Learning Technologies

Memory sticks, flash drives, usb drives, pen drives, thumb drives. All different names for the same technology - a usb storage device - a small portable device for storing data.

Back in 2005 JISC produced a booklet called “Innovative Practice with eLearning“. One of the case studies looked at the use of memory sticks with students. The challenge, at the University of Sussex was to “encourage greater ownership of digital learning materials”. Students were issued with a memory stick with course materials preloaded and encouraged to save their own work and “found” resources. Finding and sharing resources also formed part of the course assessment.

The Learning and Teaching potential was noted below

1. Can encourage student ownership of digital course materials
2. Can support collaborative activities
3. Enables continuity of work across different locations

As well as saving files on a memory stick you can actually run portable applications without the need to install anything on your computer. This is also great for students working across many different computers. They can set up the applications with their preferences without having to change them all the time.

For general portable applications a good place to start is portableapps.com. This site contains portable applications of many of the leading opensource and freeware applications including FireFox (Web Browser), Open Office (Alternative to MS Office) and Audacity (Audio Editor - great for podcasting).

Another excellent resource is AccessApps, an initiative developed by the Scottish JISC Regional Support Centres in cooperation with JISC TechDis. It consists of over 50 open source and freeware assistive technology applications which can be entirely used from a USB stick on a Windows computer. There are a range of e-learning solutions to support writing, reading and planning as well as visual and mobility difficulties.

Some things to consider when using a memory stick

1. If you plan to use memory sticks with students make sure they can access the usb ports on shared computers. I’ve only seen usb ports blocked in two institutions I’ve visited but it’s worth checking with your IT department as there could be potential network security risks when running portable applications.

2. What would happen if you lost your memory stick. Does it contain sensitive information (See 3). Have you backed up your stick? PortableApps contains an integrated backup tool. There are also sites like Mozy which do automatic remote backups. They have a free 2Gb account. An alternative to automatic backup solutions is to do it manually. Just remember to do it every so often! There a number of free sites like ADrive which offer a whopping of 50 Gb of free online storage space for your data. Just checked out the ADrive website again and it looks like they now offer a remote backup solution on their free accounts too.

The advantage of having your data online is that you can access it anywhere that has an Internet connection. The downside is what if the company folds? Personally I use a belts and braces approach. I have my data stored locally and online.

Another tip is to put a plain text file on the top level (first window you see when you open it) of your memory stick called “If found” with your contact details. So if someone finds it, it can (potentially!) be returned to you.

3. There have been many stories in the news recently about memory sticks containing huge amounts of personal data ranging from dates of birth to bank details going missing. If you’re concerned about the data stored on your memory stick you could install something like TrueCrypt a free opensource encryption tool to protect your data.

So that’s a snapshot of some of the uses for memory sticks. I’ll cover more uses in future posts.

If you’re looking for information on the benefits of using images in your learning and teaching materials and looking for sources of images, TASI in partnership with Intute have just released a virtual training suite called “Internet for Image Searching“. There’s also a useful section on copyright law and image rights.

Intute: VIrtual Training Suite (VTS) are a collection of free Internet tutorials for teaching Internet research skills for over 65 university & college subjects. The tutorials are authored and updated by a national network of subject experts from UK universities and colleges. If you’re not familiar with the Virtual Training Suite model they are broken down into four sections: Tour, Discover, Judge, Success stories. There are resources mentioned throughout and you can click on the “add to basket” icon for any resources of interest. A bit like adding items to the basket if you’ve used Amazon before.

And when you’ve finished you click on the the Links basket icon (1). You’re then presented with a list of links you’ve added to your basket (2). And you can then email the list of links (3) to yourself for later reference.

Intute also provide a range of support materials including handouts and worksheets for use in teaching and training. And concluding the images theme they have a VTS on Digital Photography.

Intute VTS || Digital Photography

There are a lot of great online photo editors out there. One main advantage is that there’s generally nothing to download, assuming you have a flash enabled web browser. Some don’t even require registration like picnik. Picknik’s great for quick adjustments like rotating and resizing – if you can live with the ads on the free account.

One particular application I’ve used recently is splashup (formerly fauxto). If you’re familiar with Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements you’ll feel right at home with this interface. It’s certainly more like Photoshop than Adobe’s Photoshop Express, their free online photo editor. You do get 2Gb of space to store and share your images with Express which is good to have.

