How to re-enable a microphone in Windows 7

In the last few months, I have twice had a situation whilst using web conferencing, where the computer has got confused with the internal microphone and the headset microphone – and the only way for me to solve it was to disable the internal microphone. The only problem with this, was once disabled, I couldn’t then find the option to re-enable it afterwards.

After much detailed and systematic searching (discovered by accident after randomly pressing and clicking) I found the solution.

Which I will share here in case anyone else has the same problem.

1. Go to the control panel
2. In the search box, type ‘Audio’
3. Under the heading ‘Troubleshooting’ there should be an option to ‘find and fix audio recording problems’ which should then re-enable the disabled microphone.

How to re-enable the internal microphone in Windows 7

MindGenius offers use at home for students (and staff)

Followers of this blog, and people that know me, will be aware that of all the Mind Mapping tools available, my weapon of choice is Mind Genius – really quick to start using, very powerful, and can be used by all people in an organisation (learners, tutors, senior managers).

One of the problems though in the past with Mind Genius, is it could generally only be used within the organisation, so if learners wanted to access it from home, they had to purchase a licence separately, and this became a barrier for its use, especially as more people are learning online, for all or some of their study.

However – Mind Genius are now offering a very attractive option, so when organisations upgrade to the latest version they can then pay an additional (reasonably priced) annual maintenance – which then gives them ‘free’ upgrades for any future new versions of the software, as well as giving the organisation the home use rights – basically staff and students at that organisation can install the software on their own personal computers at home for free.

This to me is brilliant (in fact Genius) – the software is relatively cheap for an organisation to buy, we can now offer that when a student signs up for a course, they can have this software for free, staff can use Mind Genius stategically in their teaching and learning, knowing that their learners could access it at home as well. Mind Genius can be a wonderful tool to support learners with dyslexia who have difficulty with organising work (e.g. assessments) – if you read any of Geoff Petty’s books, he identifies that using Mind Mapping techniques offers huge improvements in students grades, which I have witnessed in the work that I have done.

Details of the pricing structure (in the UK) via a CHEST agreement can be found at http://www.eduserv.org.uk/lns/agreements/mindgenius#pricingandordering

e.g. (prices correct at time of this post being written) – an FE college would pay a one off fee of £1800, and then an annual fee of £450 – this I think offers exceptionally good value.

An example of one way that Mind Genius could be used, is converting a well formatted word document into a Mind Map

Why I support ‘no-notice’ inspections

It was recently reported by the Guardian, that Ofsted will be moving to a no-notice method for carrying out inspections. http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/jan/10/schools-no-notice-ofsted-inspections?CMP=twt_gu  a move which I completely support.

Due to the diverse nature of my teaching in 7 years I went through 3 Ofsted inspections, 2 QAA inspections, 1 ALI inspection and god knows how many internal inspections. Perversely I actually enjoyed the lesson in which I was being inspected – the pressure and the expectation I actually thrived on (similar to when I played more sport – I loved the big occasions, and performed at my best in front of the crowds). Apart from 1 internal inspection, I always came out very well in these observed sessions.

The thing that I didn’t enjoy was the build up to the inspections. The fact that the whole college went into a form of panic in the 6 months leading up to the inspection, which dominated everything, stopped any real innovation happening (I remember being told in no uncertain terms that I had to back off the ILT stuff as there was an inspection ahead and the college had to focus on that not ILT!), and all so that we can put an unrealistic ‘show’ on for the inspectors.

I believe that no-notice inspections is the only way forward – this will give inspectors a chance to see the reality rather than the rehearsed, and weaker teachers will be identified, whilst stronger teachers rewarded, and as such – I said it many times when I was teaching, and I still stick by it now – anyone is welcome to turn up and observe me teaching or training without giving me notice.

Taken from http://farm5.static.flickr.com/7021/6515869227_fb11e682ee_b.jpg on 2012-1-11
Original URL – http://www.flickr.com/29455658@N08/6515869227/ created on 2011-07-19 11:28:46
Connecticut State LibraryCC BY-NC-SA 2.0

My most read posts from 2011

In 2011, I posted 25 times on this blog, which isn’t many by most peoples standards, by my posts do generally attract a reasonable amount of interest, and I hope that my posts (even though infrequent) offer use and insight to others. Looking at my stats for last year, my 5 most accessed posts in 2011 are as below, and what is interesting is how only 2 of the posts were actually written in 2011 – and 1 was written in 2008, so my posts seem to have some sort of ‘staying’ power.

