-location
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?
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!
Presenting student or researchers’ work on laptops over wireless
In a recent discussion with the group working to get the SMART centre up and running, a situation was discussed in which guests, researchers and students would like to be able to bring their laptops to the university, and in various meeting rooms and Common Teaching areas to share what is on their screen with other participants by publishing or sharing their screen to Smart/interactive whiteboards over the wireless network. And it would be good to be able to do this when working or meeting in small groups, where each group develops something on their laptop and then at the end of the lesson/meeting they can present their work to all the other groups. There would need to be some kind of interface to allow the different groups to push the work on their laptops to the various public screens in the various rooms.
Is this something you want to be able to do? Please add a comment.
SMART: live streaming of their eSim research
The new SMART centre (stilll under construction) will have a number of special simulation rooms in which hi-tech research will be occuring. The would like to have each room fitted with an IP camera and to be constantly recording the activities in the room, and to be able to broadcast this via both high-definition TV eg UoWConnect and digital signage (located in various part of the SMART building and indeed around campus) as well as lower-definition streaming media format for delivery to staff and students via eLearning environment and other websites and also via mobile devices such as iPhones.
To enable multiple streams of the media to be processed and delivered, UoW would need to purchase a new server and locate this in the UoW data centre. I am liaising with vendors regarding quotations. I’ll keep you posted, so watch this space.
For information SMART centre, see their website http://smart.uow.edu.au/index.html