What’s your dream for e-learning? Have you heard these dreams yet? On a few occasions, beginning with the ACE e-learning showcase this year, people have shared their dreams for e-learning.
So Tina, one of our amazing English teachers at PRACE, comes in with our box of headsets, “Same question i ask you every Monday.. green is for listening?” This is one of the things that used to drive me crazy when we were running our Can You Hear Us? projects.. (No, not Tina.. the computers!!) (Beware: Rant Approaching.) Most of the windows/pc boxes have a colour coding for the audio sockets (green for listening, pink for speaking), but many headsets use a different colour code for their plugs (orange or Read More …
Great initiative via Leigh Blackall over in Otago, NZ. He and Michael and Alex have been experimenting with a wild new concept known as the Point of View (POV) camera. Worn on glasses, or on a head torch, the gadget allows you to video exactly what you’re doing, hands-free. Not sure whether it has audio recording built in yet. (Check: yes it does.) What also caught my eye (and my similarity radar) was an article on Wired, where the law enforcement agencies are investigating similar options .. a wearable computer, Read More …
Reflections on the session for Can You Hear Us? .. at the Converge08 e-learning conference (5Dec). The workshop went reasonably well. Really interesting people in the room, and many of the people there had used some kind of audio technologies .. including Skype, language laboratory setup, Wimba voice boards. i came up with a kind of jigsaw / find your partner activity, that i think went well and was fun. (Each person opens a wiki page with instructions for what to do. Eg some people have to wink .. and Read More …
Today was a roaring success, as we held a Live Session between two classes, one at Merrilands Community Centre and the other in Broadway in the heart of Reservoir. Both groups comprised English as a second language (ESL) learners. Tina and Jan and i came up with a way to use Skype to develop people’s language skills. Lately the students have been practising their descriptive skills, so we decided that each student would describe themselves over the skype phone, and the other group would guess who was speaking. Each group Read More …
Well .. Lisa continued her brave and valiant exploration of screencasting in the MYOB classroom, as part of the Can You Hear Us? project. And it’s still not as straightforward as we’d like it to be. We discovered a few more things about this program known as Jing. We already knew that the application would not run without a login. Now we know it’s a challenge to log yourself off the system .. for example when you’re on a public computer. Lisa’s had a go at recording the in-class on-screen Read More …
Chris couldn’t do the whole research project, but i still wanted her to be involved; so we talked about how to use audio technologies with her very beginner, low literacy ESL learners. Filling in forms is a crucial survival skill, but the language is reasonably advanced. Chris’ students find it hard to remember written text or even recognise words on the page.. so we decided to prepare an audio CD allowing the text to be both on the page and on the CD player. She would have them do the Read More …
So, Lisa was having some issues finding a straightforward way to incorporate audio technologies into her classroom. i suggested some ‘preparation-free’ activities such as : recording the presentation live in class (audio only) recording the screen demonstration live in class (screen and audio) We thought this might work, and i’d had some fun using “jing” for making a screencast. Looked easy to me. So i turn up at Lisa’s workplace, laptop at the ready. What could possibly go wrong? my laptop can’t connect to the Moreland network, and Jing will Read More …
Ah, delight! The technology worked! For our Can You Hear Us? project, we were lucky enough to get Michael Coghlan on our wavelength as guest speaker. He was in Adelaide, and we were in Melbourne. It was all done with the smoke and mirrors of skype. i love that! Michael told us about many wonderful tools for getting audio online, from voiceboards to podcasts and live conferencing. His slideshow is online on the project wiki .. and if we can get the recording to work, i’ll post that too. Actually Read More …
Last Tuesday was the mid-year reporting session for Victorian e-learning innovations. Some terrific work going on, especially Coonara community learning centre, and AMES who are both using wiki for students and classrooms. Howard gave us all a three minute timer, and because PRACE was close to the end of the day, i finished 5 seconds inside my 3 minutes. Woot. i enjoy talking to a 3 minute timer .. means you just focus on the essential points. Elluminated? We met in the elluminate live conference room. Always fun to meet Read More …