1. Using ‘game’ and activity templates in education 1 comment January 2011
2. Quickly creating a Google Map from a Spreadsheet of data 12 comments September 2009
3. Putting the fun back into ‘fundamental’ learning 5 comments January 2011
4. Choosing different pins when creating Google Maps 0 comments May 2010
5. Recording sound directly into a Word file 0 comments October 2008

I hope that my posts over this coming year will please the many people that have subscribed to my blog, and my work gives me the opportunity to post more often than I managed in the last 12 months.

How to automatically pull data between different Google Spreadsheets

I have been using Google Docs for quite a few years now, and in particular Google spreadsheets.

One feature of Google spreadsheets is there is a function called ImportRange that allows you to pull data out of one sheet and into another. This can be really useful, if for example you have a spreadsheet that you are using to collaborate with others, and then somewhere along the line you want another person to be able to see some of the data in the sheet but not all of it. e.g. if you are using this to track student grades, you could have a master sheet that you and other tutors can see all of, you could then create a separate sheet for each student, and pull through only the data that refers to them (you then share that sheet with the student) and they have a live constantly updating record of what they have achieved etc.

Or you could have a mechanism where each subject tutor has their own spreadsheet to record class grades, then the course leader has another sheet which pulls all of this data into one place, so they can at any point in time see how the class is doing without having to ask tutors to email over their latest version of their standalone spreadsheet (which I see happening all to often).

Here is a video showing the basic principle of this idea.

Why I don’t like ‘pet names’ for VLEs

Most educational organisations have a Virtual Learning Environment or VLE. If an FE college most likely Moodle, if a University probably either Blackboard or Moodle. If a school, it could one of many possibilities including Moodle, Frog, Fronter, and the list goes on.

Some organisations call their VLE by their proper name, e.g. they call it Moodle, or Blackboard of Frog etc., but other organisations decide to give their VLE what I call a ‘Pet name’ – things like LearnSpace, Myzone, LearningStuff, TheZone, Rex, Ginger, (OK maybe not the last 2), but basically an alternate name for the VLE. Now I don’t like this (in fact it is a pet hate of mine) for a couple of reasons.

Firstly when you do have an alternative name, invariably there will be confusion within the organisation as some people will call it one thing and others will at times call it the other, and if someone works at more than one organisation they will definitely get confused (and confuse other people) as they forget which name to use.

Secondly (and more importantly), when I work with staff I try to encourage people to try to find answers to problems themselves – e.g. ask Google the question and see what comes back. The problem with giving your VLE a pet name, is people will include that pet name in such a search (rather than the VLEs proper name) – and not suprisingly they don’t get much sense back. This is something that I have witnessed on many occassions, and frustratingly replacing the pet name with the real VLE name in the search criteria, has yielded the information they wanted. Another situation that I witnessed that saddened me, was a student was accessing the VLE and got stuck with something, so they used the inbuilt help tools within the VLE. However when they started reading the information because it used the VLE’s proper name rather than the pet one, they didn’t think it was referring to what they wanted so closed it down, even though the help function would have helped their query.

So if we want teaching staff and students to start taking responsibility for their own support, then can we please stop this obsession with calling our VLE by an irrelevant pet name, and call it what it is. Otherwise we are denying our users (both staff and students) the wonderful support mechanism that is the web and its many contributors.

Unless anyone can present a better argument for having these pet names….?

How to quickly upload lots of images to PowerPoint and then compress them

A few months back I ran a training session for some primary school teachers, on how to use PowerPoint within primary education, and they were very impressed with most of the ideas and techniques that I worked through with them, but the one that captured the imagination of even the slightly IT wary teacher was showing how we can quickly bring lots of photos from a camera into a PowerPoint presentation.

This is a very simple technique, but one that many people haven’t discovered yet.

A video showing how to do this, and how to compress the images in one go can be found here

Devolving the empire of the ‘learning technologist’

Most colleges and universities have some sort of centralised area of expertise regarding the use of learning technology. For some this will be 1 person as part of many other roles that they fulfill, at bigger organisations it will be a team of individuals dedicated to this area of work.