Splashup’s got advanced features such as layers and layer effects. When you’re in fullscreen mode it feels almost like a full desktop application. Here’s a quick demo. I briefly show how to open an image, rotate it, add text including a drop shadow layer effect, resize it then save it.

Does your institution block YouTube? Many do but there are a lot of excellent educational videos on there. If you’ve got access elsewhere to view YouTube videos and want to show them in class one way to do it would be to download and convert it to a convenient video format for local playback. One way to do this (out of many) is to head over to www.mediaconverter.org,  a free online media converter.

Select Your File

1. Copy and paste the address of your chosen YouTube video and

2. Click on NEXT STEP

Choose Your File Type

1. Choose your file format. If you’re playing back the video on a PC or Windows Mobile Device a good choice is wmv, windows native video format. You can also embed wmv files into Microsoft PowerPoint. If want to play it on iPods, MP4 players or some mobile phones a good choice is mp4.

2. Give your file a name (no spaces allowed, underscores ok). If you leave the field blank your file will automatically be named using digits. Not very user-friendly!

3. Click NEXT STEP

Change Various Video Settings (optional)

For most purposes you don’t really need to change anything here. One useful setting that may be of use is the resolution. If you’ve got a high resolution file and you wanted to play it on a mobile phone then you could bump the resolution down. It would make it smaller and faster to load.

File Starts to Download

Download File

Step 1. Click on the DOWNLOAD NOW icon and save the file.

That’s it! It probably took longer to read this than to actually do it. One advantage of using an online media converter is that there is no software to install. Good if you don’t have admin rights to your PC. As well as converting YouTube videos you can also convert your own video files. Looking at the first screen there is an option to upload and convert your own videos, for example from your digital camera or mobile phone.

If you do have admin rights on your PC and can install software this site also offers a free standalone version of the software.

I’m impressed with Quick Response Codes (QR Codes). They’re 2D barcodes that you can encode with a variety of information including urls, contact details, sms and text. I’d thought they were mainly for asset tracking on a production line until last week. More info at wikipedia

I was at an Edutxt conference at Clydebank College and I noticed Andy Ramsden had QR codes on his PowerPoint Presentation. With the appropriate software on your mobile phone you could have pointed your built-in camera at his presentation and downloaded it (assuming you had a data connection on your phone), added his contact details and filled in an sms message all from pointing your mobile phone camera at his QR codes. Nothing to write down or remember.

I was intrigued by this so did some further research. What do you need to recognise QR codes on your phone? There are various free QR code readers out there including neoreader, kaywa and quickmark. You don’t need a particularly high end phone either. I’ve got it working on my Sony Ericsson k800i. It’s also running on my ASUS P750 phone.

How would you use QR codes yourself? I can imagine them being useful on such thing as posters advertising events, conferences and resources. Students could point their mobile phone cameras at them and have instant access to the information. In a lecture, students could point their mobiles at your PowerPoint presentation to download it or save urls for later use. There are a number of QR code generator sites out there to make your own codes. I used kaywa.

In summary

1. Download the appropriate software for your phone. I’ve used quickmark here.

2. Start the software. Point your camera at a qr code

I did a mock up of one of Craig’s Accessibility and Inclusion posters and put a small QR code at the bottom.

3. Look at the information

I generated the code to have a url address. If you generate the code at kaywa you have 4 options: url, text, sms or phone number. In this case Craig’s Accessibility and Inclusion Blog address. If I click on “Access” on the bottom bar it will take me straight to the blog. I can also save the Url, send it as an email or sms message all without writing anything down or having to remember an address.

Here’s the QR code which will take you directly to Craig’s blog if you have the software installed on your phone.

And if you’re easily amused like me you’ll want to check out your new qr code reader software with all different types of QR codes and Flickr has loads of them

Finally, I see that Samsung have just hooked up with Scanbuy to install a barcode reader on their phones. The whole 2D barcode thing could become more commonplace in the near future.

Update: Just came across semapedia.org which generates wikipedia qr codes and creates a pdf for you to print out. Also of interest if you scroll down to the bottom of the page it has a 2D barcode reader selector for mobile phones. Select the phone type and model you have and it will show you the software that will run on your phone. Seems pretty comprehensive.

