Audio Plugged In

We have a new voice recorder for presentations - and it does a great job... even picks up comments from the back of the room... I was able to cut the file size down to about 5MB with only a little loss in voice quality. (Tip for next time - don't put recorder near laptop fan!)

Dirk recorded his Ethics presentation last week and this week I recorded the Reflective Learning and Virtual Worlds presentations with audio uploaded to Moodle - and only slight editing was needed where my laptop decided to snooze... (See moodle for presentation notes and audio.)

We hope this will give students the freedom catch presentations online that they may not want to or be able to attend in person ... The audio can obviously also be downloaded to an MP3 player...

I might try to do an integrated slides and audio in mp4 format later.

Birds Eye Views

Sometimes the best laid plans... WORK!

Although some students have been a little frustrated with the first week of classes with multiple registrations/passwords/emails... it's starting to come together - well for me at least :-)

With all students in Gmail I can see who is online, hover over names and see faces, initiate chat, organise groups... Great for matching names and faces for the 50 new students I have...


With all students in Twitter I get an over-view of class activity - and easily click to read individual 'activity logs'. This will also enable me to gauge participation and levels of engagement.


With all students in Moodle I can see who has accessed tasks, viewed resources and submitted assignments... and MUCH more.


With all students in 43Things RSS'ed to Google Reader I can keep track of each person's learning goals and targets...


Now that these are set up I can sit back and relax while online services and RSS do all the work... OK maybe not... but at least I can now realistically work on the personalised learning and teaching while the ICTs look after the data management side of things.

In the Dark?

The 40 Interactive Media and Digital Project students who sat in a darkened theatre today were hopefully enlightened about the aims of this new course - and how we will manage learning that is both personalised and flexible. The half hour fast-paced presentation was an example of one way that students will meet in physical space... although most of the presentation was about how we will meet in online spaces.



We began with a look at a stunning machinima production by Travis. Love Harvest was filmed in The SIMS2 and won second prize in the international SIMS99 competition. I have subscribed to The_Enigmartist's (Travis) RSS feed to make sure I don't miss his future productions... BTW checkout Dwayne - very funny!

The PowerPoint explained the purpose and thinking behind the Student-Directed Inquiry course - a new TQA syllabus designed to stimulate learning skills and ways of thinking for work, study and life in the 21st century. (PowerPoint with notes - click/hover top left corner icon on each page - for those with access to our Moodle.)

I introduced some of the online services that we will use to help us keep the learning personalised and flexible. After the session students moved to computers to register for Twitter, Google Reader and 43Things.

Dirk and I then spoke to individual and small groups about their project ideas. Some people have definite ideas about what they want to achieve and others are still thinking... which is fine.

One thing is known... the course will be challenging for both students and teachers! Hopefully after today though we are all a bit less in the dark :-)

Rats?

A new year... a new blog... new courses... new classrooms (and new carpet in the old ones)... new students (well some)...

What will it all bring? Something different that's for sure

Am I ready? As ready as I'll ever be... Are the students ready? We'll soon find out...

Well that wasn't too hard for my first time in Moodle. I'm ready for anything now...

So, bring on the year of the Rat! A lucky year the Chinese tell us... An Olympic year...



Darko creates some Olympic Spirit over Rusty in Jokaydia - 7/2/2008

17/2/2008 - I've copied this post from my Moodle blog so that I can access more functions like commenting and page customisation. BTW my neighbour caught a large rat in his possum trap - he took it away and released it :-)