eLearning at New College

Its hard to keep track of the multitude of tools now available online for educators. The Digital Research Tools (DiRT) wiki has links to some of the more common tools for creating a wide range of educational tasks, so check it out if you don’t know your mashups from your mindmaps or your screencasts from your social bookmarks. Its a fantastic resource and seems to be updated regularly. If you know of any tools you think are missing send the author some suggestions on their feedback page.

The m-Learning World blog has a good run-down of the steps needed to use your iPod/iPod Touch/iPhone for showing a slide presentation on a TV. The first part talks about the various settings and iPod models this will work on. The next part will show how to get Powerpoint slides onto your iPod. Its a great solution if you don’t want to lug around a laptop and you have the right cables to attach to a TV in the classroom or elsewhere.

I have finished the first in what I hope to be a series of ‘walk-throughs’ for using new technologies in creative ways in our teaching and learning. As many of the creative tools I use are on the Apple Mac platform I thought I would start by introducing users new to Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) to 10 basic tips. I also hope to create a series of screencasts to accompany the walk-throughs as well as training sessions for those interested in learning more about these tools. Look out for upcoming walk-throughs on podcasting with Garageband 08 and an introduction to blogging using Edublogs.

To download this walkthrough as a pdf file click on the following link:

10basicMactipsv4.pdf

You can also access an online version of the document here

The CoolCatTeacher Blog has 38 cool Web 2.0 tools to enliven teaching and learning. Best of all they are all free! I have used a few of them – Gmail, Google Reader, Netvibes, Skype and Firefox and am currently trying to get my head around the whole Twitter thang. Its a good list and happy birthday CoolCatTeacher!

This looks cool (thanks to Ewan McIntosh via Jaiko for the link):

Animoto

Haven’t had a chance to play with it yet but it looks like some online software that automagically creates video from images and music in widescreen cinema format. A free version for educators is in the works and in the meantime anyone can create 30-sec shorts for free. Has potential for podcasting me thinks.