This might be worth a look if you're struggling to find the time to develop resources; lack the ICT skills; or are just fed-up with the limitations of WebCT (& its proselytizers).
What is Magic Studio? Magic Studio enables you to build and share interactive learning resources quickly and easily, with no specialist skills required. It's an online service so you don't have to install any complicated software - you can access your account from anywhere with a broadband connection. This means you can prepare content when and where it's convenient and have the flexibility to deliver learning wherever it's needed, both in and outside the classroom.
Find high quality digital content A wide range of digital resources is now available for educational use, but appropriate content can be difficult to find. Our online library gives you access to free and subscription-based digital content (later in 2007) from a range of suppliers, including the Science Museum and Port Cities Southampton. You can add your own audio, images, video and text and find resources created and uploaded by other users that you can modify to meet your own specific requirements.
Create personalised, interactive resources Building interactive images and timelines (using the Image Explorer and Timeline tools) is easy with Magic Studio. The interface guides you through the process and allows you to find, edit and remove content as you go. Once you have finished building an activity you can create copies at the click of a button, enabling you to build interactives tailored to suit different learning needs.
So you fancy blogging but sharing the internet with the great unwashed seems, well, just a bit... Then get yourself a JISC Involve blog: JISC Involve is provided by JISC as a free service to the JISC community. Anyone with a .ac.uk email address can sign up instantly and be blogging in minutes.
Seems to be run on Wordpress (which is nice) & I do seem to remember asking for a Wordpress install on a college server, but let's not be too negative. Maybe we'll migrate?
Just noticed that this was going to be (is) the 500th post which just goes to show that there's not an awful lot of sanity circulating here. Not waving but drowning...
So here's another non-educational(?) post. Just another site which reflects IMHO the true nature of the internet.
Free Albums Galore is a full-album “mp3 blog” for listeners of eclectic music. What distinguishes Free Albums Galore from other mp3 blogs?
Only complete albums are posted, not individual or scattered tracks.
Only albums with permanent off-site hosting are posted.
Podcast Wizard is an innovational product that turns creating podcasts into a surprisingly easy and pleasant task. It has never been easier to create, edit and publish podcasts. For your convenience, the process of creating a podcast split into several steps and designed the program in the form of a New Podcast Wizard You can record voice, music or other sounds, mix audio, edit and process final tracks, create a RSS feed and publish a podcast on a server.
Available for another 21 hours 37 minutes (as I type 10.24 a.m. Paisley Western Seaboard time) from Giveaway of the Day. GOTD's software is free for non-commercial use (which I presume to mean FE but maybe I still believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden too...)
A terrific resource which provides free tutorial movies on everything from PowerPoint to Photoshop to getting started in Blogs and Wikis to help you better integrate learning and technology. The site is Teacher Training Videos, created by Russell Stannard, a principal lecturer at the University of Westminster.
Some of the tutorial movies include:
How to use iTunes to get podcasts
How to create blogs
How to use and make wikis
How to use del.icio.us
Flash Training Videos
And coming soon …..Look out for the new videos on Moodle, Facebook & social networks and 2nd Life.
I make absolutely no apology for the following entry, bare-facedly cut'n'pasted from Intute:
Realtimepublishers.com is a corporate-sponsored e-publisher providing electronic books (eBooks), which are free to readers, on the websites of companies around the world. eBooks are published on a chapter-by-chapter basis, as they are written - 'real-time' publishing. To access a book, you need to register at the sponsor's site. Some sponsors publish their eBooks in an HTML version on their site, or are available for download in additional formats such as Adobe Acrobat, Adobe eReader, Microsoft Reader, and similar electronic document formats.
Neat idea, admirably executed. Not that many of the titles mean very much to your not-very-IT-savvy librarian, but there's a few titles (Suse Linux, Windows Server, VB, etc.) which might be of interest to, well, I'm not going to mention our technical chums. But just did.
October is National Poetry Month in the UK so no apologies for some of the recycling here. Anyway, look on this as an exercise in exploiting Web 2.0 resources. A lot of the sites below offer podcasts or mp3 files of poems. Some are available as iTunes subscriptions. Almost all are very good (there's some mighty fine dross out there - The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock with Blugrass guitar & a Dixie accent? Perhaps not...)
This might be worth a look if you're struggling to find the time to develop resources; lack the ICT skills; or are just fed-up with the limitations of WebCT (& its proselytizers).
