Using ICT in Further Education

Udutu is a sophisticated online course authoring system that enables you to create highly interactive eLearning courses.

By using the mydutu tool, you can “design and implement online training and courses without any knowledge of technology“. Being able to import existing PowerPoint presentations into your new course is an added bonus.

You can carry out quite extensive authoring as explained by Udutu: “In addition to conventional animation based interactivity templates it has a unique conditional branching capability that allows you to create complex scenarios, simulations, and remedial learning situations. It is a robust multimedia platform for a corporate training and development program. It supports all major types of graphic, sound, and video formats, and will automatically optimize any multimedia for the web without third party applications“.

Interestingly, Udutu recommend a minimum screen resolution of 1024 x 768, although they do provide templates for 800 x 600 resolution.

Once completed, you can download the course as a zip file, which you can then easily install on your own server or copy to a CD. The course runs in a web browser.

Have a look at the ’Build Effective Online Courses‘ created by Udutu, which shows you just how a finished course works and also provides a great lesson about building effective online courses.

Zaid has recently composed another great list of resources with his 75 free EduGames.

Zaid’s post is about “exploring and discovering free educational games that could be useful to embed within or across courses (and programs) to spark more engagement, challenge, mystery, exploration, collaboration, problem-solving, decision making, imagination, fun and thinking into the learning process“.

If you haven’t done so then I would advise you to check it out now!!!

I haven’t used all of them yet but I really like the ClassTools.net site. This one alone will keep you busy for ages. Also, the jQuizShow is a must if you like ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’.

Zaid also promises to keep adding new Edugames to his Games Galore del.icio.us site. Definitely one to bookmark

Photobucket is an image and video hosting site. As well as hosting, Photobucket enables you to edit your images, including red eye fix, automatic fix, crop, rotate, resize, flip and change contrast. For the more adventurous, Photobucket also has a layers feature.

Slideshow creation, in three easy steps, is also available in Photobucket as well as video creation – in just five easy steps! The video creation is really fun with lots of built in features such as text, borders and music to add.

This is a little sample of a video created in Photobucket. Our College staff trip to Denmark this year. Can you identify the town we were in?

Ustream.TV is a live interactive video broadcast platform that enables anyone with a camera and an Internet connection to broadcast to a world wide audience of unlimited size. Simply create your own channel on Ustream or broadcast through your own site.

With Ustream’s interactive broadcast functionality, your viewers can personally interact directly with you and each other through a built in chat facility.

Your broadcast is recorded and available for viewing at a later time, which is great if someone misses the live event. However, the most appealing thing, for me, is that you can catch the broadcast live and participate via the chat if you choose.

Ustream is another tool that has great potential for use in education. There are already many teachers taking advantage of this technology. Here’s a great example of a broadcast that I viewed last week – an informative and very useful presentation on using Google Apps in the classroom. 

 Produced and delivered by Kevin Jarrett. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

The AidtoChildren.com is an interesting site where you can test and improve your vocabulary and at the same time contribute to one of the World Vision Canada causes.

At AidtoChildren.com, you are presented with a word and four different meanings. As well as getting some satisfaction from selecting the correct meaning, you also get to contribute 0.25c to World Vision Canada for each correct answer.

This contribution is made by the site’s sponsors and runs through until 30th September 2008.

I’m not sure just how real the donations are or if they do go to the right place or not, as I am a bit of a cynic, but it is a great concept and the vocabulary testing game is definitely quite useful.  

Sitepoint are offering a time limited free PDF download of ‘The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques.

The book, written by Corrie Haffly, is very comprehensive offering 9 complete chapters covering everything from the basics to advanced techniques. I particularly like the chapter that is devoted to designing a website.

Don’t miss out. The offer ends in 25 days from now………

Drop.io lets you create simple private exchange points on the Internet called ‘drops’. This is a great little service for enabling temporary access to files.

Each drop is “private, and only as accessible as you choose to deliberately make it. Create multiple drops, add any type of media, and share or subscribe as you want“.

You can choose to delete the drop from 1 day later up to 1 year later. You can also choose to allow your users to view only, view & add or view add & delete the ‘drop’.

Drop.io is very flexible allowing you to create ‘drops’ using the web, email, voice, fax and widgets.

Give out the ‘drop’ address to your students and the whole class can access the file immediately at the same time.

Works a treat so long as it is not blocked on your schools network!! No surprises to hear that Drop.io is blocked on ours

Qipit is a free mobile online copy service that has great potential for classroom use.

You just take a picture of your printouts, whiteboard or handwritten notes with your camera phone or digital camera and then send the image to Qipit, where it is turned into a digital copy (PDF).

As well as using your phone, you can also send the image via email or fax. Once uploaded the PDFs can be tagged for easy searching and sorting.

You can also publish and share the documents.

It even works with my humble Nokia 6234!! Read a great review of Qipit on Joe Wood’s blog.

Update (13/5). Just discovered that Qipit also blog and tweet. Now that is the complete service
Update (7/11/09) . Free online service discontinuted as from 6th December 2009