Some brief notes from this event attended by around 30 participants at Nottingham Trent University:

Wimba Update – Good news from Jessica D’Souza… Moodle integration will be available for late April. I was also reminded that v5.1 is a free upgrade which includes:

  • Podcaster – 1 click subscribe to iTunes or other program + RSS feed
  • Presenter – a tool that links a resource with a mini voice-board. Teachers add a resource with an associated audio message. Then students can respond by posting an audio comment. There can be multiple resources with associated audio in the same Presenter ‘board’. Resources must be a URL, i.e. you can’t attach files

Version 5.1 allows for 20mins recordings (and longer if files are imported).

Coventry Flying Squad – Marina Orsini-Jones introduced Coventry’s “Flying angels”, students who are employed to help staff use technology including the VLE etc. They provide technical support and free up her time for pedagogical support and have been well received by staff.

Marina also briefly showed PebblePad which they use (partly because WebCT Portfolio wasn’t ready in time!). Students control what can be seen and what is kept private (like ELGG). She has used it for “WebFolio” projects, where the students put together a website as a project. It’s then very easy for the teacher to give comments on each page that the students have produced.

Audio in CourseGenie – A very useful presentation from Trevor Pull on the different ways of adding audio to CourseGenie pages which for one reason or another I still hadn’t got around to looking at. Trevor showed how easy it is to embed both audio files and Wimba audio into CG pages. I do like CG, particularly for language teachers but we still need to overcome the problems we’ve had with Word macros on LSE PCs

Auralog – Tell Me More – Off-the-shelf exercises, with fancy speech recognition. Thousands of exercises. The teacher can (re)sequence exercises that come with software.
Surprisingly the Auralog presenter was not aware of UK accessibility law and the software had problematic colour choices and fixed text sizes!