A while back I started to develop some of my own page types for use with Xerte and Xerte Online Toolkits. I finally found a small bit of time to test and refine them so here’s some examples.

This first example automatically generates QR code and short URL from a link typed or pasted into the editor when authoring. The link could obviously be a link to the learning object itself e.g. displayed on the last page to share details of how to access the LO after a f2f session.

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This second example displays the results of a twitter search feed complete with user avatars. Twitter is obviously growing in popularity and awareness of teaching and learning uses so being able to include one or more twitter feeds within an LO is a useful facility.

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This third example is a tweak of the existing stimulating question page whereby the user is prompted to type a response to a question or task before clicking the button to compare their own response with a pre-prepared example or list of ideas and suggestions.

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Finally this fourth example will only be of interest to those using the xlearn text wall system. It takes the RSS feed from that system and provides an optimised display of the messages for use in a f2f environment.

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You can download an export of these templates here and either use that via the Xerte Windows application or add to your own Toolkits installation. The latter will require admin access to the toolkits installation.

I hope to create a guide at some point on how to create new templates and incorporate them into the default Nottingham provided template. Meanwhile I hope the zip is useful but as always you’ll need to use at your own risk etc.

For users of the molenet xerte online toolkits installation the new page types are already available.

This is just a quick post to share a document (pdf) I used recently to demonstrate the latest Xerte developments with the other MoLeNET mentors. Version 1.0 of Xerte toolkits is scheduled for release on 29th January and I believe will prove an incredibly popular and powerful authoring solution for practitioners as well as specialist developers.

I’ve been working with the team at Nottingham to integrate toolkits with Moodle and hopefully this will be available in the 1.0 release. Watch the Xerte site for news! http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~cczjrt/Editor/toolkits.htm

Also sample LO’s here: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/toolkits/RSS/

About 11 days ago my main Windows laptop froze and it turned out the hard drive had developed a fault. Although of course not life and death it was nonetheless a traumatic experience even just thinking about the implications let alone dealing with them. Now most of my work I store and access from an external hard drive which I periodically backup to another drive but I do/did still store a lot of files on the D partition of the laptop some of which weren’t stored anywhere else. More importantly I store a lot of needed info and even files in my email inbox which typically resides on the C: partition which crashed. I also use an awful lot of different applications, had systems and sites stored on localhost and over the life of the laptop installed and configured a large number of programmes, utilities and updates etc. Now of course I did have an early backup created when I first got the laptop and also some of the files copied or duplicated elsewhere but still would have lost an awful lot of valuable almost irreplaceable stuff if it weren’t for the following:

1. I bought a new replacement hard drive and had a manufacturer supplied recovery disk which I used to restore the factory image.
2. I bought a SATA to USB cable/kit to view my faulty drive and was able to recover all the data from the D partition
3. That D partition also contained a regular back created by Norton 360 so after re-installing Office I was able to restore my email, calendar, contact, IE favourites etc. The more recent stuff I had via my Apple MobileMe account but certainly not everything.

With competing deadlines and family stuff etc it’s taken me about 11 days to get back to where I was before the crash. Fortunately I didn’t lose too much and may still be able to recover some files from the C partition but I’ve definitely learned from the process. I’ve purchased a second SATA drive and upgraded my copy of Casper to work with my Vista laptop and so now have a current duplicate drive which I intend to keep up-to-date periodically. Suffice to say I’ve also still got Norton 360 backing up my important systems and files on a daily basis and I’m going to be more regimental about backing up my external drives. I’m also going to ensure I have similar solutions for my MacBook and eeePC and already do for my desktop PC.

Now you may already be doing all this or have better solutions but if not please use this as a sobering reminder and think about how you back up your important stuff!

This is just a test post using

This is a free Windows based RPC tool for WordPress and other blogs. So far it looks like a really useful and fast way of posting including uploading images complete with alt tags and links etc