Link dump

The following links you might find useful. They are things I'm planning to use/read, or have skimmed.

Online animation programs

• Scratch
• Xtranormal - actually have an account and have quickly used this. Quite powerful.
• Aniboom
• Avatar Photo - make animated avatars

Other stuff

• Online Convert - convert files from one type to another
• PowerPoint templates - since we mostly agree PPT still has a limited place.
• 29 Social Media Resources - link to more links
• 5 tips for getting the most out of Google Reader

Read so many blog entries today, I can't remember who mentioned privacy with Web 2.0 but this may be of interest from Educause. Privacy in Web 2.0 Learning Environments

VoiceThread

VoiceThread - what a cool application.

It is a collaborative site in which you can upload documents, video and images. Others can make voice comments, 'doodle' on document/image, and pause video for comment.

Unfortunately for me, it is such a new and cool idea, I wasn't sure how to implement it. I thought about what I could do with it for days - hence why it is the 'ultimate' entry in this blog.

I mean, one of the videos in which family talked about a picture was great and inspiring, a really awesome thing to do for a family member, it was not really the sort of thing I thought was adequate for my area.

For other people in the course I thought you could do something cool like upload a video, pause it at certain moments to discuss an implication or event of an action etc. However, I eventually decided to make use of it in a Wiki like way, in which students could discuss what they see wrong with a reference list.

It is still a work in progress (at time of this post), but I have nonetheless embedded it.

The Penultimate blog entry - A reflective synopsis

I find myself in a slightly different position to my fellow students in the course I am undertaking on education technology. I think they are all lecturers or teachers with a full time workload of teaching for an entire semester, whereas I am a librarian whose teaching load is considerably different. I teach as part of a team, presenting free information literacy classes to students, classes requested by individual lecturers and 6 weeks of information literacy to a bridging class.



Therefore, I rarely have the same students twice to get the most benefit from many of the technologies used during the course.


However, that being said, I’m always on the lookout for new technologies that can be utilised in the course I teach and in general for the dissemination of information literacy to the wider student community.


Blogs are an obvious candidate, and the library does have a blog that is updated regularly by a rotating roster of staff. It contains information about database outages or updates, announcements, and entries that are of a generally informative nature, such as a recent one about Banned Books Week, or librarians throughout the ages, or resources on the subject of chocolate. The only problem I see with a blog is that it could be difficult for a newcomer to the blog to read previous entries for a specific topic e.g. how to find journal articles, since the information could be quite far back or have become outdated since first posting. There is also the issue of regular posting to keep the content fresh and up to date, as so many blogs become abandoned after a while.


I have harboured an idea for using Wikis as a general library tool. Something students could post their tips and tricks to, updating when something new is identified of use. In my mind, I would start off with staff posting our instructions, and then open to student contribution, perhaps moderating or addressing some student entries. In my dreams this Wiki would become an evolving tool that students would find easy to follow and understand.


Learning Management Systems such as Moodle are a real boon to the educator and student. The amount of information and resources that can be made available through them is almost limitless. As a student, having all of the course requirements, readings and resources is so handy. As an educator, being able to provide aforementioned information, as well as spur of the moment information is invaluable.


I also found online quizzes to be equal parts delightful and a trial. The time it takes to learn how to create a quiz online almost makes up for the amount of time you might spend marking a quiz offline. However, the knowledge and skills are an investment that won’t necessarily diminish over time. I would like to be able to upskill my abilities with PowerPoint to be able to write the code to incorporate Visual Basic and create a self marking quiz, however, I fear that being a code monkey is beyond my abilities, and hopefully I will just be able to rip off *ahem* I mean, modify some one else’s code to incorporate into my own quizzes.


Of the other technologies investigated, Podcasts, Google Earth, online image editors, Flickr, file hosting and slide sharing, I feel they have a place, but I’m not sure where in my particular circumstances. I see something like Flickr as being useful for a web presence promoting the library. Podcasts I see similarly, a way of promoting the library. I can’t see voice only podcast as being useful for instructing people on how to construct a reference or search databases as in many ways they are visually dependent.


