e-Learning Stuff

I was recently asked to give a short presentation at the Gloucester Academy on how Gloucestershire College used learning technologies. Though I did cover some of the technologies we are using to enhance and enrich learning, the main theme of the presentation was on how important it was to change the culture within an institution when embedding the use of learning technologies. Without a change in culture it is too easy to miss the potential and opportunities that learning technologies can bring to learning.

Those of you who have seen my other presentations will realise I cannibalised a lot of the content from them in this presentation. I do that now and again, especially when presenting to a fresh audience, I do recycle my material. Well often I am asked to speak about the same issues, so not really that surprising.

The presentation went down well, with the staff in my group mentioning key themes in their feedback to the rest of the staff.

In an not an unexpected move, SlideShare, the presentation hosting service has moved from Flash to HTML5.

When SlideShare launched it used Flash to create an online slideshow of your presentation slides. It is a service I have been using now for over three years and have found it a useful place to put presentations, but then to also embed them into the blog or the VLE.

However as it was Flash based there were issues when people viewed them on a mobile device such as the iPhone or the iPad. They did fix this for viewing a SlideShare presentation on the SlideShare website and released an API. Last year I reviewed the Slide by Slide app for the iPad and was not impressed. However this wasn’t an official iPad app one that merely used the SlideShare API.

Even though you could view the presentation on the website on the iPad when the SlideShare presentation was embedded into a website, all you got was a blank space.

So it’s interesting to hear that SlideShare are losing the Flash and moving to HTML5.

• Your slides will display flawlessly on an iPhone, iPad, Android and any other mobile platform. You can send a link to friends and colleagues, and they can view it on the go regardless of what device they are using.
• Your slides will now load 30% faster. On the web, faster is better.
• Your slides will be a part of the web. No plugins or downloads are required to view them.

They are certainly convinced that mobile is the way a lot of people will view presentations on the web.

Having posted Steve’s presentation on assessment earlier, I was reminded that I had delivered some training on assessment and diverse forms of assessment a few months back.

This was the presentation I gave at the training.

The key message I wanted to get across to the participants was that just because they had assessed the way they had always done, this didn’t mean that was the only way they could assess learners. Often we assess the way that we do, we do it because we have always done it that way. There are now new tools and technologies that allow us to enhance and enrich assessment. and make it more engaging and effective for learners.

Sometimes we need to think differently, especially if the current methods of assessment are not doing what we need them to do.

An interesting presentation from a keynote by that Steve Wheeler, Assessment in the Digital Age:Fair Measures?

Assessment, which in FE is heavily dictated to by the exam boards is always challenging to change to make “fit for purpose” and I do wonder if we assess because we need to assess rather than actually use it for something useful?

Looking at the applications on my Mac that I use on a regular basis, apart from mail and browsers the one app I probably use the most is Apple’s Keynote. I use it to create presentations for events, conferences and workshops. Having delivered my presentation (or sometimes before) I would upload it to Slideshare. Slideshare is a great site for hosting presentations that can then be embedded into blog posts, web pages or the VLE.

Though you can upload Keynote presentations to Slideshare, due to the nature of the types of presentations I create I have had issues with the conversion process. It works fine with simple presentations, buy my multiple page presentations sometimes have ground to a halt. As a result I now use the following workflow to ensure that my presentation uploads correctly to Slideshare.

I use the same process if I need to share the presentation with others, some conferences and organisations like to have a copy of the presentation on their website. Also when I know I will be presenting at a conference and I won’t be able to use my Mac directly and will have the use the provided Windows PC that is connected to the projector.

The process also works really well with online presentation systems such as Elluminate, Adobe Connect, Instant Presenter, and so on…

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