Goodbye eXe elearning, hello OneNote class

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So for a while I have been interested in finding software that allows tutors with low IT skills to author web based material.  The tools within VLEs such as Blackboard and Moodle are clunky to say the least and leave a lot to be desired in terms of navigation design.

For a long time I advocated eXe, it allowed tutors to:

  • Create text, embed images easily
  • Create and manage structure of the pages (move page up or down, become a child page of a parent)
  • Export as html
  • Responsive design (looks good on a mobile device)

in a usable way while hiding the CSS and HTML code away from tutors.   However, it was limited because it wasn’t online:  tutors couldn’t collaborate on materials easily.

junkOver the last few days I’ve been playing around with OneNote class which is part of Education Office 365 and I’m really impressed with what it can do.  Basically it does all of the things eXe does but its a cloud service so course materials can be shared with a team who can work on it at the same time.  It allows course content to be viewed by students but not edited but also includes a wiki space where students can collaborate (pretending its a forum for example) on tasks.

VLE lite:  In fact, with One Note you have most of the ingredients of a VLE.  What its lacking is:

  • Analytics:  E.g. what have students looked at in the content
  • History:  There is no way to roll back changes to a previous version

but definitely worth considering.

Screencasting: why and how

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Why

Screencasting is a technique where the screen is recorded with an added audio channel.  There are a number of reasons to use it in an educational setting I can think of:

  • Record lectures to use as pre-session learning in a flipped learning style
  • Mark students formative work as a screencast, look at their word document or similar and ‘ink’ onto the screen as you talk them through how they did
  • Walk students through a tricky software problem, i.e. howto submit an assignment.

Here’s an example from Khan academy which I think works really well

 

How

The how I’ve covered in a recent post, my favoured tool (for non-techies) is office mix, an add-on to powerpoint (another howto tutorial).  I have recently found out that it doesn’t work on the Mac version of PowerPoint (Microsoft, please get a grip) and of course, you may not use PowerPoint.  If this is the case I have had good experiences of Screencast-o-matic with whatever the presentation software is that you want to use.

Recording a presentation using PowerPoint Mix

howto

Office Mix is an excellent tool for none specialists to record screencast presentations.  The howto instructions below describes how to use it in this way with an output to video.

1      Install Mix

1.1] go to

https://mix.office.com/en-us/Home

and click ‘Get Office Mix’ top right.  Follow instructions to install the addon to PowerPoint.

2      Prepare Powerpoint

2.1]  Prepare your powerpoint talk in a number of slides in the usual way.

3      Set up audio and camera

3.1]  Now go back to your first slide.  On the Mix tab, select ‘Slide Recording Record’ (far left)

3.2]  The screen will now redraw with a black top and right border.  Firstly we need to set up the microphone and cameara.

3.3] on the right column select ‘No camera’ and also on the microphone pull down menu, select your microphone.

3.4] As a check, when you speak the volume will appear as a bar animation above ‘Microphone Options…’

4      begin recording

4.1] Click the red ‘Record’ button.  The screen will acquire a dotted red line border.  Start talking.

4.2] When you are finished with the audio that goes with the slide, click the red square ‘stop’ button

4.3]  Preview your recording using the blue triangle ‘Preview Slide Recording’ button.  Your audio and slide should play back.

4.4]  If you are happy, click the ‘Next Slide’ arrow button to proceed to the next slide.  Repeat the steps from [4.1]

4.5] If you are not happy with your recording, simply repeat the steps from [4.1] and when PowerPoint prompts you ‘Would you like to overwrite this recording?’ choose ‘Yes’.

5      Processing the finished powerpoint

5.1]  When you have added audio to all slides, click the ‘Close’ cross button top right.

5.2]  Click ‘File’ > ‘Save as’ to save your powerpoint slides and audio recordings.

5.3]  Under the Mix tab > export to video.

5.4] Select (720p) as the Video size and click next.

5.5] Save your Presentation with a sensible name.

5.6]  You should be able to play your created presentation and it work.

6      Advanced features

Office Mix has several advanced features which you may wish to use.  These are:

  • using animations within slides
  • inking
  • uploading to Office 365 for easy sharing

to investigate these see tutorial videos at https://mix.office.com/en-us/Home