It has been enlightening to see how others in this course would be able to use many of these technologies, and I have found myself considering that ‘technology A’ might have a use for ‘Person Z’.


I had rather hoped to have a more robust experience ‘conversing’ with my fellow students, but few of them found their way to my blog and left comments. Either that is an indictment on my writing, or there wasn’t much to say *shrug*. I did however enjoy leaving comments on my fellow students’ blogs, either encouragement or (hopefully) helpful comments. It did make me realise though, that having a comment left made one realise that others were reading, and it made me want to check for more comments, and write more entries.


Just in closing, there is so much out there on the Internet that keeping up is difficult, let alone being able to use it and utilise it. I wonder if I would have been able to keep up if I wasn’t already interested in this area, and had some small experience – which is kind of funny, because back in the day (high school that is) computers and I didn’t like each other very much, but maybe that was me and Basic. Nowadays I’m fascinated and want to explore and be on top of the newest lastest thing. Maybe that isn’t all you need, but surely the willingness to be told and then go play goes a long way to figuring out how to use it for teaching and learning.

WebQuests

WebQuests have been around since 1995 and involve student activity and inquiry into (preferably) a meaningful and authentic task or issue by integrating technology and the internet into the unit of work.

Susan Brooks-Young in her book 'Critical technology: Issues for school leaders' (2008), outlines the six elements of a WebQuest:

1. Introduction - explanation or background of the WebQuest.
2. Task - what will be accomplished by completing the WebQuest.
3. Information sources - list of resources; Internet sites, print materials, classroom resources, she even suggests content area experts who  may be available by email or a scheduled video conference.
4. Process - the steps taken to complete the activity.
5. Guidance - FAQ's and direction for completing specific steps.
6. Conclusion - closure for the activity

My initial thoughts when first introduced to the concept of WebQuests were:

• What an exciting unit for students (if it is something that interests them - after all, not everyone is necessarily interested by the same issues/topics, however real world they are)
• What a lot  of work to create, and keep up to date, a really good one.
• Are they being done in Australian schools (namely my kid's school)?

Brooks-Young does confirm that they do take more time in general, researching good sites and resources, but it is dependent on the subject and whilst it is unsaid, I think depending on the the teacher and their dedication to the project.

It has been quite some time since I completed my Grad. Dip. Ed. and those were the days when the Internet was starting to become widely used at home, but before it was widely used at school. So none of my instruction involved the integration of technology into the curriculum to engage students. I observe that the availability of technology and computers remains a hot-button topic in the news and current affairs shows, but it remains unknown just how much technology is integrated into the daily life of secondary school students to me.

My child is at a school where we are obliged to purchase notebooks for them to use on a daily basis, and they do have those nifty interactive whiteboards in many of their classrooms, so I'm confident that there is a high use of technology in that school. But just how well is it used I am not sure. Are they given projects like WebQuests to stimulate and sharpen their use of the available technologies? Are the teacher's competent and confident in their use of the technologies? These questions apply to both private and public schools.

My thoughts are that in general, no on both counts.

Given the skills of undergraduate students coming through the library for instruction or asking questions, so many of them seem to only skim the surface in terms of searching abilities and strategies, use of alternate sources of information, and ability to use technologies. It's like they got shown how to do one thing, and that's all they have bothered to do since.

As for instruction, I'm not even sure if my university  has an interactive whiteboard for the ed students to practice on. One thing I am sure of though, is that many of the disciplines are at uni are using videos, blogs and podcasts, as well as PowerPoint presentations to promote assessment.

The point of that little rant was that I'm not entirely sure how well many such units of work would be put together by older teachers with little skill or confidence in technology, and how well they would be put together by younger teachers with limited skills in using the technology.

Images

This is a blog post I have just posted for work about public domain images.

 

The old adage of “a picture is worth a thousand words” might not cut you any slack with your lecturers with the word counts of your assignments, but a well placed picture can certainly enliven the look of your work and any presentations.

