TDA Project Climax

On Tuesday morning, my colleague Robyn and I went over to Bulmershe campus to run a focus group with a PGCE course convenor, Judith Davies. This was the climax to a project Robyn and I have been working on with Judith since before September.

Robyn and I had been asked to look at the wealth of Web 2.0 tools out there, select a bunch of them and match them up against criteria which we had drawn up previously. The idea being to find at least one Web 2.0 tool that would fulfil a newly qualified teacher's portfolio needs.

Throughout the project, we kept a wiki within Blackboard (using the Learning Objects tool) to analyse tools and compare them with one another. When the New Year began we looked at all the information we collected and we picked two tools (and a spare) that we were going to focus on. We also prepared a slideshow (embedded below) and several handouts to make the day run more smoothly.

TDA Focus Group

View more presentations from readingcdotl. (tags: wikis e-learning)

The idea of the presentation was to present these findings to a group of teachers who Judith had paid with funding to take a day's leave and give them a lunch while we were at it.

We took what I thought was a fairly "radical" approach to the slideshow - that is, there's hardly any text and the focus is more in images and making an impact with these to mark different parts of the morning. This was inspired by talks I've seen given at conferences recently and was an attempt to remedy the Powerpoint fatigue I've been afflicted by recently. When it came to the tools themselves, we simply logged in and did a live demo, showing some examples that we'd prepared earlier to inform them further. You can see the examples we created below:

http://tdaportfolioexample.pbwiki.com
http://tdaportfolio.edublogs.org

And while we were eating lunch we recorded the discussion that we had around the table - about e-portfolios, their shortcomings, or rather the current lack of an adequate tool, and what they thought of the tools we'd picked out.

Robyn and I have yet to go through the feedback but as we do, I will try and post some of our findings here and perhaps some of the wiki notes we made in early on in the project too. All in all, it was a successful morning - so much so, that I'm now trying to take the same "radical" slideshow approach with the workshops that we run here and with future presentations.

My First Slideshare

I've uploaded the slideshow I presented at Durham to a site called Slideshare. It's free to sign up for an account there and, in doing so, you get some space to upload Powerpoint presentations to. This enables you to share your slideshow with people and receive feedback.

The Promise and Practicalities of e-Portfolios: Getting Blackboard to Deliver

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: durham conference)

I've been a visitor to the site for a while and found it particularly useful for looking over slideshows from conference presenters I found particularly interesting. I signed up so I could "give something back" to the site by contributing my own presentations to the .

If you upload a Powerpoint file to the site, you can then embed the resulting slideshow into a blog, a wiki, a standard webpage... or even a Blackboard course, with relative ease. As I've done above. Aesthetically, this could be a nicer way of giving students access to your lecture materials.

Animations don't upload well, as you'll notice on a few of my slides. But I like the easy integration with the page.

I read the Terms and Conditions before uploading my presentation and IPR remains in the hands of the author, so far as I can tell. However, be aware that anyone can grab the code for embedding and put your presentation on their webpage -you can see I did this in previous posts with keynotes for the Durham Conference (here and here). This means the site is useful for viral publicity so long as you make sure you have your name on the front page!