I was watching Reporting Scotland the other night and they had a piece on the British Film Institute putting old archive material up on the video sharing site YouTube. Currrently there are about 190 videos with about 23 covering Scottish themes. You can view the video channel here.

Here’s one from Jamaica Street in Glasgow from 1901. How things have changed!

SlideShare is an online presentation sharing tool. You can add your own presentations in PowerPoint, Open Office or pdf format. And you can share these documents publicly or privately. In common with other Web 2.O applications you can tag your presentations with keywords of your choice and post comments.

This is also a great tool for digital storytelling. SlideShare have added the ability to add your own audio files to your presentation and it provides you with an online sychronisation tool to match up your audio with individual slides. One slight niggle is that you can’t embed the audio with your presentation. The audio file has to be hosted elsewhere.

I’ve made a quick example showing you how it can be used for instructional purposes. I took some photos with the camera on my mobile phone. Transferred the pictures over to my laptop. Stuck them in PowerPoint. Plugged in a mic and recorded an audio track in Audacity (open source audio editor). Uploaded the PowerPoint to SlideShare. Uploaded the audio mp3 file to our webserver - this can be any publicly accessible place on the web. Clicked on the edit button on SlideShare to add a “SlideCast”. It then took me to the synchronisation tool so that I could line up my audio with my slides. Then clicked on “publish”. And that was it. This could be great tool for digital storytelling. And it’s also easy to share your newly created slidecast on your own blog. I’ve copied and pasted the code provided by slideshare and pasted it below. This is slidecast details my portable field recording/podcasting setup. Click the play button to hear the audio. You can aslo skip through slide-by-slide using the forward and back buttons.

Microsoft Photo Story 3 is a free tool that lets you create slideshows. You can add your own voice narration, soundtrack, captioning and motion effects. It guides you through a series of 5 or 6 screens explaining what each section does along the way. It’s very straightforward to use and the final file - a wmv video file can be uploaded and shared on site such as YouTube and Blip.TV.

Here’s a typical example of a Photo Story. I added some photos from a trip to Campbeltown, added some captions and some audio from Magnatune - you can licence music from here for free for non-commercial purposes. I then uploaded it to Blip.TV. I then copied the code provided by Blip and pasted it into this post. Blip also converts your video file over to flash format. This can be useful as you don’t need to worry about your viewers having the right video player installed. Most computers have a flash-enabled web browsers.

So how can Photo Story be used for education? It could be used for reflection. As an icebreaker at the start of a course to introduce each student - many have mobile phones with cameras or they could download creative commons licenced photos from flickr. The finished Photo Stories could be uploaded to a VLE or one of the many video sharing sites. With sites like YouTube you can restrict viewing so that it’s not publicly accessible. It could be used for evidence as part of an ePortfolio. What would you use it for?

Related Posted: Creating a Title Slide for Photo Story 3

Text-to-speech convertors can be useful for a variety of users and there are many to choose from. One such tool is vozMe - an easy-to-use, free web-based convertor. At it’s simplest you can copy and paste text into the central window and click on “create mp3″. It will then convert it to mp3 format suitable for playback on ipods, mobile phones - anything that will play mp3 format. There’s also a selection of useful utilities you can add to your own blog or website.

This short screencast introduces the basic features of vozMe. I mention TechDis. They have excellent accessibility and inclusion resources. Well worth a visit. I also mention Craig Mill, our elearning advisor for accessibility and inclusion and the joint blog he produces in partnership with Margaret McKay, his counterpart in the other Scottish RSC.

If you would like any further information on vozMe or accessibility in general please use the contact form to get in touch.

My audio is slightly distorted in the middle section. I hope it doesn’t detract too much from the screencast. Must remember to recheck my audio levels when changing mics!

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

A colleague asked me how to create a title slide for Microsoft PhotoStory 3. There are a number of ways to do this. One of the quickest ways, if you’re familiar with Microsoft PowerPoint is to create a slide, change its background colour and export it in .gif format then import it into PhotoStory.

What’s PhotoStory? It’s a free, easy to use digital storytelling tool from Microsoft. If you’d like to know more about it or would like to arrange a workshop for this please get in touch.