Of course there is the good old standby of Google Image Search  or the image search with Bing but you do get a number of results that are either off topic, inappropriate in size (or content), or watermarked with a logo.

So how then to obtain images that are Royalty Free?

Here are a few sites you can try.

Picture Australia through the National Library of Australia searches through the archives of many Australian libraries, universities and museums.

The Library of Congress in the US has recently made their collection available via Flickr as has NASA.

I mentioned Flickr before, which along with Photobucket are useful sites to search for contemporary images that may have creative commons licences.

This About.com site on Genealogy has a great set of links to various archives around the world. I could link you to numerous sites that have great sets of links, in the end I think this Wikipedia entry on public domain image resources is probably the best set of links available.

One final link I would point you towards is the Duke University subject guide for medical images. This has an extraordinary number of links for medical images.

Quizzes Pt. 3

Way-ay back in late July and early August, I made my first posts about quizzes, and how I had used Moodle to create a couple of quizzes for a course I teach, and I made a *ahem* promise to let you know how they went. Now it could be that I had forgot completely about that promise, or it could be I've been trying to keep y'all in suspense...

Anyways - I made two quizzes in Moodle, and now I'm going to tell you about my experiences with them.

1. I did impose a time frame upon them. An opening date and a closing date. For both I did extend the closing date. For the first because I decided to be generous, for the second we had an Internet outage at uni, so I thought I'd cut them some slack.

2. Automatic marking is unreal and awesome, and if I could do all my assessments that way I would. Not only because I am intrinsically lazy, but the power of the reports and tracking. I was able to see where my students were getting it right or getting it wrong. Couldn't do that before with bits of paper.

3. As part of the awesomeness of tracking, I was able to see before the quiz closed who had taken the quiz, who was still taking the quiz, and who had not yet attempted the quiz. I was then able to email or message those students to light a bit of a fire under them.

4. Don't give them short typed answer questions, you cannot begin to imagine all of the 'correct' answers and variations that people come up with. Your guesses are only the tip of the iceberg. I had to go in and manually add about 35 other answers to ensure that people weren't penalised for not thinking what I was thinking.

Over all, I give online quizzes a thumbs up. It may take a bit of time to write and format them, but I think it is well and truly worth it.

Now if only I could work out how to do an online referencing quiz where I don't have to go through and mark it, that would be even more awesome. Hmmmmm, I've seen a Flash based thing, now if only my Flash skills were better.

10 Tips for designing presentations that don't suck

So we all agree that Powerpoint can be a useful tool, but is easily abused, and its use is thus lessened.

The above links to some great tips for image choice, layout, font and design.

Here is the link to part two.

A different world

On the one hand, this is what Gen X and Boomers think, on the other hand, this is what the Gen Y and Millennials have to put up with. Although it is a joke, I thought it encapsulates some of the learning that the 'older generations' have to do to keep up and not be left behind.

If you are 30, or older, you might think this is hilarious!

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning.... Uphill... Barefoot... BOTH ways… yadda, yadda, yadda

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!

But now that I'm over the ripe old age of thirty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia!

And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don't know how good you've got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have the Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!!

There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter - with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox, and it would take like a week to get there! Stamps were 10 cents!

Child Protective Services didn't care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our ass! Nowhere was safe!

There were no MP3's or iTunes! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yourself!

Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio, and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up! There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car.. We'd play our favorite tape and "eject" it when finished, and then the tape would come undone rendering it useless. Cause, hey, that's how we rolled, baby! Dig?

We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal, that's it!

There weren't any freakin' mobile phones either. If you left the house, you just didn't make a damn call or receive one. You actually had to be out of touch with your "friends". OH MY GOD !!! Think of the horror... not being in touch with someone 24/7!!! And then there's TEXTING. Yeah, right. Please! You kids have no idea how annoying you are.

And we didn't have fancy Caller ID either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your parents, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, the collection agent... you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn't have any fancy PlayStation or Xbox video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like 'Space Invaders' and 'Asteroids'. Your screen guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!!! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen... Forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!

