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Download some e-learning notes intended for a group of teachers. PDF, 240 Kb.

These notes are in draft form, and are pure text at present. I will be adding photos and screen grabs later along with full referencing in the famous Harvard format. The notes describe and explain the various ways that a teacher in an FE College in the UK can support students through ICT (ILT, e-learning).

I kick off with a quote from the current OFSTED Inspector’s Handbook that includes a very wide definition of e-learning. Then I look at classroom applications of ILT, moving to support between class meetings using the Web and e-mail. Each section has a list of questions that a teacher could ask in their particular College to find out where things are and who supports ILT.

The notes were hacked up using a wiki, and then the HTML was saved and loaded in Word. I added styles to the headings that gurantee page breaks in sensible places. I ended up exporting the notes to PDF from OpenOffice, as OpenOffice has a PDF export option that adds tags to headings in the PDF file so that you can navigate the file onscreen using section headings.

Any feedback you care to leave would be welcome; just use the contact form. This is a draft and I know I need to do a lot of editing for consistency.

An interactive whiteboard can sense the position of a ‘pen’ that you write with and feed back that information to the computer. The software supplied with the interactive whiteboard interprets the position of the pen and ‘writes’ on the image projected onto the whiteboard. At the time of writing each manufacturer of interactive whiteboards produces its own software and the facilities and options of the software control what you can do to some extent. Much of the software supplied in the UK is mapped to the National Curriculum as the school market dominates.

There are two main types of interactive whiteboard: the ‘hard’ boards and the ‘soft’ or ‘membrane’ boards. Hard boards are made of wood or steel and coated with a surface you can write on with an ordinary marker pen. The special pen supplied with the board is an ultrasound transmitter and an antenna or induction loop in the frame of the whiteboard senses the position of the pen. Pens can be replaced although they do cost £70 or so. Membrane boards, as the name suggests, have a grid of wires sandwiched between two slightly flexible surfaces. As you press on the board with your finger or a plastic ‘pen’, a contact is made and the position of the contact is reported to the computer. Membrane boards can be rendered useless by sharp points (drawing pins, compass points) although this appears to be rare in practice.

Your College ILT people will probably have standardised on one make of interactive whiteboard to simplify support and training. The best staff development is to book yourself into a room with an interactive whiteboard and work through the manual and play. The time period between 5pm and 6pm is often quiet in Colleges (day classes finished and evening classes yet to arrive) and this is a good time for playing.

There are two main ways to use an interactive whiteboard: annotation mode and whiteboard mode. As the name suggests, whiteboard mode presents you with a blank white space in which to ‘write’ with the ‘pen’. Your lines are faithfully reproduced and may be smoothed somewhat by the whiteboard software. The software will also have shape drawing features, offer a range of colours (including stripy paint) and a range of supplied graphics. There is usually a screen image of a keyboard to spell words out in a regular font, and sometimes there are stopwatches and calculators that can be summoned with the pen. Handwriting recognition is available – sometimes as an add-on program from a specialist supplier, but these systems need to be ‘trained’ to fit your handwriting. Specialised backgrounds (music staves, graph paper, football pitch layouts) can be applied to the whiteboard.

The magic thing about the whiteboard is that you can summon a new screen by clicking a menu item: the old screen is saved by the software. You can keep a record of all the whiteboards worth of content you have drawn in a lesson, and this information can be exported as pictures and even as a complete ready made Web site for uploading into the VLE or placing on the College intranet. The re-cap in the next lesson can be simply a question of re-loading the whiteboard file.

Screen annotation mode allows you to write on the computer screen – labelling features of software or ‘highlighting’ parts of a Web page in a contrasting colour. Again, each set of annotations that you create is captured by the whiteboard software and can be saved, converted and recalled. You should remember that you are annotating a screen grab of the computer screen within the whiteboard software – there will be a floating menu (or an actual button on the side of the screen in some cases) that allows you to switch between the annotated view and the ‘live’ screen. When you switch from annotation to the live screen, your annotations will disappear – they are still on the screen grab in the whiteboard software. I liken this to having two ‘layers’ on the screen and swapping them round when demonstrating this feature.

Questions

1. Which rooms have interactive whiteboards? Is this information tagged on the room booking system?
2. Which kind of Interactive Whiteboard has your College standardised on?
3. Can you have the interactive Whiteboard software installed on your staff computer?
4. Is anyone offering training on the Interactive Whiteboards?
5. Are there colleagues who have ‘adopted’ an Interactive Whiteboard as a preferred way of presenting? Will these people share their ideas with you?
6. Are there any ‘good practice’ guides or examples in your subject area at your level available on the Web?

I have found three contrasting views or approaches to PowerPoint on the Web;

• PowerPoint is Evil [Tufte, Wired article, Web page ]
• PowerPoint provides the images to your words [Godin, PDF, 800Kb]
• Make PowerPoint a rich media experience [Lane and Wright, Presenters’ University, Web page on Infocomm]

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Carol publishes the Blogging for Numeracy blog aimed at Numeracy tutors and is recording her use of blogging as a tool to support numeracy students.

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Download Quick Quiz number 5, Fractions basics

Just a few questions on recognising equivalent fractions and the four functions.

Download a 12 page handout on using MS PowerPoint 2003 to produce screen based learning packages [PDF, 600Kb]. This handout just deals with the mechanics: planning is the issue and the devil is in the detail.

• PowerPoint 2003 allows you to disable the space bar/mouse slide advance
• You can then use actions attached to buttons to provide navigation through slides
• Smaller text size is best for individual screens
• Last Slide Viewed action allows glossary and help pages to be linked to from many pages: like the back button in a Web browser
• Sound clips work and are Mac/Windows cross platform if WAV files
• Package as CD-ROM works fine from Windows XP
• Custom animation works if timed in seconds, handy for diagrams

See the PDF for the gory details and screen grabs. Again, the work is in the navigation design. The mechanics is just mechanics

Below are two sample audio files of just over a minute each recorded with an Olympus digital voice recorder. The files are WMA format, exactly as recorded by the Olympus WS-200s. You can hear me operating the controls on the recorder at the start and end of each recording.

Both samples contain 30 seconds of ‘room tone’ or ‘silence’ so you can hear the noise generated by the pre-amplifier circuit in the recorder. The external microphone was a dynamic type with an impedance of about 200 ohms and a highish output (Shure VP64L).

• WS-200S with internal mic in mono HQ mode. The ‘silence’ is about 32 seconds into the recording. The recorder was on a small table with the microphones about 18 inches from my mouth. This is how I imagine these recorders would be used to record a meeting or interview.
• WS-200S with external hand-held mic in mono HQ mode. The ‘silence’ is about 34 seconds into the recording, but one of my neighbours decided to hammer nails into wood outside at around 55 seconds. The microphone was about 6 inches from my mouth and pointing slightly to one side to reduce the sibilants and popping. This is how I’d imagine the microphone might be used for interviews.

When I convert the samples to WAV format and import them into Audacity, I find that the peak recording signal is around -6 to -3 dB for both recordings, and I suppose this shows the action of the automatic gain control. I estimate the noise backgound using the internal microphone to be around -33dB corresponding to a dynamic range of about 30dB. The external mic shows a noise level of roughly -45 dB from the level ‘meter’ in Audacity, again giving a range of about 42dB. As you can hear, recordings with the external mic sound ‘fuller’ and have more mid and low frequency content than the internal microphone recordings. Most of the noise was a ‘rumble’, perhaps due to cable noise or hand holding the mic. I’ll perhaps try a ‘close’ recording with the internal mic later.