Educational Technology

SoftChalk and Moodle 2.0

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When it comes to eLearning content creation I am a big SoftChalk fan.  One of the great things about this tool is it will publish SCORM compliant packages for Learning Management Systems so an instructor's activities can post to the gradebook automatically.  They have had this working for Blackboard, Angel and Moodle 1.x already.  I was pleasantly surprised today to find out that they have created integration guides for Moodle 2.0!  So if you are SoftChalk user and Moodle 2.0 user you should check these out:

http://support.softchalk.com/FileManagement/Download/5eefaab891744e8d93a431433d51ed12

In addition they have updated the SoftChalk Student Guide.  You can find that here:

http://support.softchalk.com/FileManagement/Download/f63c73ce33fb45f091657ba93a4d92b0

SoftChalk

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SoftChalk is an incredibly useful tool for creating dynamic content for deploying on the web, in a Learning Management System, CD-ROM and a myriad of other ways. The best thing about this tool is the ease of use. Essentially if you know how to use a word processor you can use SoftChalk. Although it isn't really fair to compare it to a word processor because it does so much more. It has a large number of interactive activities (like crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, flash cards, etc...) that you can quickly add to your document. In addition to the activities you can search across multiple content repositories (YouTube, Flickr, MERLOT, etc...) and quickly insert the content into your document. A good example of the kind of document you can create with SoftChalk is Tacoma Community College's New Student Orientation.

Second Life Presentation in Our Faculty Learning Community

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Last Friday our faculty learning community got a tour of Second Life from a couple of campus experts, John Miller (aka JS Vavoom http://jsmillerrn.blogspot.com/) and Monica Monk (aka Athena Naxos http://thenakedavatar.blogspot.com/). It was very interesting to see the various spaces in Second Life that are being utilized by our faculty. There have been a lot of advancements, since my last visit, in the medical modules that John is using on Evergreen Island (http://tiny.cc/SecondLifeEvergreenSBCTC). We also learned about Cypris Isle (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cypris%20Village/155/100/24) that Monica is using for her ESL courses. This is an English speaking island where students can interact with people all over the world that are interested in learning and speaking English. We also had a brief tour of Bloom’s Taxonomy island (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Teaching%204/208/175/25) hosted by Iowa State University. It was a great trip and I am looking forward to more tours in the future.

Elluminate in Action

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The new Elluminate install for the State of Washington came at a very opportune time. All state agencies were asked to reduce travel because of budget cuts. Several State groups have decided to run their quarterly meetings in Elluminate. It has been working quite well. We just finished our eLearning Council Orienation meeting today and will use it for our Fall eLearning Council meeting tomorrow.

Echo360 and Elluminate

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We had an interesting training session yesterday on Echo360.

About a week and a half ago we had our Echo server and appliance installed in one of our multimedia rooms. The tech from Echo360 was unable to make the trip (through no fault of his or the company) to Tacoma for the install so we did everything remotely.

He was also unable to make it (again not an issue with him or the company) to the training yesterday. To accommodate for this we set up an Elluminate session so everyone could participate remotely. Once we were all in the Elluminate session I granted him control over the PC in the multimedia room through Elluminate. Once he had established control he brought up the server application and trained us on it's use. In addition to all of that he also kicked off a capture with the Echo appliance and we got everything recorded. It was pretty awesome! I am sure that we caused a rip in the spacetime continuum somewhere in the universe, and for that I apologize.