Dunstable Departure

I finally have a date when I shall be free from the chains of Further Education college employment. From 30 June 2012 the daily trudge through traffic on the A5 south of Milton Keynes ends and I need no longer fear retribution for not including references to Equality Act strands in my lesson plans.

I shall continue with my role at Middlesex University but to have so much flexibility as to when I can meet current clients and potential new ones will be marvellous. In many ways, I wish I had retired from what was then Dunstable College several years ago as everything worthwhile that I have achieved recently has been completed in my own time - late evenings, weekends and stolen days here and there. Once, I felt that I could make a difference at College, when, as their ILT/E-learning Co-ordinator and seconded to the Learning & Skills Development Agency and its successors for a proportion of that time too, my days were spent helping staff not just at Dunstable but across the country. Those were great days and, especially through LSDA's Q Projects, where I was in a position to fund small projects for using technology in teaching, and with chances to speak to audiences at various agency gatherings, personally rewarding.

With a bit of luck I shall be able to pick up some of that type of work again although, with most funding sources drying up now, I guess it will have to be from persuading budget holders that spending a few hundred on yours truly will be beneficial.

There are many ideas that I'd like to launch but I know I can't do them all! Here's a flavour of where I may concentrate my initial efforts.

Staff ICT Skills Audit

Already being trialled by institutions here as well as in the States, I shall be working with colleagues to promote this simple way to discover who your ICT stars are and who needs a bit of extra help in this vital field.

On-line Surveys

Combining my skills in design and data analysis, I look forward to offering a complete service to those wanting to ask questions and get results - all on-line.

Web Tools

Staff development sessions on new and free tools and applications that can make a difference in course management and the learning experience.

Web Design

Sites that look good and do what people want them to do. Simply.

Images

With huge picture files still causing trouble all over the place - from e-mail attachments and use on-line to those that are in desperate need of a bit of editing - some staff development sessions to explain everything ought to be fun and worthwhile for a wide range of people, and not just in education either, I suppose.

VLEs

What's wrong with today's virtual learning environments (or MLEs as they may be termed in the States) is worthy of a separate article so I'll be brief here! Here, the UK Government gave institutions a pot of money years ago and they all rushed out and got WebCT, Blackboard, moodle or something similar. So what's happened since? Not a lot. Yes, most courses now have some material and links to resources on-line. Yes, management can now tick some boxes about using technology, show statistics about student usage. But, with a few exceptions, most provision of this sort has become stale, clunky and I have even heard students moaning about moodle, preferring tutors' individual sites and portals to materials. That global solution that the corporate VLE brought has limited value now as a student-programme interface. It's time for a change and I will simply love moving forward the thinking of anyone prepared to listen.

On-line courses

This could well be The Big Thing this decade. It's early days now and, for many institutions, the thought that they may not actually have students wandering around their wonderfully glamorous, glassy and smart premises that have cost taxpayers billions in a few years' time isn't one that does much for a Principal's ego, never mind career. I warn them all now, though: change is coming. Given the choice, at least a third of your students on full-time National Diploma-style programmes would prefer now to study at home in their own time and just attend a centre for tutorials, guidance and specific topic days on a few days a term. Once the others start to see the quality and range of qualifications that can be delivered on-line instead of in class then that proportion can only rise. They're only still enrolling because no-one has told them that there might be an alternative. That's because there isn't yet but I shall be doing my best to design and create one, or, more probably, promote what someone is bound to have ready first!

I may think of some other things to do but these ought to keep me occupied quite happily for a while after 1 July. I would, of course, also be delighted to hear from anyone who can make use of my time and skills!

"Please Sir, What do I have to do?" "Expletive deleted"

Yes, they should have already done all their assignments and now just be concentrating on some merit and distinction grade work, or taking time to look for a job but, no, their folders are looking pretty thin so I have published some very simple guides and more notes to remind them what they need to do and which tasks meet which criteria.

Whether this actually makes any difference over the next few weeks remains to be seen but at least this will save me a huge amount of time!

Bearing in mind that some will be just starting to do some actual work on May 1 you do have to wonder why we run courses for forty odd weeks when they do almost everything they need to pass in just seven.

HNC Level 4

Unit 4 Project Development

Assignment 2 Guide
Unit 14 Web Design: Assignment 2 Guide

National Diploma Level 3

Unit 4 The Impact of IT on Organisations
Unit 8 E-commerce
Unit 30: Digital Graphics
Unit 42 Spreadsheets

First Diploma Level 2

Unit 5 Supporting Organisations with IT
Assignment 2 Guide
Assignment 3 Guide
Unit 17 Web Development (1st task, others to come)
Unit 27 Spreadsheets
Unit 29 Presenting Information with IT
Unit 35 Digital Graphics

Draft Blogger

Well done, Blogger! I have so often been tempted to move to another blog application where much smarter designs and simpler editing of the look and feel have been available. The choice of initial designs has been fixed since the year dot or shortly after until now . . .

Although still in 'draft' they say, Google have opened up some really smart developments for us bloggers with their Blogger Template Designer. Looks like I'll stick around a bit longer!

Have a look and start using this for your own blogs. Or go to Blogger in Draft and log in as usual. Have fun.

Trying out Zoho Polls

Just discovered Zoho Polls. I've been telling everyone about Zoho's other particularly useful tools - Forms for web design use and Project for project management - but I hadn't appreciated that they now have a full range of office-type services. Not all are free but many are, including this one, Zoho Polls which I'm using here as an example.

