Learn By Doing

A Lifelong Learner Shares Thoughts About Education

  • Often while adding a YouTube video to some site you are using for educating your learners you wish to alter the playing experience.  I recently had the experience of having a perfectly acceptable video which had potentially less acceptable videos show up on the related video screen at the end.  While the tool I was using had limited controls I was able to remove related videos by simply adding the YouTube Embedded Player Parameters to the string the tool used for inserting the videos.  In my case:

    rel

    Values: 0 or 1. Default is 1. Sets whether the player should load related videos once playback of the initial video starts. Related videos are displayed in the "genie menu" when the menu button is pressed. The player search functionality will be disabled if rel is set to 0.

  • I am frustrated with how my Moodle pages look and especially as I have moved away from the Book Resource and still struggling with the Lesson Resource

    Janetta Garton in designing aesthetically pleasing Moodle courses has given me some good things to think about.  I am going to start packaging my courses better.

    Designing aesthetically pleasing Moodle courses
    Image by opensource.com

    When you’re working online and you access a text heavy web-page that scrolls for 5 pages, what is your initial reaction? To most of us, a text-heavy page filled with a long list of resources and activities is not inviting or enticing. The same is true for students and online courses. But with a little sleight of hand, plus use of the right resource formats and labels, you can design an aesthetically pleasing online course and avoid the long scrolling webpage syndrome.

    First, a mini lesson on design

    A good user interface has: clarity (no manual required), concision (concise and clear), familiarity (users recognize elements), responsiveness (clicks lead to speedy responses), consistency (the interface is consistent throughout all areas), aesthetics (attractive), efficiency (users get where they need in a few clicks), and forgiveness (strategies to remedy user mis-clicks, “Are you sure you want to delete this?”).

    Building blocks of visual interface design
    • Layout defines hierarchy and relationships. Vary the white space between elements to making grouping obvious.
    • Positioning can improve flow.
    • Using different shapes for icons makes them easier to recognize. Icons are visually appealing but less clear than words, so use effective metaphors when choosing buttons.
    • Size can be used to show importance. Size can also be used to provide an efficient interface by making hotspots large and easy to click on.
    • Use color to attract the user’s attention by having a strong contrast with the background. Convey meaning with color (red = stop/error). Color can also show relationships, making data easier to read or types of buttons easier to find.
    • Use contrast to increase the usability of the interface and to indicate importance. Use shadows and darkened backgrounds to focus the user’s attention and reduce visual noise or to add visual weight.
    • Use texture to indicate how an element can be used (ridges on a corner indicate users can click and drag it).
    • For text, select fonts and set the scale to increase the readability. Italics and upper case are more difficult to read so use for titles and captions. Use size to guide readers and provide organization. Less is more when is comes to using multiple fonts.

    Moodle course design strategies

    Four strategies I use when laying out a Moodle course:

    1. Chunk content into Books or Lessons and include multimedia.
    2. Use hidden topics with visible resources and activities.
    3. Link to resources and activities in context, in books, lessons, sidebar blocks, etc.
    4. Use a label in Topic 0 to create a menu on the homepage.
    Chunk content into Books or Lessons

    First, I usually chunk my content into Books. I like to use the Book resource to keep my web page short and provide a table of contents, which means easy navigation for my users. So rather than using 5 topic boxes on the home page to display a list of resources and activities, I may use one Book with 5 chapters, or maybe 5 Books, dependent on the amount of content.

    A Lesson is another resource format that works well for such purposes. Lessons allow you to set up branches to control what the user sees/does next based on their responses. I’ve used this to provided choices for my users, but it could be used to guide students to remediation or review before moving on to the next topic. Lessons can be a bit confusing to setup with the “if this then that” branching system.

    Books and Lessons in Moodle from Willard High School on Vimeo.

    Books and Lessons in Moodle from Willard High School on Vimeo.

    I also create additional elements by publishing a web page, a quiz, or a certificate; uploading a pdf file; or posting a forum for questions. Videos I upload to Vimeo and embed where needed. For slideshows I typically create those in SlideRocket (which our teachers and students have free access to via their Google Apps accounts) and embed them as well. I use Camtasia to record screencasts and upload those to Vimeo so as to embed or link to them in course. MyBrainShark (also available through Google Apps) is a great tool for posting your slideshows or documents online and adding narration.

    Hidden topics with visible resources and activities

    For my Moodle courses I use the Topic format. I create all my resources and activities in the Topic 1 section of my course. Topic 1 is set to Hide. Each of the resources in Topic 1 are set to Show.

    Use Hidden Topics to House Resources and Activities in Moodle from Willard High School on Vimeo.

    Link to resources and activities

    In my Books and Lessons I will link to handouts, quizzes, and webpages (all listed in Topic 1). Sometimes I link to one of the elements in a sidebar box (certificates). Using this method, instead of a long list of resources and activities organized in several topic boxes, I can link to elements in context, making them more meaningful to my users and adding clarity to my course.

    By right-clicking on a resource or activity in Topic 1 and choosing “Copy Link Location” or  “Copy Shortcut” I place on my clipboard the web address for that element. I can now create a link anywhere in my course to this element using this copied web address.

    Link to Resources and Activities throughout your Moodle Course from Willard High School on Vimeo.

