Sorry!

I was just having a look at some previous posts and for some reason a few paragraphs on a number of posts were illegible. For some reason the format had changed, making the background white, and with my writing being white, well you couldn't read it!

I will have to preview my posts now to double check!

My first video

Well here is my first video made using my stop motion software I got the other week.

I had to export it from the Hue Animation software as an MPEG-4 and then i uploaded it onto YouTube. The only problem I have is that the screen width is quiet small. I'm guessing this is due to the quality of the camera, or the way in which it is set up, but I will have a look see. Hopefully I will be able to get the quality a bit better. I may even look to see if using a different camera will improve the quality.

HUE Animation Studio

This week I bought an animation kit called Hue Animation Studio, which can be used to create stop motion films and such. I got it from Hue Animation, and they seem to work closely with a company called iCreate to Educate. I decided to get it as just before I finished work for summer Sandra at one of the other libraries was doing a competition for creating Black History films out of Lego, so it got me thinking too!

My plan is to create a few films, upload them onto YouTube and try and get my head around how to use videos on the various library and e-learning programmes I have mentioned in the previous post. And also try and get the videos to play on this blog! So watch this space for how I am going on!

So anyways, my package arrived yesterday and this is what I got in it when I opened it up.

Here it is, instructions and camera in the box.

Here it is all unpacked. the camera is set up, you get all the leads and software to attach it to your computer. They even give you some plasticine so you can dive right in! 

Having researched a bit more Hue Animation seems to be aimed at younger students and children, but I am looking forward to creating some films!

E-Learning and Library management : Tools and programmes

Sorry for my lack of blogging this weekend, I have been on a stag do to York races. Fun times indeed. Any ways...

I have been meaning to upload a list of E-Learning tools and software we have used at work, as well as those I have used at uni and in the past. At the moment it is just a list really, but I intend to go through some of them in some detail so that I can try to get my head around the best ways of using them.

As I seem to be going of on an E-Learning tangent, and with recent developments at work regarding a site catalogue merger I'll also include some of the management systems in the list. Hopefully this will get me thinking about how to use the programmes in more of a library based setting. Keeping myself from going off on extreme tangents is proving quiet tricky!

Well here is my list, and I will try to begin writing explanation blogs on most of these in the coming weeks. I'll probably start with the presentation software Prezi as I have most experience using this one, but we will see :)



E-Learning and Library Management Software


Presentation software

Slide rocket
Prezzi


Video/animations

Go animate


Diagrams and flow charts

Gliffy


Digital signage and displays

Xibo


Online voting, brainstorming and presentation

Tricider


For artful story telling

Storybird

Visibletweets

Visible Tweets is a visualisation of Twitter messages designed for display in public spaces.


Blogging tools

Blogger
Glogster
tumblr

Traditional social media

Facebook
Myspace
Linkedin
Twitter
youtube


Online surveys

Survey monkey
Fluid surveys
smartsurvey


Photo sharing

flickr


Library Management Software

Heritage
Galaxy
Talis

Kemu


Computer Monitoring Software

Icam
MyPC
LanSchool

E-Learning: Turnitin

The past few weeks at work have been full of training. It being the end of term and near the summer holidays there have been lots of sessions crammed in all over the show.

One of these sessions was a preview of a program called Turnitin and it introduced me to a very good resource.

Turnitin is a program where teachers can upload students coursework. It then searches the internet looking for any plagiarism and highlights this for either the student or the teacher to look at, depending how it is set up. Not only does it search the internet for sources, but it also keeps hold of the particular document in a separate database so that future submissions can be checked against previous work, allowing tutors to check if students have copied each other. AND it also searches the databases of other institutions which are using the software too, so it could tell you if students have copied work from further afield! 

How good is that! 

The only down side I have noticed so far is that it did not search our e-book catalogue, which is quiet easy to copy and paste things from. Could it be that turnitin only works with word documents and cannot search PDFs or any of the many other file formats used by e-books?

Maybe if there was some way to attach the e-book catalogue to the search parameters this could be fixed? Or it could be a case of copying entire e-books into the system as 'coursework' in order for it to be searchable? This would be quiet a pain to do. I will have to raise my ideas/concerns with the very capable people in our IT and E-Learning departments and see what they say!

Any ways here is a screen shot of the turnitin website and the link to it too incase you wanted to have a look see :-)

http://turnitin.com/

E-Learning: Moodle 1

Well this week at work I have been talking to Clare who works with elearning things and Sandra at one of our other sites, and it has become pretty evident that our Learning Resources Centre Moodle page is in need of a good going over.

For those of you who do not know what moodle is, it is a virtual learning environment where you can create course areas where tutors can upload course information and resources. It is also used at the college I work at to create a base page for all LRC resources and information.

So having spoken to Clare and Sandra I have been coming up with some ideas for the moodle page for the site that I am based at. First of all I am going to have a look at the other three LRC moodle pages in order to get an idea of what they are like. I am then going to style my moodle page so that it is visually the same, with similar resources and a similar feel. I think this would help us brand all the LRC's better and give the students a better expereince.

To be honest though the LRC moodle page for my site is a bit rubbish at the minute, I dont think it looks the best and the resources are not uptodate. Hopefully with some work this will change and it will become useful! A visit to Sandra on Thursday/Friday last week gave me the chance to discuss the moodle LRC pages with her, so I should now have access to the resources that are on Sandra's moodle page. This week will be a busy week with training and such, but I am hoping to have enough spare time to get my hands on moodle and have a play about with it.

First off I will be styling our LRC page to look like the others to create better LRC branding. After that I will try and add some resources and try to tidy it up a bit, so expect future moodle posts and maybe some pictures!