You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel!!! NO REMOTES!!! Oh, no, what's the world coming to?!?!

There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I'm saying? We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little rat-finks!

And we didn't have microwaves. If we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove! Imagine that!

And our parents told us to stay outside and play... all day long. Oh, no, no electronics to soothe and comfort. And if you came back inside... you were doing chores!

And car seats - oh, please! Mum threw you in the back seat and you hung on. If you were lucky, you got the "safety arm" across the chest at the last moment if she had to stop suddenly, and if your head hit the dashboard, well that was your fault for calling "shot gun" in the first place!

See! That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled rotten! You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in the1980's or any time before!

Regards,
The Over 30 Crowd

Turn your blog into a PDF

For all you bloggers out there, one of the blogs I have RSS'ed had this link to an entry about PDF'ing your blog, it links to an app for Wordpress and Blogger. So if you've had great things to say, want to share it with your students, check out the link.

File hosting

Maybe I'm a bit impatient, but kee-ripes it can take a while for a file to finish loading up to a free file hosting site.

I gave up on my first one when it got stuck at 83% for about 10 minutes, so I have lessened the size of the file in the hopes it will upload. This one seems to be stuck at 9% *roll eyes*

I guess that free file hosting can be used for almost anything that we have undertaken thus far in this 'Delivery Technologies' section. MP3's, Office files, images, anything that has a file to be downloaded.

If your school or company website has a ferocious firewall that is too problematic to get around for multiple sites, then maybe one site with permission might be the easier way to go - as well as remembering a log in for a few sites instead of about 20.

However, dedicated sites to a particular function, e.g. Flickr for photosharing, is probably slightly easier and quicker and more intuitive than Mediafire.

Okay - not sure if it likes larger files or not (as in more than 10mb) but I've cancelled the other one, and I'm now uploading individual files, which at least I can see that it is happening, slowly. It's a kind of misleading that the site says "Time remaining: a few seconds" because whilst it may be true that there is only the wait of a few seconds in the timescale of continental drift or the universe, in Internet time it is considerably longer.

I'm pretty sure I've uploaded these pics to my Flickr account, but I'll embed the image and link here.

Google Earth

I haven't really used Google Earth much before. I've downloaded it, had a quick play with it and then kinda forgot about it, and went ahead and used Google Maps.

Well, it is pretty cool, but I don't know that it is way cooler than Google Maps, I mean, the street view is awesome, which Google Maps doesn't have, but then Google Earth seems to have more businesses listed for the area.


View Larger Map

Here is a place I've stayed when visiting family o/s.

Maybe this betrays a lack of imagination - either because I've come down with the 'dreaded lurgi', or because I don't have enough imagination - but I can't readily see how I can use this technology in my given field - teaching information literacy to students.

I guess you could have them evaluate the information given in a street view, but for a foreign country like this one where all the landmarks are in Chinese characters, I'm not entirely sure how you'd go about it.

I can see this working for some other disciplines and subjects - creative writing (write about this scene/town), or some sort of group project where additional information about a region is posted up by the students (photos of local landmarks, business descriptions, school descriptions).

Just in closing, the one thing I thought was pretty cool in Google Earth were that some of the buildings were 3-D. As in, when you moved the map in any direction the building's perspective would move according to that direction. Not entirely sure, but it must be some functionality that some businesses can purchase since in the area of the above image, on Google Earth there are about 6 that have this 3-D perspective function that can be turned on or off.

QR codes - the next big thing?

A couple of years ago, in my web wanderings, I found something called QR Codes.

I got a bit excited when I read about them because I could feel instinctively that there was something new and exciting here that I could harness, if I could only figure out how, and pretty importantly, if people would pick it up and run with it.

This Educause 7 Things You Must Know from 2009 will tell you what QR Codes are, and how you can use them.

Lately (as in the last few weeks) I've been getting information on papers and trials by other university libraries around the world on their use of QR Codes in information literacy. UTS in Sydney is trialling it, this guy has a few links to other sites using QR Codes. Just embedded below is a presentation with some embedded video from an Australian teacher in high school using QR Codes.

