Certified Internet Web Professional (CIW) Master Class

I'm delighted to be hosting two CIW masterclasses at Glasgow's Metropolitan College in June.

Presented by Dr James Stanger they are a complete introduction to the Certified Internet Web Professional qualification. The events will focus on

• latest Micsrosoft and Adobe CS4 software
• enhanced CSS
• how to start an online business
• social networking
• enhanced business models
• technology career focus

Register here for Tuesday the 23rd of June and here for Wednesday the 24th.

The CIW is also part of the new PDA Award in Web Technologies from the SQA.

I'm greatly indebted to Marjorie Quigley of ComputerPrep for making Dr Stanger available and sponsoring the events.

Classroom Posters

Google For Educators

Want to help out students and colleagues with handy tips on improving search results and using popular Google products like Google Earth? Just print out these posters and hang them where everyone can see them.

Second Life + Moodle = Sloodle!

Image by VRider goes Web3D via Flickr

Mari Cruz García who is a Learning Technologist at Carnegie College has created a course explaining how to use virtual worlds in education. She says:

The course I have created is very humble, but I thought that it could be useful for beginners as it illustrates what you can do in Sloodle with very limited budget. The course includes free Linden scripts and objects, as well as a backup copy of the Moodle course. The only object which I couldn't display is the Presenter, until the IT Department can review the firewall settings that are currently blocking it.

I say: she's being modest and you should check this out at:

http://carnegiecollege.ninehub.com/course/view.php?id=7 (self-registration)
Password: tortilla.

The course is also available via SMUG (the Scottish Moodle User Group) at:

http://s-mug.org.uk/testbed/

Access in Second Life is at:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Sloodle/14/229/22 and click on the "Registration both" object.

Thanks Mari.

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Google Apps For Education

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Nice video explanation of using Google Apps in education.

Google Apps For Education | Twine

RETOOLING THE CLASSROOM: NEW APPROACHES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY Bridging the Gap Connecting education with how young people use digital technology in their personal lives

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Adobe ConnectNow

Image via Wikipedia

If you're looking for a free and easy web conferencing system that allows speech, video, chat and screen sharing and that come from a company with a proven track record - you could do a lot worse than Adobe ConnectNow.

Adobe ConnectNow web conferencing from Acrobat.com

Adobe ConnectNow is a great way to share ideas, discuss details, and complete work together — all online. Reduce travel costs, save time, and increase productivity with a web conferencing solution that's easy to access and simple to use. It's free, so sign up now.

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Surfing Google Earth for Real

YouTube - Hacked Nintendo Wii Balance Board Surfing

Hacked Nintendo Wii Balance Board Surfing

Plea to minister as secondaries set to abandon computer studies

Image via Wikipedia

Is this an isolated incident or the shape of things to come?

Plea to minister as secondaries set to abandon computer studies - Borders Today

SEVERAL secondary schools in the Borders have taken the controversial decision to remove computer studies from their timetabled options and effectively close their departments.

Microsoft IT Academy Student Pass

Image via CrunchBase

Microsoft DreamSpark

The Microsoft IT Academy Student Pass is a special no-cost online learning opportunity for students. IT Academy Student Pass provides free e-learning courses to verified students who are interested in extending their technical skills with Microsoft technologies.

The IT Academy Student Pass offers 12 to 22 hours of FREE e-learning courses, aligned to the first set of topics you need to master for the first Microsoft certification exam within the track. Each track is unique, and most will require you to take additional e-learning courses to complete all of the topics you need to succeed on the certification exam.

The goal of the IT Academy Student Pass is to give you a head start by providing hours and hours of rich, award-winning e-learning content that sets the stage for the learning to come.

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Education Games with Microsoft Office

Image via Wikipedia

From the site:

I have tried to create templates for games, using Microsoft Office, that teachers can download and quickly modify to match any curriculum.

Try it:

Jeff Ertzberger Microsoft Office Games PowerPoint Games

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Free Resources for the Photoshop Community

Image via Wikipedia

Nice new site for anyone working with Photoshop - PhotoshopDaily.

It's full of news, tutorials and freebies.

