Moodle 2 for Teaching 4-9 Year Olds Beginner's Guide book

by nick | Sat, 08/10/2011 - 18:40

Moodle 2 for Teaching 4-9 Year Olds Beginner's Guide is available now.
Download a sample chapter, view the table of contents and buy the book on PacktPub and Amazon

Moodle is a virtual learning environment that is being used in more and more schools worldwide. It is ideal for teaching a younger age group as interactive lessons enable children to learn quicker and with greater ease.

Timeline widget on Moodle.org

Moodle 2 for Teaching 4-9 Year Olds Beginner's Guide will help you to adapt your existing lesson plans to online Moodle courses and will give you ideas to create new activities, quizzes, and puzzles to make the learning process fun and interactive for young children. More from Packt.

OU Annotate

by nick | Wed, 04/04/2012 - 22:37

I was in a meeting today of The Open University's accessibility practitioner's group. Louise Olney, a project manager in Learning and Teaching Solutions kindly came to talk to us about OU Annotate, and in particular the work that is being done to improve it's accessibility.

"OU Annotate enables you add your own annotations to web pages. You can create an annotation for an entire web page, like a bookmark, or you can select and highlight specific text. You can add comments and tags to your annotations and, if you wish, share them with others."

Obama-China inundation on Google+ is an opportunity not a threat

by nick | Mon, 27/02/2012 - 02:27

I've come across a BBC article about Chinese internet users inundating Barack Obama's Google Plus page. Here is Obama's Google+ page. This bit of news gives me a warm feeling. Apparently "many simply voiced delight at their freedom to speak: they talked about occupying the furniture and bringing snacks and soft drinks."

Nomensa's open source Accessible Media Player - first look

by nick | Sat, 28/01/2012 - 00:02

I was tipped off about Nomensa's player, newly open sourced (thanks Chetz), and ever curious, I thought I'd take a look.

I came across version 1 of the player last year, and I must say at the time I was a bit bemused. It seemed to be a thin wrapper around either YouTube, or the JW Player (I can't remember which), and Nomensa weren't upfront about saying so.

Note, I'm not going to go into the accessibility aspects here, but instead concentrate on how the open-source project itself is presented.

oEmbed at Dev8D 2012

by nick | Thu, 19/01/2012 - 15:03
2012-02-14 09:30
2012-02-16 17:00
Europe/London

Location

University of London Students UnionWC1E 7HY
United Kingdom
51° 31' 21.6696" N, 0° 7' 52.1328" W
See map: Google Maps

I'm happy to say that I'll be going to Dev8D again this year. Dev8D is organized in part by the JISC DevCSI initiative, and is aimed at all developers and IT people in UK higher education. It is free, and an excellent training opportunity.

OU web developer's coffee morning - OU player

by nick | Wed, 12/10/2011 - 09:30
2011-12-15 10:00
Europe/London

Location

The Open University Library / DigilabMK7 6AA
United Kingdom
52° 1' 29.6904" N, 0° 42' 35.0892" W
See map: Google Maps

These events are fairly informal, but some topics we may like to cover:

* What is OU player?
* What is OU embed?
* What is oEmbed?
* What are the benefits, for developers, end users etc.?
* How can you embed using these systems - in Drupal/ in Wordpress/ using Javascript/ in Moodle?
* What is the status of the project? Future plans?

16th Annual SEDA Conference 2011

by nick | Wed, 12/10/2011 - 09:12
2011-11-17
2011-11-18
Europe/London

Location

United Kingdom
52° 28' 58.6596" N, 1° 53' 36.9312" W
See map: Google Maps

The Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA).

Using Technology to Enhance Learning
17 November 2011 - 18 November 2011

Participants
"The conference will be of particular interest to all those involved in promoting effective change in HE learning, teaching and educational development. This includes:
Academic and staff developers
Lecturers and teachers in further and higher education
National and institutional teaching fellows
Heads of academic schools and academic development
Learning technologists ..."