Avoiding death by powerpoint

http://breeze.bloomu.edu/powerpointtips/ - Karl Kapp

It's the design and not the tool that impacts learning.

Tips of the Day

You may use the below already, but there's bound to be someone who doesn't...

In Groupwise
Caroline: Ctrl R will make an email that you have already opened appear as unread
Mel S: View - sort by Date, From or Subject - helps you find what you're looking for

Ppt
Mark (by proxy!): b key gives you a black screen (like using No Show) on the remote control pad
Caroline: and w gives you a white screen

Screencasting
The software Mel G. uses is Windows Media Encoder - free download from internet. Have a go!

Websites
Mel S: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4849402.stm gives info on latest in technology
Caroline/Karen: http://mm.dfilm.com/live/home.html animated moviemaker online - you need to set up an account and then you can make your own animated cartoons. Easy and results are quite crude but could be fun with students...

For more tips go to the eLL wiki to see the eLL emails from last year with heaps of tips. You can add your own tips there as well.

Meeting 29th Aug 2007

We met this afternoon - lots of discussion stimulated by Keith's questions

• what innovative things are you doing in your programme with technology?
• what technology would you like to use?

Decided that we would include a 'Tip of the Day' in our meetings as a regular feature so come prepared to tell us something useful that you use for next time.

More homework... How can we use YouTube in our teaching? Experiment and see what you can come up with - bring your suggestions/experiences for next time.

Next meeting - October some time... But before that, we (the CALL CoP) star in the Tchr Dvpmt Day on Oct 5th. Our chance to show and tell for an hour. Keith will tell us how he 'puts it all together to lower his workload' for 25 mins, Mel will show us some of her screencasts (10 mins) and we'll watch 'How to avoid death by Ppt' and maybe a YouTube clip as well.

June meeting

Wednesday's group

We talked through the CALL symp highlights for each of us. This group enjoyed the practical stuff - txt wand, audacity etc.

Decided that none of us was that keen on a grammar repository for the following reasons

• need for gate keeper - enormous amount of work


• so much stuff out there already eg. websites


• need for differentiation between levels


• we tend to give personalised feedback


• where to put it? Blackboard, H drive, web discussed

Outcome: Agreed in principle with Ailsa's suggestion of 1 hour in Oct to demo CALL stuff. 3 or 4 people contributing rather than one session.

Suggestions were

use of Audacity, Textwand, PDAs, photos to promote writing

Any volunteers for the above? Put your thinking caps on NOW, rather than wait until September when it will be too late!

Reminder that http://elanguagelearning.wikispaces.com/ is available to put useful sites etc. Anyone can add sites so feel free to have a go. I've put some of the things that we mentioned under Tools to play with. You might have other suggestions to add.

Friday's group

Smaller (only three of us) but we had a good chat. Some talk on CALL symposium sessions we enjoyed, and we discussed the concept of Second Life.

May 2nd CALL CoP meeting

We had a good session (albeit small) today.

What we did
General discussion (and hearing about Howard's Chinese trip)
Quick preview of the CALL symp programme.
Looked at audio recording - first, Howard demoed how he uses QuickTime Pro (Mac based) and then Karen showed Audacity and the mysteries of a lame encoder. Keith also uses Audacity to turn tape recordings into digital mp3s - ask him for details.

Something that came out of our general conversation (and motivated by Keith's desire to have a practical outcome from the CoP) was the idea of having a general repository of grammar worksheets that we could direct our students to when doing error correction in writing. So when you mark students work, or give them online feedback (as David demoed using Word on TD) you can link to a Ppt presentation file on articles for instance, or maybe a nice hot potatoes exercise to revise gerunds or whatever. We agreed that we would go away and think about this and come back and discuss it next time from our individual programme context/needs perspective. So we'd like everyone's input - have a think about how it could work for you.

Next meeting
Unfortunately noone there could make a Friday time so my suggestion is that next time we have two sessions that you can choose from. We'll do apporximately the same thing both times.
a) Wed 6th June 2.30 pm
b) Fri 8th June 2 pm
Hope this might suit those of you who can't make the Wed session.

The way ahead

This CoP is about community and practice (doing), rather than being a specific teacher development area (feeding). However, the concept of communities of practice often crop up in discussions of learning, particularly in the work place.

So how do we develop better practices? How do we develop a community round CALL practice (mutual engagement)? Are there areas that we can contribute to outside this group eg. SLS (negotiated/joint enterprise)? How do we satisfy our individual needs/interests?

One suggestion made was that we could break into slightly smaller groups with special interests eg. audio OR Blackboard OR blogs OR wikis OR ? We could work together to develop our knowledge in these specific areas and share individual practices. Or work together on a particular product that we think might be useful? Or we could do one of the CTLI workshops as a group and then, maintain the impetus of what we've learned (and have some accountability) by using the ideas in our practice and discussing what works and what doesn't.

At the moment, we're exploring the use of blogs by using this as an environment to record what we do etc. Maybe next year we could think about a wiki or Moodle for the same purpose.

And what are our needs in terms of teacher development? What expertise can we offer the SLS in the CALL area?

Tell us what you think? What grabs you? Add comments below.

Meeting 14th March 2007

Some of the issues that we discussed were

a) CALL frustrations

• labs - tools not working eg. mikes
• labs - students can't access podcasts live
• labs - software problems - message reading "over run #48" and then software closes
• labs - length of time to access internet sites such as Flickr
• support for Bbd - not enough hours, don't tend to respond
• students logins - names, dates of birth, enrollment/payment issues
• classrooms - sound not working eg. mp3 files in Bbd

If you have concerns about any of these or others ie. specific glitches that make you grind your teeth, add a comment to this posting or email Karen who is intending to forward something to the appropriate people...

b) concern with varying knowledge levels - we have tech gurus and tech pygmies in our ranks (NB. it was the self-professed latter who were concerned!) Discussed the osmotic process and also 'legitimate peripheral participation' in relation to CoPs (had to get this in somewhere!)

c) we want to share stuff that works - please keep checking this blog for Adon and Dave's additions in this area - website and datashow tips. Jan has already added several useful bits.

d) Adon talked about his learning experiences on a master's paper in online and flexible learning

e) Karen briefly mentioned Flickr (put images on internet and then do activities with your class with them) and Bloglines (an aggregator ie. place to pull all your RSS feeds together). Add a comment below if you'd like a hands-on session on either of these sometime.

Next meeting - after Easter break - 2nd May (Wed again but after that we'll go for a different time for those who are missing)