eLearning journal

Have you been wondering about online surveys, bookmarking, blogging, or podcasting but not really sure where to begin. Here are two websites that provide easy to follow video guides that will be really useful if you are thinking about using more web technologies in your teaching.

Web2practice from JISC Netskills:
So far they have developed five guides explaining technologies like RSS, microblogging (twitter), podcasting and social media. Each guide consists of a short animated video explaining the key concepts, with a useful accompanying short written guide covering potential uses, risks and how to get started.

Teacher training videos from Russell Stannard (principal lecturer in Multimedia/ICT at the University of Westminster):
On this website you will find an extensive set of easy to follow training videos introducing YouTube, iTunes, online surveys (Survey Monkey), delicious, wikis, audacity, camtasia, blogging, and podcasting to name a few. Each title includes a number of short 1-3 minute video clips that you can watch in sequence or view just the parts you are interested in. Russell Stannard has a special interest in english language teaching and a separate collection of videos under that title.

Here's a good way for sharing web resources and reference material with your students using the RSS feeds tools available in Moodle. For example, you can collect bookmarks for your course in delicious (tagged with a name specific to your course) and then set up a feed into your Moodle course that automatically updates as you add more bookmarks.

Here's how to do it:

1. In your Moodle course click the Turn editing on button.
   
2. Find the Blocks editor and add a new 'Remote RSS feeds' block.
3. Click on the editing tool (hand tool) to configure the Feeds block.
4. Click on the 'Manage all my feeds' tab.
5. Find the RSS Feed logo on the website (that's the small orange square shown at the start of this post, labelled RSS or RSS Feed). Right click on the logo and select Copy Link Location or Copy Shortcut. Paste into the space provided to Add a news feed URL. Click the Add button. This feed will now come up in the Feed block on this page.
6. Click on the Configure this block tab.
7. The feed should now be available to select (there may be several feeds shown here depending on how they have been configured in other courses), select your feed/s with a tick. Choose how you want to configure the feed, for example give it a title, provide each links description, and display a link to the original site. Click the Save changes button.
8. This feed will now be displayed and updated automatically in your course.

If you are new to blogging or even not so new, Sue Waters (The Edublogger) provides some helpful technical pointers in her Top 5 mistakes made by new bloggers, with information about:

1. Copying and pasting text written in word into a blog post
2. Using copyright images in blog posts
3. Uploading images from digital cameras without resizing
4. Forgetting to link
5. Copying and pasting other bloggers posts

It's well worth a look, read through the comments as well for other bloggers feedback and extra hints.

A word about The Edublogger. It is "dedicated to helping educational bloggers with emerging technologies in education, share their own experiences and promote the blogging medium. It’s purpose is to share tips, tricks, ideas and provide help to the educational blogging community".

There's lots of useful information on this blog, see the Posts by Topic section down the right. If this sounds like it might be useful to you, then why not subscribe to it.

(Image: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3102/2627669442_ce269e9fb4.jpg, by jenny downing)

Chris from Tuesday evenings social media class asked about setting up a twitter feed to her blog. Had wondered how to do that myself so followed the steps that Leigh suggested and there it is over on the right.

To get your own twitter feed:

1. click on the "Get Widget" button (seen at the bottom of my twitter feed)
2. fill in your twitter username in the right-side column and it will display your tweets in the central box
3. select the background colour
4. the Auto Scroll is disabled as a default setting so click on the tick if you want your tweets to scroll through automatically on your blog
5. click on the "Get Widget" button
6. copy the embed code in the pop-up box
7. go back to your blog and click "Customize" in the top right
8. click "Add a Gadget" in the layout boxes and select the HTML/Javascript gadget
9. paste your twitter widget code in the Content box and Save

Wondering what a widget is?
I looked up wikipedia and it can mean a number of things in computing. A simple definition from Widgetbox (where the twitter widget comes from) is

Web widgets are mini, portable-applications that can be added to any web page

There seems to be some overlap in the terms widget and gadget if you look up gadget on wikipedia. Is there any difference between these terms or are they referring to the same thing, at least for the general masses?

So here's the follow-on video of How to make a video using Camstudio, it shows how to add the title and credits to a video recording using Windows movie maker. I'm thinking that screen recordings could be useful for showing staff how to use Moodle or other applications. In addition screen recordings could be used for showing off-campus students how to access their online courses and other features of their course.

1. Open Windows movie maker.
2. From left options 1, import video.
3. From left options 2, add titles.
4. Option 3, save to my computer.
5. Name movie and set location to save.
6. Click show more choices and select other settings, then select 'High quality video large'. Then click next. The movie will open when finished compressing.

Here's the video showing how to use Windows movie maker:



Both Camstudio and Windows movie maker seem relatively easy to use. The biggest difficulty I found was trying to record in a shared office with people coming and going, telephones ringing etc. Most staff here at Otago Polytechnic have shared offices and several have mentioned this as a problem when using Audacity. I wonder whether we should have a room provided on campus that could be booked for recording purposes, or do we already have this?

With heavy snow overnight, Dunedin turned into a winter wonderland. With schools closed and hill roads treacherous, we had the day at home. Thought I'd turn my photos from today into a Flickr slideshow to share.



Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

This is how I embedded the Flickr slideshow on my blog using flickrSLiDR to create the embed code:

Create a Flickr account if you don't already have one and upload some photos. Organise your photos into a Set.
Open your Set and copy the URL.
Open flickrSliDR and paste your Set URL into the URL space.
Add the width and height. I used 500 x 400. Click on the Create slideshow! button. This creates the embed Code.
Copy and paste the code into your blog.

1. Download and install Camstudio.
2. Open Camstudio, open region and select fixed region, set to 640 x 480.
3. Open Options and set to record from microphone and autopan.
4. In options, click audio options and click the volume button, then advance microphone button and tick the 1MIC boost option (windows only).
5. Click the record button. Position the mouse over recording area and click again to record.
6. The recording region will track your mouse (move your mouse slowly and deliberately).
7. Click stop. Name the file and save (wait while it will be compressing in the background). When finished the movie will open.

1. Open Windows movie maker.
2. From left options 1, import video.
3. From left options 2, add titles.
4. Option 3, save to my computer.
5. Name movie and set location to save.
6. Click show more choices and select other settings, then select 'High quality video large'. Then click next. The movie will open when finished compressing.

This video is now ready for publishing online ie YouTube.

The video below shows how to set up Camstudio for recording. In my excitement I forgot to mention that once you have all the settings, hit the red record button and place the recording frame where you want to begin recording from (it's not recording yet), then left click and it will start recording.



I've now added the follow on video showing how to use Windows movie maker in this posting.

Have started tweeting? or maybe twittering? not sure of the correct terminology yet, but these are small posts (microblogs) of 140 characters or less updated on your twitter page that all your followers can view.
So how is twitter being used? You can ask a question, provide a link to something interesting, send out reminder post about a meeting/event, or simply tell everyone what you are up to.



Leigh introduced twitter at the last social media class, in the hope this might be an easier way for newbies to start interacting with others before getting going on their own blogs.

Sign up, fill in your profile details, then you can find people to follow. Clicking on someone's username takes you to their twitter page and you can see their recent posts and also who they are following; a click of a button and you can follow them.

Firefox allows you to install Twitterfox (see under the Tools menu, Get Add-ons and search for twitterfox) so tweets automatically pop up in the lower right of your screen. Clicking on the twitterfox icon (see red arrow below) shows you a list of recent updates, and you can post/reply from here.



Here's a neat example from an Auckland primary school teacher of what can happen with twitter: pirates ahoy . Sounds like a lot of fun!