I'm a Learning Technologist at the University of Plymouth. I'm responsible for the design, development and implementation of e-Learning materials and finding creative solutions for using technology in education across the whole university.
I play a lot with new and existing technologies in hope that I can advise how they could be incorporated in technology assisted learning. With a keen interest in design I also utilize my creative skills as part of the marketing group where I produce websites and marketing material for events, conferences and work on self-promotion.
Ok, I’ve been a little busy this weekend fixing a few things with this blog. Firstly I realised the ‘archive’ and ‘search’ sections weren’t formatting correctly so I have fixed those. Also, the search had moved – see… up there in the top right corner, better than being in the side bar methinks. Also something more interesting down there along the bottom.
Inspired from an older design on Facebook, I’ve added a fixed footer with quick links to my latest tweets and delicious bookmarks. That’s only for starters, I’m going to try and add to these, things like YouTube etc. This bottom bar is made using JQuery, the JavaScript framework I’ve scratched the surface of a few times, but now I’m really getting into.
Hopefully I’ll make a few more improvements in the not too distant future, but I’ve used a lot of my weekend to do this, and I do like my weekends.
Recently I was tasked to create a couple of banners, one for ‘Technology Enhanced Learning’ and the other being ‘Podcasting’, so I thought I’d take a couple of minutes to share the final result. We decided to get them printed at a place called Recyclable displays, which was a good choice but created some interesting challenges when designing. Firstly they supplied templates but only in PDF format, which isn’t all bad, as you can import these into something like Adobe Indesign, but it doesn’t import to the correct scale. So in the end, I decided to recreate the template from scratch, meaning I had a 1:1 scale, which put my mind as ease when sending off the final designs.
Excuse the quality, taken on an iPhone 3G
One thing you probably can’t see from the photo is that the banners take on a 3D box-like form, meaning there were 4 sides to design. The final result of the designs can be seen below, this is the second design I created as we decided to go for a theme, rather than two differently designed banners. This will be easier for the future I we decided to get further banners printed for other topics.
The Plymouth e-Learning Conference for 2010 came to a close on Friday and it was a very well organised and informative 2 day conference. There was a nice blend of technical and theory based papers and it shows there is some good work going on out there. As usual I liked the technical papers and got the chance to sit in on a session discussing issues such as user-generated content and battling copyright issues and IPR, this is a topic I am becoming more and more interested in. It is a serious issue in education and its interesting to hear people’s ideas and possible solutions.
Plymouth e-Learning Conference 2010
A nice surprise was a couple papers revealing technology that hadn’t worked for their teaching, I think its always nice to see these kind of papers so people can live and learn with experimenting with technologies in education. These technologies didn’t work in that instance, so dust yourself off and try again… and they will! One paper that stands out demonstrated that a game-based learning objects didn’t really achieve the goals it set out, but did identify ways that might help them redesign the game to aid learning transfer, which was their primary goal.
So with only 358 days to go until PeLC11, there is plenty to think about and work on, but I can’t end this post without mentioning the Cream Tea which went down nicely (and eventually… they were big this year!)
Keyboard shortcuts in Operating Systems and Applications can often speed up productivity for simple tasks that are repeated often. By simple tasks I mean continually saving your document, copying a selection to the clipboard, creating new files or folders etc. These simple tasks can eat up time, time that could be better spend producing your content or other work. Here you will find a selection of shortcut keys that will speed up these repeated steps. Further down you will also find some shortcut keys for accessibility (Universal Access) for voice over and mouse keys.
By mastering some simple keyboard shortcuts you will amaze yourself at how you ever worked without them. If you are a lecturer, and think these shortcuts will be useful to your students please notify them about this article or forward them to the full Apple Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts. Read the rest of this entry »
Our new website for Technology Enhanced Learning the the University of Plymouth launched about 2 months ago and details almost everything to do with our work and what we do. From latest new, upcoming events, staff development, latest projects and even JISC projects, it can all be found here. It is our version of a shop window displaying what we do and what we have to offer for e-learning at the University. All Learning Technologists have a profile page detailing our main duties and what we have to offer in terms for skills, my TEL profile can be seen here. The site is only 2 months old and growing rapidly, as a results it is leaping up search engine rankings. Please check it out.
So… the story begins with my Apple Macbook screen starting to go faulty. I have been using my Macbook a lot lately, at work and home probably about 12-14 hours a day, so the screen has started to go, but I’ll leave that for a later post. It is for this reason I have decided to move back to my PC at work, but have been looking for an alternative in software that I love on the Mac. For most of my coding jobs I use Textmate. Its a nice simple editor on the surface, but the way it formats and lays out the code, it helps me with debugging etc. But as I was searching for possible options I came across IETester which relates to my earlier post about Multiple IE’s.
IETester is a better option in my opinion, its all neatly contained in one application and uses a tab system, like most standard browsers these days. Here is a video demonstrating it being used, its a very useful tool and I will be using more and more.
If you’re finding your sites are doing strange things in IE versions as far back as 5.5 then you may find this extremely useful. There are a couple of bugs with the software which are detailed at the bottom of their homepage.
Yesterday Caroline Leeson, Mark Pannell, Flea Palmer and myself showcased ‘Children with Special Needs’ to a group of 25 students in the Faculty of Education. We gave a quick introduction and that we would welcome any feedback on the project. We didn’t tell them too much on how to use it as we wanted to see how easy it was to use with no prior knowledge. The session lasted about 45 minutes and we collected a range of written feedback about how much they learned, usability features and criticisms in general. The group were very happy to participate and we were very thankful for their efforts in using the project for the first time. The majority of the feedback is positive with some questions raised about individual confusing points which we will clear up in the introduction of the site. We have all worked very had on this project and it was very satisfying to see it being used and used successfully. Below is a final screenshot of project in its new skin, and it can also be viewed here.
A little clunky but very helpful, its Multiple IE’s! Multiple IE’s allows you to install all the different versions of Internet Explorer all the way back to version 3, this comes in very handy to make sure your websites still work in IE6. As I said its a little buggy, sometimes crashing constantly but when its working it really helps to see your site is performing or more accurately not performing in older browsers. You can download it here.
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