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Over the last few months I’ve been using a number of different tools for creating and delivering presentations – partly to introduce training sessions and partly to demonstrate a range of tools and support those attending the training to consider when and how they might use the tools themselves. I plan to add a range of examples here over then next few blog posts beginning with these examples created with http://haikudeck.com which is now both a mobile app and a web app. The great thing about the tool is how easy it is for non-specialists to create extremely professional looking presentations and either deliver those via haikudeck.com or embed in a blog or vle etc or indeed export in various formats including PDF or PowerPoint for continued editing. Here’s a couple of simple examples that I’ve used recently:

Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app

Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app

Of course as you may know I’m a regular Xerte user and like most online tools Haiku Deck presentations can easily be embedded within your Xerte LO’s.

More examples to follow.

Click play to view.

Along with colleagues at JISC, JISC Techdis, Niace, Learning Unlimited etc I’ve been working on a Maths project developing interactive resources for the past few months and together with another long time colleague Terry Loane we’ve been using a combination of Xerte, Articulate Storyline and other tools to develop the interactive resources in collaboration with the team from Learning Unlimited.

The http://learningmathsonline.ac.uk site has been public for a while now but it’s arguably it’s first official launch at an event today although behind the scenes we are still working on the materials as well as the site and will be for a while yet. One of the things we’ve been looking at together with Alistair McNaught, Shri Footring and Michael Rippon is how best to open the learning objects from the WordPress site from both an accessibility and usability perspective and particularly what the user does when reaching the end of a learning object to return to where they were.

The two links below are a test to demonstrate two possible ways of doing this. The first screenshot link is a standard chromeless pop-up window and the second is a lightbox pop-up. We’ll have to see what works best?…

Opens in a new chromeless window

Opens in a Lightbox window

I delivered a very short Xerte Training session for some Health Science students at Newman University in Birmingham yesterday. (1st Oct 2013)

@BobRidgeStearn tweeted during the session and took the photo opposite. You can view related blog postings via their blog, including a post about what we covered yesterday and a previous post about the project.

Although we also scheduled an afternoon session with some of the staff at Newman, including Bob and some of his team, my main prep was to update some of my existing Xerte LO’s and some new LO’s to provide a wide range of guidance which I could use during the sessions but also which would work as self-access resources after the sessions and for the students in particular. As the student session was so short (and even shorter after one or two technical issues) I wanted to share some short but clear and important tips that I think are essential in creating effective learning resources and activities with Xerte. You can view one of the LO’s I used via the screenshot below. Please note the copyright info.

I’ve been supporting some college in the East Midlands on an LSIS project which is really all about their respective Moodle developments but they also wanted to be able to create relevant training material using iPads and more importantly to conference and collaborate remotely outside of their f2f meetings from and between iPads. So a relatively unique challenge – but there are one or two options for hosting online meetings direct from an iPads and obviously lots of options for content creation and we explored these during training I delivered recently.

In prep for the training I also decided it was worth creating a Xerte learning object purely with HTML 5 consumption in mind and very much optimised for iPad consumption. As such the ebedded and linked LO below is an example that won’t work correctly via the alternative Flash Xerte player and demonstrates some of the extra benefits of the new HTML 5 playback. Of course it’s viewable on any HTML 5 compatible device not just iPads but I’ve used layout options and image size optimised for iPad portrait viewing.

View the conferencing and collaboration LO in a new window via this link >> or the embedded version below:

Since the training session we have had further discussions and have lots planned in advance of the LSIS dissemination event in Birmingham on 5th Feb. Watch this space for further news and hopefully see some of you at the event!