QR Codes? on Prezi

So, even though it is not on our mighty list of sites and apps to evaulate and blog about, it maybe of interest to you other educators out there interested in using Web 2.0 technologies in your teaching.

Of course, one of the major drawbacks about QR Codes is the data download charges incurred, but I think it is a good add on to parts of a course. The video can give you some ideas.

What are your thoughts on this?

Podcasting - Redux

My first ever favourite blogger - Librarian in Black - has just published a new entry about how she keeps up to date with technology and libraries. You can jump to the link here to read about all the methods she uses to keep up. She may very well be crazy, but her knowledge in the field makes her a good blogger.

One of the myriad ways she keeps up is through podcasting. If you go through and read her post, she has a very crummy commute every day - close to 2 hours, each way. So podcasting is ideal for her to fill the time with learning as she drives.

Interestingly, she has a little list of criteria for her list of regulars, which I'll paste here.

So why these podcasts and not others? They have the three winning factors:


1.Good, quality content of interest to me


2.Quality audio content


3.Good production quality (show-pacing, musical interludes, regular show segments, interesting guests, etc.)
 
I’ve probably tried out two dozen other podcasts, and unsubscribed because they ended (Boagworld, AdaptivePath), the content was uninteresting, the audio quality was so bad and uneven that my head hurt from listening, or the show production quality was laughable.
 
So dear reader, if you are going to podcast on a regular basis, or if it is going to form an integral part of your course, take the time to find out about how you can produce a good quality recording, with good quality content.
 
I scripted mine out, but really needed to rehearse a few times before recording, I had inadvertantly created a tongue twister in my original script - "seond set of shelves". Try saying that out loud!

Slideshare and Slidecasts

Jeez - don't want to harp on and sound like a broken record, but voice recording sometimes feels unreasonably difficult.

I have recently uploaded a PowerPoint presentation to SlideShare. This is a pretty good site and have been directed to it many times by some of my favourite bloggers who are sharing their presentations from conferences with those who could not attend. Pretty awesome considering that I doubt very much in this current economic climate that work will come at sending me to the US for a conference.

I didn't even realise that I already had an account with them. Actually, truth be told, I really can't remember with who on the Internets I have an account. *shrug* I guess that is a different topic for a different post. :)

So, on to SlideShare. Uploading my pptx was a bit time consuming. In part because I fiddled around with the presentation 3 times trying to 'prettify' it (people could be looking at it y'know), and the other part is that the site converts the file in some way which takes a little bit of time.

I recorded my narration a day or so later - and this, THIS is where the troubles began. I watched the SlideCast on how to create a SlideCast, and it seemed fairly straight forward. Since that was recorded SlideShare have upgraded their site and now have the capacity to host the audio file for you to synch with the slide. 

I uploaded the file, nothing happened, tried again, nothing happened - tried a few more times. Don't know who sang this song but this encapsulates what I was doing perfectly.

Definition Of Madness

One definition of madness is 
Doing the same thing over and over 
For ever and ever 
Expecting a different result 

I tried linking from the Internet Archive - nothing. Went through the help forums and followed their suggestions, which boiled down to something along the lines of 'there is a known problem with IE, try another browser'. So I used IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Google Chrome. I also tried three different computers running two different OS's. I think I had a reasonable go at it. I've even logged a job with SlideShare.

So please, please tell if you get sound synched with your slide. I want to know how you did it. I don't like being defeated.

Apart from that rant, SlideShare is a good site. Many excellent presentations there, and it is of course a way to share your presentations and possibly get them used by other parties. Students might be encouraged to create slides that are informative and viewable - taking a bit of pride and care in their work (I was using the features in PowerPoint where I could input values for the size and position of the text boxes to get them in same position in for each slide - for a seamless look). For any teachers without an LMS like Moodle, it is a good way to share slides with students who may want them for reference and study purposes.

Anyway, if you want to go and have a look at my presentation, click here for the link.