    Create navigation system using a Label

    To keep my homepage concise and efficient, while providing an attractive starting point for my users, I add a Label to Topic 0 and use that to create a menu for the course. I often insert a table in the label to allow me to create a uniform set of buttons or icons. With the border set to 0 for the table, users don’t see the table, only the buttons. Sometimes I use photos, which I usually find via FlickrCC. Sometimes I use clipart from OpenClipart, LoveVectorFree, or Clker.com. I look for free media licensed with Creative Commons, and typically credit my source in a block on the sidebar. I use Snag-it to edit the images as needed, sometimes adding 3 dimensional button effects. Any image editing software will work. I use Snag-it a lot for my screen captures and am very comfortable with it. I usually include text with the buttons. Sometimes I include these images on pages in books or Lessons to provide consistency and familiarity in my course.

    Use Labels to Create Menus in Moodle from Willard High School on Vimeo.

  • After reading the original article by Audrey Watters about a year ago, I read this one with great interest as I was chasing the idea of setting up our own Minecraft server.  It was interesting to read about the details, now if I can just get to affording it.

    It’s been almost a year since I first wrote about the work of Joel Levin (aka "The Minecraft Teacher") bringing the 3D world-building game Minecraft into his second-grade classroom. Much has changed since then — the full release of the PC version of the game, for starters. Mojang co-founder "Notch" stepping down as the lead developer of Minecraft (that is sort of "inside baseball" information, I suppose). And Levin himself co-founding a startup — TeacherGaming — the only company sanctioned by Mojang as an official reseller of the game. Levin’s still teaching too, but he’s also hard at work helping other educators implement Minecraft in their own classes.

    Currently, that takes the form of MinecraftEDU, TeacherGaming’s first endeavor. It’s both a product and a service, tapping into the expertise that Levin has accumulated while using Minecraft in his classes and by supporting the teachers that have been drawn to doing just the same. MinecraftEDU offers educational licenses to the game at a deep discount (up to 50% off the regular price). There’s also special training for educators who are interested in using Minecraft with their students. Additionally (and perhaps most importantly), the startup offers a special version of the game — slightly different than what’s sold to regular customers (more on that below).

    With or without special mods, there are a lot of reasons why Minecraft is a wonderful game for the classroom: it is open-ended (there are no explicit missions — no princesses to save or wagon trains to get to Oregon); it’s deceptively simple in its graphics yet complex in what people have actually built (See this Quora thread for a short list of some of the coolest things); the game can be played in single person or multiplayer mode and can run on both public and private servers; and the Minecraft community has developed tons of modifications to extend and alter the game’s functionality.

    MinecraftEDU provides one such "mod" that’s been designed for classroom use. At the very outset, the mod tackles one of the biggest barriers to implementing Minecraft at school — that is, setting up your own private Minecraft server. The MinecraftEDU mod allows teachers to do this with just a few clicks, turning their own PCs (Mac, Windows or Linux) into a local server.

    (more…)

  • Many of you will have used and maybe still use Joyce Seitzinger’s Moodle Tool Guide released two years ago.

    A Moodle 2 version

    So now, G Henrick, has added to SlideShare a starting point for a Moodle 2 version.  You can also Download it Here.

    A moodle2 toolguideforteachers

    View more documents from Gavin Henrick

    For all details on the original version created by Joyce Seitzinger for Moodle 1.9 check out her website -> Moodle Tool Guide

  • This is a reprint of the article so I can use this with my classes.  Please view the article on the original web site where additional links and information can be found.

    I am interested in how they are attempting to view the Big Data stack that is our History.

    This collage demonstrates how the time scales for the cosmos, Earth history and the histories of life and humanity span a range of a million billion, making it impossible to view them together on the same timeline. Using zoom technology from Microsoft Research Connections, ChronoZoom allows you to zoom easily from one timescale to another, and imbed multimedia that tell the history of everything.

    ChronoZoom: A deep dive into the history of everything

    By Robert Sanders, Media Relations | March 14, 2012

    BERKELEY —

    Imagine a timeline of the universe, complete with high-resolution videos and images, in which you could zoom from a chronology of Egypt’s dynasties and pyramids to the tale of a Japanese-American couple interned in a World War II relocation camp to a discussion of a mass extinction that occurred on Earth 200 million years ago – all in seconds.

    Based on an idea from a University of California, Berkeley, student, ChronoZoom – essentially a zoomable timeline of timelines augmented with multimedia features –- is coming to life.

    Roland Saekow disusses ChronoZoom’s possibly revolutionary impact on education and the teaching of history. (Video produced by Roxanne Makasdjian, Media Relations)

    Roland Saekow disusses ChronoZoom’s possibly revolutionary impact on education and the teaching of history. (Video produced by Roxanne Makasdjian, Media Relations)

    A University of California, Berkeley, geologist and his students have teamed up with Microsoft Research Connections engineers to make this web-based software possible. ChronoZoom is being designed to help students, or anyone, visualize history and to assist researchers in viewing large amounts of data to find new historical connections.

    A beta version of ChronoZoom was released today (Wednesday, March 14) by Outercurve Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports open-source software.

    The idea arose in a UC Berkeley course about Big History taught by Walter Alvarez, the campus geologist who first proposed that a comet or asteroid smashed into the Earth 65 million years ago and killed off the dinosaurs. Big History is a unified, interdisciplinary way of looking at and teaching the history of the cosmos, Earth, life and humanity: the history of everything.

    (more…)