Interactive White Boards for Free

I discovered a really promising web based application the other day that was promoted as an interactive whiteboard, not surprisingly it’s called Virtual White Board. I registered for an account and though you do not at this stage get all the fancy clipart and sound clips etc; its still in beta, I was impressed with the functionality. Here at college interactive white-boards, probably due to the cost just do not seem to have happened, though all our computing rooms do all have a master PC and projector. Using Virtual-whiteboard you can include text, images, files and notes, freehand drawing plus some symbols and clipart. Users i.e. students, can be invited in and authenticated via their email address; if they are remote, then chat is also available. Sessions can be saved, printed or exported as an image . My impressions at the moment are that Virtual White Board will be a nice compliment to the various tools that I am currently deploying through Moodle and intend trialling it in the coming academic year. If you decide to give Virtual White Board a try yourself please feel free to get back and make a comment for us all.

Elgging

In the last few weeks I have been taking a close look at elgg and trying to decide whether to promote it as part of my courses in the coming year. I set-up my account and began trawling through the various options and facilities, and came to the conclusion that it will be ideal for creating a personalised learning space. While on this subject, there is a whole debate going on it seems around personalised learning at the moment, so if you are interested in getting clarification you may like to browse this standards site; complete with quotes from David Miliband who started the whole thing, well almost. I don’t know about you, but with certain people, whenever I get into discussions on this one, the whole session seems to drift into customisation, which in turn takes you up the road of accessibility, definitely not the same thing. Anyway things could get even more interesting with elgg from my perspective, because it will also facilitate my ambitions for learning communities, which brings it very much into my sights regarding the JISC bid. So with that all said elgg is on.

Nine mystery guests

Well the JISC bid event with our partner colleges went really well, and now I am looking forward to seeing the whole project hopefully come to life in the New Year. The web-cast also worked and our network manager informs me that we had 10 IP addresses connected, though one of those was him, so I guess that leaves 9. Following my request for the web-cast to be set-up, a first for Bromley College I must say, it was reassuring to have evidence of it actually being used, and given the technical issues that had to be overcome, its top marks and thanks to the network team for that. While you may be thinking that this blog is likely to go quite given it’s the end of the academic year, I will now have the task of helping to write the actual bid and on a completely separate tack, preparing for a new venture as we develop our plans in forming a partnership with a commercial company in the deployment of the Moodle VLE beyond our more usual FE and HE sectors.

Change of stream

Just a last minute change to our streaming of the JISC bid proposal here at Bromley College this afternoon, the address is now http://keyhole.bromley.ac.uk please feel free to drop in.

Live stream

Tomorrow we shall be presenting our proposal details to partner colleges for the JISC bid along the lines of ‘access to online content, and tools to support collaborative working and personalised learning experiences’. The network team have been working hard getting my request for streaming to work and this afternoon I saw it in action. If you are interested in looking in on the event, then click here between 2 and 5 gmt. If you do manage to view the webcast I would be interested in any feedback to this blog, for now I have a few finishing touches to the presentations to get on with, so I’ll sign off.

Virtual presence

A productive weekend with regard to Moodle and the bid. I completed the presentations, five in all for this coming Thursday, which not surprisingly has changed the agenda a tad. After some thought on the subject of on-line presence for participating staff, I have decided to use Myspace as the medium, its popular, easy to use and most will have heard of it already. I had seriously considered elgg, and had it already been integrated into Moodle would probably have plumbed for that, maybe if we get the bid and moodle-elgg integration runs to timescale then there will be some considerable mileage in using it for students. I met with the network team today and the possibility of us being able to stream the event look very promising, so stay tuned for the address of the webcast.

Dolly 2 and the Bid

I went along to a LAMS event at the Knowledge Lab in London this week, and apart from being pleased to meet up with others that I only seem to see at these gatherings, I must say that some of the improvements with version 2 (Dolly), are I feel certain going to make it available to a much wider user base. Among the new features are a file manager, rich text editor and tab dialog boxes for sequence components, all good user friendly stuff. As LAMS is now integrated with Moodle, I have given it a trial to good effect with one of my own courses, and enthusiastic about running some more at the college in the coming year. Much of my spare time this week has been taken up in preparation for the July 13th Conference afternoon here at Bromley. This will be an opportunity to present the detail and discuss the bid with both our own staff and partner colleges, so I am looking forward to that. Tomorrow I am meeting with our network team, because I hope to stream the event for anyone who cannot make it along on the day, I will be sure to post an address on this blog, so if you are interested in having look, stay in touch for that one, must get on for now though.

Training by capture

For some time I have been working on diversifying the Moodle training here at Bromley. My original three hour intro session did present some problems for staff on a full timetable, so we cut down to two hours, but meant not everything was covered. So my plan has been to reduce the content and course time, but deliver other features through multimedia, then everyone can select their training requirements in the fashion of a Moodle training type supermarket. I have put a few of these together, but here is the latest format that I am almost certainly going to run with. My intention is to make these available to a wider audience through this blogs video block on the right. Please feel free to let me have views and feedback