Music (and passion were always the fashioooon at the Copaaaa)

What a nifty site Incomptech is. Royalty free music for use just about anywhere for anything, as long as the composer gets a credit. What a swell guy.  (^_^)

I chose one called 'Enter the party' - funk, and described as Simple, clean, light-yet-driving funk-type dance. With the tags of Bouncy, Bright, Driving, Grooving.

There was one I liked more 'One eyed maestro' which will apparently make skeletons dance, for the purposes I was considering being able to use music, it didn't seem entirely appropriate to be using creepy music.

In my current situation, the only way I can use this with students is to tell them about it, for their other classes. How I would really use it is to liven up presentations without infringing on copyright.

Wikipedia

I would hazard a guess that only the most remote and/or poorest people on Earth have not heard of Wikipedia.

Created in 2001 by Jimmy Wales, it is a free online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute. It has had it's share of criticism over the years, and I would  be remiss as a librarian in an academic institution not to spout the party line of 'don't trust or cite Wikipedia in your assignments'. In fact their very own 'About Wikipedia' page does warn that the site can be prone to vandalism and misinformation as can newer articles recently created.

However, Wikipedia does have some useful points in its favour, besides being free. One is that articles are continually updated, so the most recent information will be included in a wiki entry. Another is that it is a kind of peer review process - if the information is not of high enough quality, the admin for that page will pull it down. Even the newness of some entries are a mark in its favour.

Anecdotally speaking, I remember not long after a college shooting in the States, people were updating an entry into the shooting as it was happening. [citation needed] (ha ha). Readers were saying it was more up-to-date than the news in reporting the events.

Another anecdote I am unable to cite as it was part of a presentation into teaching I attended last year, a lecturer at Macquarie University related how she used Wikipedia with her students. Their assignment was to get information ONTO Wikipedia by editing a specific entry. There was some sort of prize for anyone who was successful. They almost invariably raged at how they weren't successful.

When I teach classes, I do suggest to my students that if they need background information, then Wikipedia is okay, but to confirm that with other readings. However, there are a few pages that can be used in library instruction, although some of them are more in-depth than I would want to use with neophytes.

These are:
- Library Reference Desk
- Research
- Boolean
- Databases
- Evaluating sources
- Referencing

If I think of any way in particular I could use Wikipedia in my classes, I will update this post.

Quizzes pt. 2

Gahd - I feel like I have spent far too long today messing around with Script-O Pro.

I really really really hope that if you are forking over the dough for the professional membership the help for using the site is more forthcoming, because at this point it is wretched!!!

As per the brief I created a quiz with their online quiz maker. It has some good options
 - Multiple answer - where more than one answer can be correct.
 - Single answer - where only one answer is correct. Handy tip - don't confuse them.
 - True/False - 'nuff said.
 - Matching - where you choose from a term in a drop down box to complete a sentence. 

However, it has some jolly confusing options, either because the resultant page doesn't have the input options the other three did, or it doesn't act they way you thought it might, or it doesn't have any help - AT ALL.
 - Fill Answer - where you  have a word to enter to complete the sentence. To do this you must enclose the word in *asterisks* either side of the word. The page will then have an input box.
 - Short Answer - can't work this one out, the help file for it was inactive.

 - Simple Cloze - tried and tried with this one. It didn't have any help files active. Nothing I tried was really sufficient. I found an HTML cloze exercise and copied and pasted it into the quiz and modified it, but it doesn't really work.

So those are the questions.

Just as painful is the creation of the quiz. Similar to Moodle there are a range of options open to you in the creation of the quiz. Imposing a password for log in, regulating the amount of attempts, show the answers or not upon completion, randomising the questions and answer order. Good stuff there. Not so good is that every time you save the quiz you have to go back to that page, or that you need to use the drop down boxes quite carefully or else you'll have blank questions all over the place.

Something else incredibly painful is the need to know/look up some HTML tags for inserting an image. I needed to upload an image (that's fine), but when I clicked on the link for 'Your Images', it came up with the URL for the image. I had to look up the tags for insertion to include the image.

