Screencast-O-Matic

I use the rather wonderful Wink to create animated screen captures for my on-line learning materials.

I get a lot of feedback from people who are not allowed to install software on their institution's computers. For them I would recommend

Screencast-O-Matic

which performs a similar job but completely on-line.

TeacherTube - Teach the World

Well, the summer's over and I'm back lecturing and the blog's back too.

My last entry was to suggest that bite sized learning could be stored in a YouTube style site, properly tagged and available to everyone.

Well gosh-darn it someone's only gone and done it:

TeacherTube - Teach the World

SuTree

While many of us think of e-learning from a traditional academic perspective some of the more interesting implementations are actually to be found elsewhere.



SuTree is an index of free video lessons, tutorials, lectures and how-to guides covering an eclectic range of subjects. On the day I visited the most viewed video was "How to Make a Banana Split".



Now, if you need help in the preparation of fruit based desserts you may have other problems, but the principle of having categorised help videos is sound. All we need is someone to provide the necessary hosting facilities.



Even the videos could be hosted anywhere (like YouTube) and the hosting would simply be a categorised, or tagged, set of links.



Any volunteers?

Wikipedia

I've written before about my liberal use of Wikipedia as a background source for information. After someone asked for more information about why I started writing a post detailing my reasons, and then the fine people at Google Operating System did it instead.



Ther article "Why People Link to Wikipedia" details some of the many reasons that Wikipedia is a prime resource for unbiased and useful information.



Here's number 1:

1. Wikipedia articles have a lot of content
and people like to link to pages that consist mostly of text. There's a
lot of information structured in a consistent way and that makes most
of the articles valuable.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Moodle

My favourite VLE is starting to get even more coverage in the press. This article on ZDNet shows just how far Moodle has come.

On the Implementation of an LMS or LCMS

The eLearning Guild is an American organisation (or organization as they would have it) that promotes eLearning, its uses and applications.



As part of this they have produced, in collaboration with Adobe, a free e-book on the subject.



While it's too fragmented to read well it's still a useful resource for anyone involved in implementing these systems.

While you're there check out the other e-books they have available.

SQA and e-Learning

You can say want you want about the SQA (insert your own joke here) but they have always seen the potential of e-learning, e-assessment and e-portfolios. In fact for a small country we are remarkably advanced in introducing these things into the day-to-day learning environment.



If you're interested in the SQA's current thinking (and you should be) they've produced a new document outlining their vision for the next five years and more. You can read the PDF document at this link:



SQA E-Assessment Vision Strategy