Photoshop Daily

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Flash training course - June 16th 2009

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Carnegie College is hosting an Adobe Flash training day for teachers and lecturers on Tuesday 16th June 2009. Aimed at existing Flash users, the course will cover the development of Rich Media Interfaces – integrating images, sound and video with ActionScript and XML to create dynamic, interactive interfaces for websites or applications. The training will be useful for those delivering on current NQ Digital Media Computing, HNC/D Interactive Media and HNC/D Visual Communication courses.

The training will be facilitated by Colin Maxwell, Adobe Education Leader.

Details and contact information at: http://www.maximized.co.uk/flashtraining/

Places are limited, so advance booking is required.

Cost is £80 per person.

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HND Games - Give us Your Opinion

The Scottish Qualifications Authority are currently working on creating a new qualification - HND Games Development. As part of the process it is important that we get as many views as possible on what is required. To do that we would appreciate it if you could complete the following survey:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=60ncuuOlp73guIcbtAIOrA_3d_3d

It's very short with less than a dozen questions and will take less than three minutes of your time but will be invaluable in structuring this award.

The survey will close at 5pm on the 5th of May so please don't hesitate to follow the link and complete the survey.

Click Here to take survey

Thanks in advance.

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Easy Lecture Streaming

Image via Wikipedia

Looking to get in to broadcasting your lectures to off-campus students but not sure where to start?

ProCaster is a free Windows application (Mac is promised soon) that allows you to set up internet broadcasting without any problems. Just connect your camera to the application and go. Your broadcasts are available as a live stream and recorded for video on demand use later. You can mix in views of your computer screen and also chat (and tweet!) to your viewers interactively. The video is then streamed on the internet by Mogulus.

The viewer is Flash based so should be available on pretty much any platform you can think of.

You can try Mogulus broadcasting for free as long as you want if you don't mind ads appearing. Otherwise you can upgrade to the Pro version for a reasonable charge.

Try ProCaster here:

Procaster: One-click live streaming, powered by Mogulus

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Free iPhone Programming Course

Image via CrunchBase

One of the undoubted successes in the application and game development world has been iPhone/iPod Touch development. The recent announcement of the one billionth download from Apple's App Store is testament to that fact.

For those just getting started, or wishing to include iPhone development as part of their course Stanford University has released an iPhone Application Programming course. Comprising a set of PDFs with accompanying lectures available on iTunes the course covers everything from the basics of getting started with Cocoa to publishing on the App Store.

Definitely worth a look.

CS193P - Cocoa Programming | Announcements

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Reblog this post [with Zemanta]">

YouTube for Education

Image via CrunchBase

YouTube, the massively successful video hosting site, has created a division for educational videos. As ever it's heavily weighted towards US institutions but it's definitely a sign of things to come.

YouTube - EDU

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TextFlow

Image via CrunchBase

Following yesterday's post on collaborative document sharing I've been told about TextFlow. Haven't had the chance to try it yet but if anyone does please let me know in the comments.

TextFlow

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doingText

Image via Wikipedia

doingText is a fairly pain-free way to manage on-line discussions. Features (from the front page) include:

• Collaborators don't need an account - simply share the URL
• Easier to use with clutter free interface
• Fine grained control: track and comment on every line
• Runs on mobile devices
• No Flash or Java required
• Stay up to date on changes through news feed/RSS
• We are making it better every week
• You pay for it - We treat you like a paying customer
• made with love.

Can't comment on the last one but everything else seems about right.

DoingText - effortless text collaboration

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Software Alternatives

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Lifehacker has a post talking about alternativeto.net, an on-line search engine that give alternatives to well known software. Like Photoshop? Try The Gimp!

Lifehacker - AlternativeTo Suggests Software Alternatives - Search engines

Posterous for Picture Twitting

Image via CrunchBase

Posterous API: We're a direct replacement for TwitPic

Posted by Sachin Agarwal to The Official Posterous Posterous

The Posterous API is a direct replacement for the TwitPic API used in
desktop twitter clients and iPhone applications. It lets you upload
photos to your Posterous site using just Twitter credentials.

Except it's better. We allow you to upload multiple photos and you get
an image gallery. We offer the full size download of the image, or a
zip file of multiple images. It posts to *your* Posterous site, which
may have a custom domain and Google Analytics. And we autopost not
just to Twitter, but also Facebook, Flickr, and many blogs. Oh, and
TwitPic is down all the time. That's no fun.

Michael Arrington, Guy Kawasaki, and Rainn Wilson all use Posterous in
place of Twitpic. They email photos to Posterous, and we update their
Twitter and Facebook accounts. We're extending this to the desktop and
iPhone apps with this API.