I can see it is quite a powerful program, and probably quite a boon to the more cash strapped schools out there. However, as someone who is not an HTML code monkey it was a bit painful (I did need to insert some break tags in a couple of questions), as was the lack of substantial available help.

Anyway - if you're interested in having a go of my quiz, it is at this link. Or if you are the website, enter 519 into the course ID student log in.

Will shortly give you an update on my quiz created in Moodle. My students have until the 13th to complete it. So far I've only had 12 try it out of about 60.

Podcasting, pt 3

Well, now that I've been successful in this particular exercise - establishing an account with a hosting service, recording a podcast and then publishing it - I will say it can be fraught with problems, if you want to do a bitof a decent job of it, as my previous rantries (rant + entry = rantry).

I am sure with a bit of investigation I could have eventually worked out how to do a better recording without resorting to the use of the digital voice recorder.

I also think that I could have just gone with the first recordings I did and uploaded them. However, I also think that dependant on the nature of the recording, the quality of the recording is of some importance. My recording for example is a tour of the library, something we would hope is downloaded multiple times and may be an intitial point of contact for the library and university with a student or parent, so it should sound professional.

A personal short podcast's quality might not matter so much, and dependant on the length of the podcast, a teacher's lesson may be of variable quality - just so long as the quality doesn't detract from the content.

I am quite aware of the growing use of podcasts at university to complement and augment subjects. Whether it is content recorded from a lecture for further reference to students, or to enable distance learning, or original content to be considered as pre-reading for the lecture and tutorial.

I am also quite aware of the use of podcasting in use for assessable material, after all, why would the library possess digital voice recorders? For some students, it is a great way for them to express their creativity as well as complete the assessment.

Really, it is all a win-win situation... as long as the support is there to enable staff and students to use it.

Training and equipment. Both in the recording and uploading, and in the downloading and re-play.

We have had students seeking assistance in downloading podcasts to their MP3 players at the library  because they were not adequately shown how to do that.

If a technology shy lecturer came across the initial troubles I had in my efforts, I can't see them following through or revisiting it again.

One last thing to take into account is the location of the people accessing the podcast. Quite a few of our students are in the country, where their Internet access is limited to dial-up, if at all. Many of them are unable to download large files, so keeping files small and accessible is of importance if you are not sure whether your audience is going to comprise those still on poor access to the Internet.

Podcasting pt. 2

When last I left you dear reader, there was a small bout of madness that had taken root in 'Peggy's Adventures in Podcasting', due to an infection of n00b-ishness. Whilst there are still lingering effects of the dread condition, I feel it safe to report that the goal has now been attained, that is to say, there is now a published podcast. \0/

As reported, I did establish an account with Podbean. As also reported, I tried a number of methods to record a podcast with varying results, but always the same element of a loud hiss overlaying the recording. Luckily I had access to MP3 voice recorders through work.

My original plan was to record my podcast at work in an unused meeting room, to lessen the chances of interruption. However, the recorders do not come with battery, so I needed to bring it home anyway, and I'm glad I did.

The recorder comes with an internal mic and a jack to plug in a mic. I decided to record with out a mic, and one with the mic I had previously tried using.

Happily uploading the results was super-easy since there was a USB connector, so it was simply a matter of drag and drop.

Listening to the first recording (sans mic) sounded okay, until I plugged in earphones. *hissssss*

The second recording (with mic) sounded good with and without headphones.

I logged on to PodBean, clicked on the Publish tab, filled in information such as the name of the podcast, description, and tags, attached the MP3 file of the podcast, then clicked on publish.

I should probably add that beforehand I did the barest minimum of personalising the channel with some tags and other information.

As proof of my success here is the link to the UBLibrary podcasting channel.

And just to show off a bit, here is the podcast itself ( I got the embed code from the website)

Powered by Podbean.com

Podcasting Pt. 1

OMG - what a n00b!

That is what I've been thinking to myself over the last 24 to 48 hours with this podcasting lark.

