Watch this movie now!

*Special thanks to Des Osborn for pointing out this movie after a recent Elluminate Session… e-Tools ‘n Tips

There a few more of these “in Plain English” videos by Lee LeFever at CommonCraft

• Social Networking in Plain English
• Wiki’s in Plain English
• Social Bookmarking in Plain English

There has been a lot of interest in RSS lately. What is RSS, how can it help you and save you time? If the movie above wasn’t enough, then check out some of the links below…

Looking at my blog statistics and reader clicks, the RSS information seems to be the most popular, so here is a list of posts and resources from the archives;

• Netvibes Vs Google Reader – Aug 14th
• Alex’s demonstration of netvibes – August 13th
  
• Netvibes ‘How To’ – June 14th
• RSS in education - April 18th

Other good RSS feed readers;

• netvibes – this site is really cool. Your feeds are loaded into pods that you can click and drag around your homepage. You can also add To-Do lists, weather, search engines, calendars (very Mac friendly), video searches, and more…
• pageflakes - here’s another site you can personalise with your favorite news, weather, sports, entertainment, photos, videos, music, email…and much more, all in one place!
• bloglines – another useful site that once you have an account, you can add RSS feeds… I find this hard to use in comparison to netvibes and pageflakes

Attended e-Learning Networks web conference about Virtual Classrooms, let me clarify; the virtual classroom is an online classroom using web software such as Adobe Connect or Elluminate. Sessions run in these applications have a URL (web address) and offer interactive tools such as polls, share document spaces, whiteboards, chat and much more. You can facilitate quite an interactive session using the software, which often includes the use of a web camera and headset for audio and vision.

I run frequent online sessions in Adobe Connect and have attended quite a few in Elluminate. I found this session very helpful, it was highly interactive and closely examined how much interaction to include on both your online sessions and your e-Learning material.

The session looked closely at the following points;

• Is learning better in a face-to-face or virtual classroom? What the evidence says.
• What are the important instructional elements of any learning event?
• How to engage learners productively in virtual classroom events with visuals and interactions.

Guest speaker Ruth Clark led discussion on the above points, which she expands upon in her recently published book;

The New Virtual Classroom: Evidence-based Guidelines for Synchronous e-Learning,
by Ruth Clark and Ann Kwinn.

This session was recorded, so stay tuned for the link, it’s worth having a look at.

Ruth focused on how to harness the power of a virtual classroom by looking at the techniques required (such as interactivity, instructional design, multimedia, use of graphics, etc), rather than the technologies (although there was a slight focus on Elluminate).

Link to view recorded Elluminate Session: (link coming soon)

Link to Ruth’s slides: (link coming soon)

Website: http://www.clarktraining.com (download book intro here)