All 3 entries tagged Showcase, Transversality

February 07, 2007

Showcase: Podcast audio with Sitebuilder 2

In the last year it has become much easier for students and staff to create and share audio recordings on the web as MP3 podcasts. Both Sitebuilder 2 and Warwick Blogs make the inclusion of podcasts in web pages easy. This poster introduces podcasting as a teaching, learning and research tool. It Showcases three interesting uses of podcasting from the Arts Faculty, and gives further suggestions for how it might be useful.

Here is a screenshot from one of the examples used. It shows a series of podcasts that support vocab learning in German Studies:

German Podcasting

Here is the text of the poster:

Why podcast? – It’s a flashy name for a simple technique. Record audio into an MP3 recorder (a kind of digital equivalent of a dictaphone), upload it to the web, allow other people to play the audio either in your web page, or downloaded onto their MP3 player (e.g. iPod).

Very little or no editing is required.

The MP3 recorder automatically creates the audio files (PC, Mac, Linux).

Both Sitebuilder 2 and Warwick Blogs include podcast players that do the rest of the work for you.

Why podcast? – There are many good reasons to record and share audio, both in “traditional” courses and “distance online” courses. For example:

Record a brief introduction or summary to a lecture;
Record a seminar or a presentation to use in formative or summative assessment;
Present interviews with experts and academics;
Create an archive of your lectures, so that you can re-use them in the future.

Get your students podcasting: Students can learn a lot from producing their own audio productions. For example, get your students to interview an expert on some topic. This will improve their questioning and investigation skills, along with IT and communications skills.

Robert O'Toole : 07 Feb 2007 08:43 | Tags: Arts Faculty Arts Faculty Exhibitions E-Learning Showcase Warwick University | Comments (0) | Close comments | Report a problem

February 06, 2007

Showcase: Deep linking to library resources

Follow-up to Second Arts Faculty E–learning Exhibition Lunch from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

I have just completed another showcase poster ready for the Arts Faculty E-learning Exhibition on Friday 9th February. This poster demonstrates how we can build a Sitebuilder page with deep links to online books and journals provided by the University of Warwick Library. Such links can be of great use in both on-site and online teaching.

The showcase is based around the demo deep-linked reading list created by Madeline McKerchar (now of Cambridge University) for the Online MA in History.

Deep linking demo page

The text of the poster reads as follows:

The University of Warwick Library offers an extensive range of online electronic resources, including books and journals. These resources can be accessed by students over the internet anywhere in the world at any time. You can easily build a Sitebuilder 2 page containing a list of links directly to these resources. Such direct connections are called “deep links”.

It is important to remember that many of these resources are provided by external organisations. To ensure that the web addresses that you provide stay operational over time, you should use the linking facilities provided by the Library. For example, the Build-a-Link tool can be used to generate stable urls (demo on the poster). Talk to your subject librarian for more details and guidance.

The poster gives the following useful links:

And the poster can be downloaded as a PDF from this page (login required).

Robert O'Toole : 06 Feb 2007 12:16 | Tags: Arts Faculty Arts Faculty Exhibitions E-Learning Showcase Warwick University | Comments (3) | Close comments | Report a problem

February 01, 2007

Showcase: Arts E–learning at a glance home page

Writing about web page /rbotoole/entry/term_planners_using/

Writing about an entry you don't have permission to view

I have just completed the second of my new showcase posters, ready for the Arts Faculty E-learning Lunch Exhibition on the 9th February. This poster is one of two showcases that demonstrates ways of creating an “at a glance” page.

Arts E-learning Homepage design

It illustrates various technical features, both standard and custom, including:

embedded forum, with html content wrapped around it;
a rotating headlines feed from a Newsbuilder page;
a highlights panel, giving a list of the currently most interesting pages;
an “e-elearning talk” panel listing in date-time order the latest blog entries containing the tag “e-learning” and the latest messages from our forum.

I also talk about the need to balance getting lots of information and links in one place with the need to keep people focussed on the most important and currently relevant tasks, news and events. I don’t think my page does that particularly well, but it at least illustrates the issue.

You can see the poster as a PDF file.

And the page itself is at http://go.warwick.ac.uk/arts-elearning
(publicly accesible).

Robert O'Toole : 01 Feb 2007 12:30 | Tags: Arts Faculty E-Learning Elearning Showcase Warwick University | Comments (0) | Close comments | Report a problem

All 3 entries tagged Showcase