This is the first time I've tried my hand at podcasting. I know what it is, but I've never felt like I've had a need to try it out. So read on and laugh, cry, and pound your little fist on the table with me as I recount part one of 'Peggy's Adventures in Podcasting'.

First of all the link on the course did not work - but that is of little concern to a person with access to Google. I just looked for 'free pocasting host' and the search engine did the rest. It was about this time the first of my troubles really began to make themselves known - which are not actually course related, but impacted on my experience. Clicking on links to various podcasting sites, I found that I was being redirected to other websites. At first I thought that I was being obtuse and clicking on the wrong link, but upon trying these links again, I found that I was indeedy being redirected to other websites, every darned time.

A bit of investigation into this it is discovered that I had 'something-wrong-with-my-computer' which involved a full virus scan (which takes fohevah), downloading a malware program - and running that, then downloading AdAware - and running that. It was worth doing, 2 viruses that weren't picked up by the daily scan, 4 things picked up by the malware program, and 187 things picked up by AdAware. So kids, remember to disinfect your computer on a regular basis.

Now, the great naive n00b that I am, I thought that some of these podcasting sites might just record your podcast for you and then upload them. In fact the one I chose, PodBean, certainly seemed to give that impression with their "Easy to publish your podcast in 3 steps. No tech to learn." statement (or maybe it was one of the others - I looked at quite a few of them trying to decide with whom to sign up).

It was at this point I discovered I needed another program to actually RECORD my podcast, save it, then upload it to PodBean. *huff, sigh*

I looked upon the other PC I was using (as my original was being scanned x 3) - nuttin'. Nothing that could record voice. So I do another search, and find Audacity, which seemed to be highly regarded amongst the how-to's. Download that, grab a headset mic that's lurking around, and do a test recording. More nuttin'. Actually I lie, something, but it is very very faint, and very very hissy. It's late now, so try again tomorrow.

Tomorrow. My other computer is now disinfected. It is running Vista (whereas the other was XP) and Vista offers some of its own recording software. I've remembered we actually have a microphone so I get that, thinking I'll get better quality, less hissy sound from it. Nothing. Try again, nothing. Try a different program, nothing. What's happening??? A bit of messing around later, finally get something which is still a bit hissy.

I decide at this point that I-don't-care, and record something. I wrote a script for a virtual library tour. Thought I might do something for work if I'm gonna do something. Part way through, my husband who is playing a game on the XBox in the other room shrieks incoherently at some perceived injustice in the game he's playing. Upon listening to the playback, it comes through quite well.

I record another. This time he starts shouting 'f***, f***, f***' x 3, which once again came through quite clearly.

Take three. This time my son decides to emerge from the cocoon which is his bedroom. In my head I can hear him coming to ask what I'm doing, or shouting about what's for dinner. My anxiety comes through in my voice, and in the recording, so does the sound of the toilet flushing. *SIGH*

Take four - much later. I finally record a better take, but it is still hissy. Jeebus Cripes - I don't have the energy for this anymore. So I use Audacity to edit out a flubbed line. As an aside, I'm lucky enough to have some experience in using video editing software, so it doesn't take too much to drag out those old skills to do a simple cut - but I don't know how other people would cope with that functionality.

Audacity saves it in its own file, and PodBean requires a MP3 file. No problemo - Audacity can save as an MP3. I go to do that and discover... I need to download a file to enable that to happen. *AAAARRGHH -- sigh*

To employ the common parlance - Podcasting sux.

Although I'm sure it will be better once I become accustomed to the process. But right now, getting all of the proverbial dominoes set up is time consuming and frustrating.

Through work I'm going to borrow a digital voice recorder and see if that creates a better quality file.

So until the next installment dear reader, adieu, and good luck with your podcasting endeavours.

Next on 'Peggy's Adventures in Podcasting'
- Using the digital voice recorder.
- Uploading the file to Podbean.
- Working out where the podcast has gone after that for the URL.
- And problems not yet conceived by my little mind!!!