careers

Presenting Prezi

I was reminded on Friday by the ever-innovative LSE Careers Service that I never shared my attempt at using Prezi, so here it is.  I’d seen it used at a couple of events earlier in the year so when I was preparing for this year’s new academics induction I thought I’d give it a go for my Social Software in Teaching slot.

While it’s nice to sit in a presentation where PowerPoint doesn’t feature I’m not wholly convinced by Prezi.  My main gripe is that I found it incredibly fiddly to use.  It took me a long time to put this together, OK it was my first attempt, but I’m not sure it was worth it.  The main advantage it seems,  putting the occasionally sea-sickness inducing animation aside for now, is that it doesn’t need to be a linear presentation.  It’s very easy to jump around and as most of my presentation could have been in any order I let the audience decide!

The LSE Careers Service Prezi I saw on Friday is below.

November 9th, 2009|Events & Workshops (LTI), Images, Audio & Video, Social Media, Teaching & Learning|2 Comments|
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Screen Recording Made Simple

Update October 2010: ScreenToaster is back, ignore text below that says otherwise

I’ve just finished testing various free web-based screen recording tools. I’ve been looking at them for a new course at the LSE run by the LSE Careers Service & the Language Centre called English for Career Success. As part of the course students have to give a 5-minute presentation to the class.  As a practice exercise before the live event they have to record themselves doing the presentation using a screen recording tool.  They then receive feedback on it from the tutors before delivering the real thing.

Here is an example of a screen recording I just made using Screenr and below it you will find notes on it and my other two best finds ScreenToaster (no longer available) & Screenjelly. I recommend watching in full-screen mode.

All 3 tools are web-based, free & require an account.  They publish with a unique URLs & can also be embedded elsewhere as I have done above. The quality of the output is good for all three and they can all be viewed full-screen.  However there are some important differences between them which may affect which you choose.

November 5th, 2009|Images, Audio & Video, Social Media|4 Comments|
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Walking the Walk

Galway CathedralAfter giving an Emerging Technologies talk yesterday I have used some of them as a follow-up to the session. So there’s a wiki page which includes a link to the presentation on slideshare, one to the all the links on Diigo (a social bookmarking site), an embedded YouTube video, a photo from Flickr to brighten things up and a chat window just because I can!

Image: Galway Cathedral http://flickr.com/photos/slinky2000/217514055/

June 27th, 2008|Conferences, Social Media|Comments Off on Walking the Walk|
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Emerging Technologies and Careers

I’m travelling back from Harrogate and the AGCAS “Emerging Technologies and their use in Careers” event and am taking advantage of the free wireless on the new National Express East Coast service. Excellent!

My sessions were well received and I felt the whole event went really well with a great set of speakers today building on my introductory tour from yesterday: blogs, feeds, podcasts, screencasts, social bookmarking, social networking, e-portfolios & PLEs, virtual worlds and wikis… and they all stayed awake thru it all 😉

I used a wiki for an evening homework activity which worked really well. The AGCAS Harrogate wiki also contains all of the presentations from the two days.

A word about the wiki

I looked at three free wikis for this: wikispaces, pbwiki and wetpaint. I rejected wetpaint first as I felt it was too busy and I wanted something cleaner. I initially went with wikispaces but I wasn’t happy with how it dealt with simultaneous editing which was an issue for this particular exercise so I selected pbwiki as it locks the page when someone is editing it. The delegates who in the main were using a wiki for the first time were very positive about it and I was very pleased with both how the exercise went and the performance of pbwiki itself.

January 11th, 2008|Conferences|1 Comment|
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Careers Service Social Software Projects

I’m just back from the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services (AGCAS) Biennial conference, where I presented a session with Kezia Richmond, the LSE Careers Information Manager, titled “Blog it, tag it, share it: learn the language of the Google generation”. It seemed to be very well received judging from the immediate feedback we were given.

We covered RSS, blogs, podcasting & social bookmarking and showcased the Careers Service’s social software projects:

*Strictly speaking audio recordings rather than podcasts! You can download our handout and see a list of sites we highlighted in our talk.

If you are interested in finding out more about social software then look out for the social software sessions on the LSE upcoming training courses page. The CLT are particularly interested in further exploring how social software might be used in teaching and learning, so if this is something that interests you too then please get in touch: clt-support@lse.ac.uk

September 5th, 2007|Conferences, Social Media|Comments Off on Careers Service Social Software Projects|
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