If I add some links to the applications listed then this could make a brilliant addition (or even replace part of) the webtools site.

Microsoft free web sites

I have mentioned this before - they're still available and certainly worth getting. Go to this link and even if you don't want a web site it's worth getting the free domain.

Create Your Own Academic Webpage

The blurb says "Academia.edu enables graduate students and professors to create academic webpages very easily." You don't need to be a professor - just have a .ac.uk or .edu address!

It also has discussion rooms, and a paper-tracking engine, that allows academics to track the latest papers uploaded to the web in their field.

I've just tried it out and created this page in about 5 minutes. It looks neat and tidy and may be just what someone out there is looking for. My preference would still be to use Pageflakes or Protopage or, of course, pbwiki but this really is one of the simplest I've seen. It's free and no ads.

Click here for access..
http://www.emedia.co.uk/l/?874876.834750.LSBVIRZO.0

Through the glass, darkly

Landed on tumblr which may provide one solution for my problem in what to suggest instead of Blogger. Only had a quick look and grabbed the nice address six.tumblr.com while I was there which I shall now proceed to experiment with. Not sure how the RSS feed works but it certainly looks simple, very simple, and clear and is another way for any of you to publish stuff like this.

slides with a difference

I keep remembering things I forgot to include

. . . in the new Webtools site, that is. Think I might call it Webtools2.0 for a while because I'm doing an event soon with a worrying title that includes the words Web2.0 technologies. Ah, but that would then imply that I know what web2.0 is which I'm not sure I do. Hmmm. The point is I spent many nights burning the old midnight oil on this and you ought to have a look at least. Only published it a couple of days ago and there have been 930 page views already which beats anything else I've done so hopefully someone somewhere got inspired and will be making a better impression in class after the break.

I can just see it now: that usually apparently ICT-illiterate old lecturer who normally heaves the OHT from the window cill and passes that huge pile of still-warm photocopies of some book pages to the poor lad whose name just happens to land him in the front row left or right and the next ten minutes are taken up by the sound of transparencies slithering around and notes being passed around - but this time he walks in, naked, in a manner of speaking and drops a url into the stunned silence or slaps a really smart-looking web page on the screen. "How did you do that, Sir?" someone asks. The emphasis could be on any of the first five words.

There's the usual brief descriptions of what things with mostly pretty odd names and pastel logos are supposed to do and I'm hoping that people will use the Comment links to add something about what they might to or even have done. That bit's possible thanks to a wiki - pbwiki are really making life easy in that respect - and one or two other interactive features courtesy of Google's Notes and Labpixies' Todo list.

And yes, I'm sure I'll have omitted someone's favourite - so don't whinge, just tell me and I'll do my best to remember to add it. Incidentally, there's something called the Curriculum Champs list here in the UK where some really clever people recently listed their choices of software and I've tried to include as many of their suggestions. Trouble was, over half of them were quite expensive things so I couldn't include them. All the stuff I've added is free, almost entirely ad-free and most of it doesn't need any special knowledge or complicated downloads / installations but works on the web wherever you happen to be.

Hope you find something inspiring.

Splashcast

Here's a new application that is worth a look and I'm sure you'll think of some way to use it. Splashcast provides a nice way to construct a web show that can contain video, images, text, narration or a soundtrack. The end result can be displayed on a web page via a little bit of code. Visitors got a neat frame with a rather obvious start button and your show will be streamed on your page. It looks as though all the heavyweight files are stored on the Splashcast servers too (so I don't know how long this will stay free or ad free!)

It's a very neat and smooth product and I can see it at one extreme as being a nice change from PowerPoint and, being web based, looks easier to make available anywhere than PhotoStory and certainly has better text addition features.

So far I've only played with a folder of images but I'll try doing something a bit more challenging in other traditional applications and see what happens when I get a spare moment.

Coffee: for a few dollars free

The boys at CoffeeCup have been making fun tools for web design for years but I didn't make more than occasional use of them having Dreamweaver for most of what I needed at the time and most were only free for a limited period. Period expires and that's that. The regular mailings continued which I ignored until I got one about a web album which was pretty smart and, before discovering JAlbum, I decided it was worth the few dollars and went to their site to buy it. There I spotted an offer to buy everything they do for just a few dollars more and their marketing worked.

In the long list of software I can now use I found some interesting items, some I don't understand, one or two a bit odd but some more that I have been using, including a nice CSS Style Sheet maker, something that makes putting videos on your web site a cinch, an RSS news feed reader and several others which have definitely been helpful and avoided long sessions of trying to figure out how to do things in Dreamweaver. But this post isn't intended as a sales pitch for them. You should know that I like free stuff and try to avoid recommending anything that costs money - and I'm not about to break the habit now. You see, a week or two later I had an e-mail asking whether I'd like to be something grand like a CoffeCup Ambassador. Naturally, my vain side said "Yes, if it's free." and then I get an invitation to apply for the whole shooting match for free for use by students at the College. I filled in the form expecting it to be restricted to US only (as so many offers seem to be) or to find a catch but, no, I got approved and now have a CD with all the stuff on and permission to spread it around College machines liberally.

Naturally, I can where they're going: get the kids hooked and then sell 'em the set. With that wealth warning, however, I am quite looking forward to giving people an alternative to Dreamweaver and some genuinely fun and easy tools to play with. I may even learn from some of the smarter students what to do with the more strange-looking things!

I don't know if the offer's still there but why not contact CoffeeCup and ask? And any firm that substitutes "Cool" for "OK" on the button deserves a mention in my book!