Using ICT in Further Education

Curriki, combined from ’curriculum’ and ‘wiki’, is an Internet site for Open Source Curriculum (OSC), aiming to provide universal access to free curricula and instructional materials for grades K-12.

Curriki focuses on a complete curricula solution, not just a textbook or lesson plans, but a complete course of instruction and assessment including easy-to-use tools for creating curriculum packets out of the content assets available on Curriki.

Once you create an account, you can access all the resources at Curriki and you can build up your own collection of favourite resources.

Currently, there are over 25,000 resources available in the following subject areas: arts, career and educational technology, education, educational technology, health, information and media literacy, language arts, mathematics, science, social studies and world languages.

In this interview with Chris Walsh, CTO Joshua Marks explains exactly what Curriki is all about.

Make Internet TV is a comprehensive, yet easy to follow, step by step instruction guide for recording and publishing Internet video.

All the required steps from start to finish are included:
* Equipment
* Shooting
* Editing
* Licencing
* Publishing
* Promoting

Make Internet TV provides lots of good practical information and is a great resource for any intrepid video producer or casual user!

I am delighted to see that the World Digital Library, mentioned back in December 2007, is up and running.

The World Digital Library makes it possible to:

discover, study, and enjoy cultural treasures from around the world on one site, in a variety of ways. These cultural treasures include, but are not limited to, manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings.

Items may easily be browsed by place, time, topic, type of item, and contributing institution, or can be located by an open-ended search, in several languages. Special features include interactive geographic clusters, a timeline, advanced image-viewing and interpretive capabilities. Item-level descriptions and interviews with curators about featured items provide additional information.

Check it out now. This is a great educational resource!!

ItrainOnline, promoting Internet training, provide a very useful Multimedia Training Kit, which could be used for introductory ICT modules, professional development modules or indeed for self paced learning.

The Kit includes full sets of trainers notes, handouts, presentations, exercises, worksheets, glossaries and evaluation forms. Most of the material is provided in text/graphics format, although there are some videos included.

If you wish you can update the modules, some last updated in 2003, as they are provided under Creative Commons licence.

Apart from the Multimedia Training Kit there are lots of other useful resources on this site, which are relevant and up to date. Well worth having a look around.

ShareTabs provides a great way of sharing a number of links together in one browser window.  All of the links are combined into just one single URL.

ShareTabs provides the information both visually, as thumbnails in the main body of the browser window, and as actual tabs at the top of the screen.

You can even make use of your existing Delicious links by using Extract Website. Just enter the URL of the Delicious page, for the tags that you want, and hit the Start button. A list of your links is produced, which you can copy and paste straight into ShareTabs.

A great way for accessing links during a presentation, demonstration or indeed during class. I just love the visual aspect as well as the ease of access

Sni.ps makes it really easy to capture information from the web, insert it into your blog/website and include proper attribution at the same time.

Sni.ps tracks the original source of content, which can be a piece of text, an image, a video or a flash object. You don’t even have to register to use Sni.ps, but if you do you can keep track of your clippings.

Just drag the Sni.ps tool onto your toolbar and you are ready to go! You can also organise your Sni.ps by adding a title, tag and notes to each one.

As well as providing an easy way to import content, Sni.ps could also be used to highlight, for your students, the importance of including attribution.

I have included a text, an image and a video example, below, all on the topic of comparing a LAN and a WAN.

Difference between a LAN and a WAN

A LAN (local area network) is a group ofcomputers and network devices connected together, usually within thesame building. By definition, the connections must be high speed andrelatively inexpensive (e.g., token ring orEthernet). Most Indiana University Bloomington departmentsare on LANs. For more information on LANs, see What is a LAN (local area network)?

A MAN (metropolitan area network) is a larger networkthat usually spans several buildings in the same city or town. The IUBnetwork is an example of a MAN.

A WAN (wide area network), in comparison to a MAN, is notrestricted to a geographical location, although it might be confinedwithin the bounds of a state or country. A WAN connects severalLANs, and may be limited to an enterprise (a corporation or anorganization) or accessible to the public. The technology ishigh speed and relatively expensive. The Internet isan example of a worldwide public WAN.

kb.iu.edu

Example of Wide Area Network Technologies

www.edrawsoft.com

LAN LOCAL AREA NETWORKS

www.youtube.com

Reading Ira Socol’s recent post on FreeTech has made me think, once again, about the importance of making sure that all we provide appropriate tools for students with special needs.

How often do we simply wait until a student with special needs presents and then make any additions to one dedicated computer in a classroom?

Although many special needs students do receive laptops with the necessary specialized commercial software, there is no reason why classroom computers cannot, also, be suitably enhanced given the availability of many free useful assistive technology tools. Preparing classroom computers really is the ‘least we can do’.

For example, the following free assistive technology could easily be made available for students with special needs:
* Firefox Web browser - allows for many useful plugins.
* CLiCk, Speak - plugin for Firefox for reading/speaking web pages.
* Dkey and/or Tapir – which works in a similar way to ‘predictive text’ on your mobile phone.
* Ghotit – include a prominent link to this online spellchecker.
* vozMe, YAKiToMe!, SpokenText, Read The Words - include prominent links to these online text-to-speech converters.
* HelpRead – text-to-speech reader.
* TopOCR – use your phone/camera as a personal scanner. Also includes OCR to mp3 (text to speech).
* Microsoft Reader – has many excellent features including text-to-speech.
* Microsoft Word - speech-to-text converter. Set up through tools, speech option (not free but a very useful option if Word is already installed).

 Mobile Phone Options
* Dial2Do - use your phone to send e-mail, txt messages, record reminders, post updates to twitter (normal rates for a phone call).
* Qipit – use your phone as a personal scanner to turn documents, notes and whiteboards into digital copies, pdf (normal rates for a phone call).

As well as this, students could be given a USB containing the impressive AccessApps, which contains over 50 open source and freeware assistive technology related applications. They can all be run from the USB stick on a Windows computer. 

Thanks Ira for the continuing inspiration that SpEDChange brings!

Lexipedia is a visual online dictionary and thesaurus providing examples of nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, fuzzynyms, synonyms and antonyms for your chosen word.

Visually, Lexipedia reveals the related words in an animated visual word web showing their semantic relationships. Just hover over any word in the web to reveal its definition and an example of how it is used. The same information is also provided in the categorized side menu.

Lexipedia supports English, Dutch, French, German, Italian and Spanish. Could be particularly useful for communications, english and language classes.