CLIPP Board

CLIPP Good Practice day 18/1/10

Carl Senior(LHS) was first on at 9am on a Monday morning but at least weather was OK. Despite the sexy title and initial content it was about using SMS – I decided not to challenge two inaccurate comments about the reasons for resorting to traditional SMS over the latest fashionable and power hungry gadgets. At least they seeded the idea that required a more pragmatic solution.

http://www1.aston.ac.uk/clipp/projects/2009/
There were parallel sessions running in SW305 & 309 most of which are available as Echo360 lecture captures on the CLIPP link above.

Next session Nicola Bullivant(ABS) raised the interesting issue of whether Pebblepad(Pp) is an aid to developing reflective practice or a technological hurdle – results from 2nd phase pilot seem to suggest the later, mostly due to lack of intuitive user interface. I must admit that while I like the concept, I have to wrestle the interface hurdles too frequently for comfort, especially from an IT literate perspective like the pilot group students.

After Coffee I went to another Pp presentation by Georgina Hardy(LIS) about information literacy. I intend to go through the special Profile they have setup in Pp and share it with them(no one else has yet!).

Urszula Clark(LSS) presented a pilot on using Articulate for DL MSc materials. It looked very easy to use and flexible, particularly for creating new DL content, and the only caveat seems to be the differences with Adobe Presenter and licensing at Aston.

Olivia Hunt(LHS) presented the iPodTouch Optometry project which I’ve helped with. It certainly seems to have improved quality and timeliness of feedback to students. I’m also helping facilitate development of an iPod/Phone app for streamlined data collection and distribution which may have wider uses in future.

After lunch I attended Ellen Pope’s(LDC) TurnITIn presentation. CLIPP are planning external training for both admins and instructors to look at the broader use of the software.

It was a very useful and though provoking day.

Screen casting using Articulate Presenter and Adobe Captivate

There has been quite a bit of talk around Aston, formally and informally, about the relative merits of different pieces of software for screen casting. Personally I’m not convinced that there is a one size fits all solution for absolutely everyone. There seem to be two camps that are developing, those that would like screen capture and those that would like some of ‘Power Point’ style presentation with enhanced features. You could almost say there is a third camp that would use both concepts to create a presentation but this is very much a minority at the moment.

Over at the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) there is an article called ‘Screen casting using Articulate Presenter and Adobe Captivate‘ which surprisingly enough is about Articulate and Captivate. It reads like its going to be a comparison between the two, but as the two pieces of software do different things this is not really applicable, which is the conclusion that is reached in the article. The article does however point out a lot of the useful features in the packages and if you are at all interested in this sort of software then I would suggest checking it out.

Articulate and Flash Player 10 problems

Many of our lecturers use Articulate to create on-line lectures/presentations for students. Unfortunately there are some issues with Flash Player 10 and play back of these presentations.

To solve this issue you must download the Articulate updater and follow the instructions that can be found in the article “Why are my presentations not loading with Flash Player 10?“. As a heads up the updater does 2 things.

1. Updates Articulate Presenter 5 so that any thing you export in future will be correct.
2. Updates already exported presentations so that you do not have to export them again. Please bear in mind though this will mean that you will need to re-upload any material that you have put into the resource centre.
   

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