Coming soon: support for audio, video, and other files. We can handle it all.

If you use a Twitter client that has TwitPic support, email them and
let them know they can add Posterous support today! We use all the
same methods, responses and errors, so integration should be a breeze.

API documentation can be found here.

See the release on Techcrunch here.

Posted via email from tonygurney's posterous

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JISC Get On Board Open Learning Bandwagon

Good to see that JISC have thrown their weight into getting open source learning into the virtual marketplace.

With any luck this will be the push required to make it "acceptable" to institutions to share their work.

Experimental Blog: JISC09 Last Post Open Learning Resources

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MacHeist

The new bundle is now available. Dozen Apps/$39. Excellent!
http://www.macheist.com/bundle/u/39465/
 
--end

Posted via email from tonygurney's posterous

Posterous Links!

Image via CrunchBase

Now this might be useful. Create the e-mail, post to posterous and
then have it forwarded to all my sites. That could be worth using.

Posted via email from tonygurney's posterous

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Blocking websites: your company vs. the great internet censors of the world | Open (minds, finds, conversations)...

Check out this website I found at antonymayfield.com

Probably good to remember that, no matter how restrictive your institution's setup is, you're probably doing better than these people.

Posted via web from tonygurney's posterous

Is Posterous the Future of Blogging?

Hard to tell. It's certainly easy to use as it only requires an e-mail
connection.
 
But... yet another platform? We'll see...

Posted via email from tonygurney's posterous

Free, as in speech

Image via Wikipedia

The Online College has a great post on free or open source tools particularly applicable to students.

From image editors to IDEs and to-do lists to web browsers you'll find something of interest here.

69 Free or Open Source Tools For Students | Online College

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At last - PDF to Word Conversion that Works

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Just managed to get a trial of the pdftoword.com site. It allows you to upload a PDF file that it then e-mails back to you. Not only does it work well but the Word dosument is intelligently laid out ready for editing.

Hugely impressed. Get on the beta invite list and try it for yourself.

Convert PDF to Word (DOC) Online — 100% Free!

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Make Use of... Anything

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Make Use Of is a great site with tips for doing all sorts of things on your computer. On the day I looked the front page had a link to:

• Best source code sites
• Grabbing MP3s from FLV files
• Making use of Research features in Word 2007
• Using Gmail offline
• Online image editing

Add it to your feed reader today.

Cool Websites, Software and Internet Tips

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Don't pay teachers; That'll learn 'em

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When in doubt, consult The Bugle.

The Bugle Column: Don't pay teachers; That'll learn 'em | Andy Zaltzman - Times Online

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Back to the Future

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It's Monday and you're back at work. It's not good. So, at lunch time only of course, why not try the on-line Apple ][ emulator.

About Virtual Apple ][
Virtual Apple ][ is a site which will take you back to the 1980's through its collection of more than 1250 game disks online. Play and enjoy old Apple ][ (Apple2) and Apple IIgs games and other disks through your Internet web browser. You will find games like Oregon Trail and Number Munchers which many of you played as kids, as well as games like Tetris, Battle Chess, Leisure Suit Larry, Choplifter, Archon II and Kings Quest.

I started on one of these more years ago than I care to remember and, while my school would have no truck with the games available here, I lusted after them from afar.



Just make sure you eat before you start or you'll get sucked in and not remember.

Virtual Apple 2 - Online disk archive

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Charts Ahoy

Image via Wikipedia

Ever needed to come up with a quick chart but didn't have the appropriate tool at hand?

Despair of hand-drawn monstrosities that don't present that professional air?

Sick of writing in faux ad-speak?

Than try Lovely Charts. Does exactly what it says on the tin.

Lovely Charts is limited by guarantee. No muss, no fuss, no salesman will visit your home. By using this product you will become ineffably sexy. Deal with it.

Lovely Charts | Free online diagramming application

But it's better if it looks ugly...

Image via Wikipedia

As part of their quest to name and shame the ugliest sites on the web Download Squad have highlighted this little educational monster.

The reasons for it being like this? The IT manager doesn't want "his" web site to look broken. As DS say - too bad it works but looks broken.

This is yet another case of processes getting in the way of education.

Go check it out here:

Fugly Friday: it doesn't have to be like this - Download Squad