Monday, October 26, 2009

Writing on the wall


Since I decided to begin making use of Facebook as a means of communicating with my students out of class, the post to response time has generally dropped in some cases from hours to minutes, clearly something I should tried before. So now I start to think of ways that I can make use of the network to draw-in and engage it with college life more. I began by posting out messages of congratulations accompanied by badges for work they had completed to an exceptionally good standard for C programming exercises. Now if I had write access to their personal Wall on Facebook, then I would post there for everyone to see, if they had not given be write access, then I simply sent it via email. Was it popular, well some have replied with a thank you, but perhaps more meaningfully, those that did not grant me write access to their wall now have.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Giving Facebook a try


The other day I had an email from our network manager with a link to a BBC news item promoting the use of social networking in colleges using Facebook; strange that I often go to some lengths in separating social from computer networking during conversations, still. The article suggests that using Facebook, improves both engagement and retention, mmm. I have for some reason, that right now I am not completely sure why, avoided using Facebook with my classes. I think I had probably formed the view, that we are likely to be about as welcome as educators in using the network for college matters, as turning up at a rave and handing out course notes, but I am happy to be proved wrong on that one. Anyway it was a Saturday night and I thought give it a try; yes that is when I received the email. My experience with contacting students using their college emails has I must say not proven very successful as I am likely to get no more than one read confirmation within 24 hours. So I started by not using college email, but first went to the vle, Moodle, to see what their preferred emails are, surprise surprise, just about all of them were of the form Jbloggs@anyserver.com! So I used the vle contacts and sent out my Facebook invitations, within a couple of hours 8 out of twenty had replied, so perhaps this may not be such a bad idea after all. I have opened up the question on how they would like the network to be used, but for my own part right now I am not going to abuse with nagging messages about course work, what is clearly a window into some interesting, unexpected and intriguing views on student life.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Note taking any where


I was talking to one of my colleagues recently who, with some enthusiasm has embraced the idea of eLearning to such an extent that all of his students now arrive at class not with a notebook and pen, but a wireless enabled laptop! Now not withstanding the problems that you may or may not experience with wireless technologies, one of the issues that soon make itself apparent is the activity of note taking in an electronic environment. Let’s face it, the combination of mono-purpose scripting tools and double sided optical paper have a bit going for them still, i.e. you can change to any writing to drawing mode in an instant, annotate at any time and of course providing you resist the temptation to rip out, materials can been retrieved from their storage medium with ease. If you are using say Word or equivalent package, of course you have access to drawing tools of sorts, though they tend to be a bit clunky, alternatively you can always task switch to drawing package and import the images, fiddly though. So what is this all leading up to, go back to pen and paper, no. The other day I discovered
OneNote, which comes with Microsoft Office 2007. If you look at the Microsoft site for this then OneNote is described as an ‘easy-to-use note-taking and information-management program where you can capture ideas and information in electronic form. Insert files or Web content in full-color, searchable format or as icons that you can click to access'. Add to this the fact that you can use freeform drawing tools and OneNote starts to look as if it could be a really useful package. If you would like a preview then take a look at this video, and please feel free to drop a reply to this blog with your own experiences.

Friday, October 09, 2009

Chatting Software Design


Today I met with a group of my new Foundation Degree students who are just starting out in learning Software Design using C, not the best of places to be I must admit. We met today not because we had a class, but because they wanted advice in how to establish a self-group, brilliant I thought. Apart from the advice on content, I started out by setting up a new forum for them in Moodle, which they liked the idea of, and I asked if they had any preferences for a name, they came up with Cmaritans, good one. Anyway, then I remembered a web app that I have been very keen to get the chance to tryout when the opportunity arose called Tinychat. Basically this is a free (up to 12 simultaneous users) chat facility with live web cams, a suggestion that definitely received the thumbs up, and naturally I am looking forward to reviewing their use and views. If you are interested in knowing how they get on, then be sure to revisit this blog, as I will be making future postings for sure.

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Role playing font styles


I recently posted a blog on some thoughts that I was having on the subject of fonts, which you may have read. Anyway on lighter note, today I found this amusing video on characterising fonts, amusement value good, follow this link and enjoy.

Thursday, October 01, 2009

Free hand written font generator


Producing materials that will be distributed through either a vle or similar e-learning delivery platform, immediately draws the question, should these be the same as documents I would hand out in class, well maybe, but maybe not. For a start, handouts in class tend to be black and white, fundamentally because of the printing costs, so there’s the first difference that’s up for easy change. Now not withstanding all the widgets and gadgets that you can incorporate into almost anything that’s electronic, how much consideration do we actually give to fonts? In a class situation you are there to present and guide students through the material, but distributed materials will not have that accompanying hook; fonts, typography, can play a part here. You may like to watch this little video on the rise of Comic Sans. Just recently I took a move away from the usual font list options in my word processor package and began to think more about fonts that would look more natural than the standard Arial, Verdana, Trebuchet, Calibri set that I tended to gravitate toward. And I started to look at possibilities of handwritten font styles. But that costs, and has copyright issues right, well not if you create your own using the free MyFont tool from Microsoft, follow this link for a short tutorial and feel free to get back and post a comment.
BarryS