Compressing images in PowerPoint (or Word)

With digital cameras taking pictures at higher and higher resolutions, people are ending up with very large PowerPoint presentations, or Word files (if they include pictures) which often causes problems when trying to upload it to say a VLE, as well as increasing the time it takes for the student to open the file when [...]

Improvement to my PowerPoint Score Ladders resource

Following a few requests from people, and having sat down to work out how to do it, I have improved the Score Ladders resource, to include the option of having ‘cumulative’ ladders. With these when you click on the ladder, rather than a single block moving up the ladder, you get that block and all [...]

The learning design paradox

I have spent the day at a JISC event looking at learning design tools (tools that help a tutor to design learning activities), and I have come to realise that this area is a victim of a self inflicted paradox. From what I can make out, most of the tools were developed by universities so [...]

DimDim – a web-based conferencing tool

Over the last few years I have looked at various web-based conferencing tools, to see if any of the ‘free’ ones could be seriously used for teaching purposes, and generally there has always been something about the tools that has held them back. Yesterday a colleague of mine introduced me to this tool (currently in [...]

Concept Mapping training session

Ran a session today for Blackpool and the Fylde College on “The uses of concept mapping in education”, which went pretty well. The first half of the session we looked at Inspirations which is the concept mapping software that they have, and most people were very impressed, including one tutor who during the course of [...]

YouTube rolls out filtering tool

This looks interesting
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7046916.stm
There is some great stuff on sites like YouTube, which can be used so effectivewly in education, its just a shame that to find it you have to soft through all the rubbish, offensive stuff and blatent copyright breaches. Hopefully this tool from YouTube will have 2 effects.

Reduce the amount of content breaking [...]

‘Life after Death By PowerPoint’

Whilst searching for some resources on YouTube to complement a training session on Embedding videos into PowerPoint I found some videos of ‘Life after Death by PowerPoint’ by a comedian called Don McMillan, I think he quite brilliantly through the use of comedy highlights some of the key points to do with the effective (or [...]

Embedding YouTube videos into PowerPoint

I was recently asked how to embed YouTube videos into PowerPoint, and after a quick search I found this YouTube video which explains it much clearer than I can.

This technique relies on having Internet connection at all times, and doesn’t work on Macs.
If you want the video to be independant [...]

A good couple of days

It has been a good couple of days for me, with 2 contracts for projects being confirmed, and 2 other possible leads for work as well – after a slow start, things have suddenly picked up and got very busy. Just the way that I like it.

Creating another teaching resource

I have spent the afternoon getting my head messed up with complex functions and random numbers in excel to create another teaching resource. Haven’t quite finished it, but have got the mechanism working which is the hard bit, just need to tidy it up, check it works, before publishing to my website, so watch this [...]