Category: general

When I began the MET program, my experience with multimedia tools, especially web based tools was minimal. I had a lot of experience with client side tools, (audacity, garage band, website authoring, Gimp etc.) but there was a whole new world of web based authoring tools out there that I had no idea existed. The ability to use web based tools opened up many new possibilities for my teaching practice. I began to explore and think about ways to use these tools in my classes. Over the two years I have been in the program, I have explored a few with classes, but the lack of computers at my school has made it difficult. I look forward to the new school year, a new lab, a new laptop cart and no MET homework to begin to use some of the tools that are out there.

One of the most profound learning experiences I have had that involved multimedia was the Learning At Night program that our school district undertook. In the program, teacher leaders get together to present new technological tools for learning. There is a video presentation by someone who is an expert in their field, followed by a Skype session with the expert in which we could ask questions and get more information, followed by time to play with the tool that was presented. In these presentations, I have “met” Alec Courosa, Dean Shareski, Heidi Hass Gable, and Jeff O’Hara, I have learned about backchannels, twitter, instructional design, and more. Most importantly I now have a network of like minded colleagues and experts to guide me and provide me with inspiration.

I had a look at the Terms of Service for Flickr (Yahoo), Facebook, World of Warcraft (Blizzard) and Delicious.  The question of ownership is one that requires a little more explanation. For Flickr and Facebook, anything that I create, I own, however if I upload it I grant a royalty free license to use that content to the website owner. It gives them the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform, and publicly display the Content. For WOW, they own the content and the user is licensed to use it, and for Delicious the only real content is tags and URL’s so it really doesn’t apply. Having programmers in the family, I was pretty well aware of general terms of service, but I was most surprised by WOW. There are some very specific do’s and don’ts and a complete Code of Conduct which I found very interesting.  The other big surprise was from Facebook, and the stipulation that you may not use facebook from a country which is embargoed from the U.S.

I do use Flickr and Delicious with students, but carefully and not in public areas, I find them very useful tools.

Here is a link to a little tool that keeps track of changes in Terms of Service for websites. I thought it was interesting.

http://www.tosback.org/timeline.php

Since I had a fair amount of previous experience with using iMovie to create video, I decided to try screen capture for my LMS site to add some instructional material.  It turned out to be an all day activity!  I used two different tools to try them out, the first was Screentoaster a completely web based tool that comes with a free trial period.  It worked well and was easy to use, but the file upload took almost an hour, and then I lost the original .mov file in the process of the upload (somehow?) so I couldn’t add titles or anything else to the screencast.  Because the save and upload took so long, I decided to go and look for another tool, this time I chose Jing which is also free, but requries a downloaded program on your computer.  Jing was also very easy to use, but only allows file save in a .swf  format which is not supported by iMovie either, so I am still without a title page.  I imagine that if I dug around enough I could either find another tool, or a converter of some kind, but I’m drawing the line at 8 hours on one 2 minute movie.  Here is a link to the first video on [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGeZn44HbdU[/youtube], and the second one usingaudacity.

I am familiar with HTML, and have created many websites before, so I decided to concentrate on using CSS for my website. I went through the W3Schools CSS tutorial, and downloaded a few website templates to get a feel for what can be done. I have managed to create navigation and basic rules (fonts, Headers etc) using CSS but I’m still curious to learn more and am continuing to explore. I did learn some things that I have always wondered (like what order the padding numbers go in – answer clockwise starting at the top)

I must say I was very impressed with the wiki and its tools. Especially the information about accessibility and bad design. There are so many bad, difficult to read sites out there. I was not thrilled that Steven Mischook (Killersites) has gone commercial. (I guess we all have to make a living) If you dig around enough you can find the free tutorials though. I learned HTML from his site maybe 10 years ago. I would recommend the W3Schools HTML tutorial as well.

I am posting a link to my ePortfolio (work in progress) which is the culmination of my MET experience and my learning experience (including a *big* CSS learning curve.  Let me know what you think?  ePortfolio

I did take a look at the features of WebCT/Vista and Claroline as well and I was surprised that there is so little information posted on their respective websites with regard to server requirements. The Moodle site had clearly defined requirements. I wonder if the lack of requirements is an intentional attempt to get you to pay for installation and service, which both LMS’ offer.

The three systems offer pretty similar products, but Vista comes with a huge pricetag, about 50K for 500 users. Since I have a budget of $0, and Claroline seems to have pretty poor documentation online, even though it is also Open Source, I will choose to use Moodle, which will meet my needs well enough.

Since I have used Moodle before, the tasks outlined in the Toolkit activity were not difficult or surprising for me. Actually, they seemed pretty straightforward. I did find it interesting, that on the UBC Moodle server, we all have the ability to edit anyone’s course content. I had a classmate log into my moodle to try it and he did in fact seem to have access. I guess we will have to check the change logs to see if our courses have been altered.

I am wondering if we will have server side access so that we can create custom headers/themes? I am guessing no, since it could be a security nightmare.

1.  A tempo mark directing that a passage is to be played at a walking pace.

2.  The name of my dog.