One problem with this model though is there becomes an unhealthy over reliance on those individuals – which if they leave or are off work for a period of time stops things happening. Also the gap between the abilities of the learning technologists and the average lecturing staff is widening due to the speed of change in this area of work, and only the technologists have the capacity to keep up.

I was lucky enough over the last year to work on an LSIS funded project with Loughborough College looking at a different model, where the expertise for certain technologies is devolved to teaching staff, which has the effect of building confidence, spreading the expertise, and putting the expertise into the teaching staff room.

The experiment involved the ‘learning technologists’ within the sports team mentoring lecturing staff as they explored and used a chosen technology with the idea that they became the ‘expert’ in that technology and the first point of call for other staff wanting help. The outputs from this project can be found a http://thehub.loucoll.ac.uk/lsistechnologyproject/ The outputs include at least 2 screencasts for each technology, and a simple user guide in that technology.

The next question is was the project a success? The short term indicators showed that the staff were more confident as a result, there was a noticeable knowledge shift away from the learning technologists to the teaching staff which was positive and staff were certainly using a wider range of technologies and using them better. The real test though will be in another 12-18 months time – to see if the teaching staff that became these experts are still ‘experts’ and are still influencing others around them.

From what I have seen though having worked through the process with the college, I think there is definitely merit in this ideology. It is challenging for many, as it does involve the technologists letting go slightly, and some may see this as a threat to their employment future – although I see it as an opportunity, I think there will always be a need for the technologist, it is just their role may change into including more mentoring and facilitating rather than just doing. This model would also require careful strategic planning and direction, and in the short term would take longer than sticking with the current model, which would be a real threat to is adoption else where, but if people could see the benefits of this model, then it certainly has potential.

Why I use WordPress rather than IfL’s reflect tool

This morning I read a blog post by David Hopkins on the idea of the bPortfolio replacing the ePortfolio which made me look back at my blog to see what I had written about ePortfolios in the past and came across my post about the ePortfolio conundrum from January 2010. I don’t think we are any closer to solving the problem that I presented back then, but David’s post does back this up, and is for me my reflective portfolio of choice.

Like many other educators in the FE sector I am a member of the IfL. Personally I get no benefit from being a member, and when I asked them to justify the value for money before renewing my subscription, the top item on the list was my access to the IfL Reflect tool. This didn’t help convince me as I chose not to use it, for a variety of reasons:-

Reflect is based on the tool PebblePad which some people really like, and has some very good qualities but the way it works is very personal (which is it’s intention) but by being personal it means that some people will like the way that it works, and others won’t. I for some reason fit into the category of it not working for me.

However more importantly the reason why I choose to use WordPress for my reflective practice, is I am in complete control of the area, and I can personalise it to the way that I want it to work. Also it can never be taken away from me. With Reflect, if I ceased to be a member of the IfL I would lose that area, which to me goes against the notion of Continuous Professional Development. Defenders of Reflect will tell me that I could export my portfolio if I did leave IfL, but that isn’t the same as being able to continue using it as it is, which is what I want.

There are different ways to use WordPress. I use the wordpress.com site, which hosts my blog for free me. If I wanted to (and had the technical ability to) I could download the wordpress software onto my own server and run it from there. If I wanted to switch from one to another, I could easily back up the blog, and then re-import it into the other environment. With WordPress I have so many options

• I can write and edit entries easily from my iphone.
• I can send an email which updates my blog.
• I can integrate images, video, sound easily.
• I can attach files easily.
• I can keep the blog private, or public.
• And the list goes on.

So it will be interesting to see if the idea of the bPortfolio (blog portfolio) that David Hopkin’s mentions does replace the ePortfolio. If it does then I am already converted.

 

Using the Master Slide within PowerPoint

One of the most useful things to learn within PowerPoint is about using the Master Slide. This is a way of formatting the entire presentation in one place rather than applying formatting on each individual slide. This will save you time, improve the quality of the presentation (as formatting will be consistent throughout) and will make the presentation much more accessible, as it then becomes very easy to change the colour scheme for a presentation if a learner requires it.

It is very easy to do, and these 2 short screencasts will show how to set up a basic master slide, and then how to format the header and footer options to include things like slide numbers.

To create a basic master slide

To then add a footer such as slide numbers