In the iMoot 2010 Conference held on February 4th, Ernie Ghiglione did a presentation showing Moodle users the benefits they can get from LAMS using their own Moodle concepts.
Moodle is an open-source-learning software, a Course Manangement System, also known as Learning Management System (LMS), which helps teachers create online learning courses with a focus on interaction. On the other hand, LAMS is a tool for designing, managing, and delivering online collaborative learning activities. It provides educators with a visual authoring environment for creating sequences of learning activities. While both are great tools for promoting online learning, one is effective in creating and managing courses and the latter enhances the first by making the activities within the course sequential.
Social networking has grown and spread through all ages and fields since its birth in the market about 24 months ago. Everyone, if not the majority, has adopted the social networking fashion.
An interesting article talks about the social networking strategies that middle market companies are implementing these days. Corporate leaders are beginning to see the value in social networking and how it can make business better by increasing business and employee efficiency, decreasing training and development costs. "Employees are actually interested in using social networking; thereby increasing the likelihood of adoption and decreasing the time, budget, and resources required for training and education."
A new tool called Geogebra has been helping students in graphing their Mathematical equations. This great tool has been suggested by Edoardo Montefusco and has drawn most people's attention.
GeoGebra is free and multi-platform dynamic mathematics software for learning and teaching. It is a software for all levels of education that joins arithmetic, geometry, algebra and calculus. It offers multiple representations of objects in its graphics, algebra, and spreadsheet views that are all dynamically linked.
The year 2009 marked the global outbreak of a new strain of H1N1 influenza virus, otherwise referred to as "swine flu". Classes and even work were disrupted in some schools and offices. A not-so-recent article quoted the U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, in August 24, 2009, "Schools and colleges should be ready with hard-copy packets and online lessons to keep learning going even if swine flu sickens large numbers of students this year."
Technology like MEL can be a big help in preparing and coping during this time. It can keep lessons on-going through online teaching. Teachers and students may also communicate virtually.
LAMS was recognized for its use of technology to support and enhance learning across all eduation segments and in all regions of the world. In a not so recent competition held in Barcelona, the IMS Global Learning Consortium announced LAMS as one of the 2009 award winners.
For more details on the awards, click here.
In a not so recent article, it was mentioned that based on a study, online learning tends to be better than the conventional in-person or classroom teaching. Students in an online learning condition performed better than those receiving in-person instructions.
Learning Management Systems are widely used in many different countries. To add to that, the social networking technology also has its share of rapid growth. These combined allow students to teach each other and share resources online. But according to Philip R. Regier, the dean of Arizona State University’s Online and Extended Campus program, "The technology will be used to create learning communities among students in new ways." "People are correct when they say online education will take things out the classroom. But they are wrong, I think, when they assume it will make learning an independent, personal activity. Learning has to occur in a community."
Anne Gentle recently announced in her blog the availability of her new book entitled Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation.
The author shares a sample chapter which accounts much about online communities these days and how people are motivated to contribute to documentation. Regardless of background, training, or education, people who have a sense of belonging in an online community are motivated to contribute information because they feel a sense of freedom in sharing these information to other users. Much like in Open Source documentation where users of the same interests and goals connect, share, and exchange information.
We, at Solution Grove, are advocates of Open Source software. A good use of Open Source is to teach kids how to program. One such example of Open Source is the Etoys activity from the Squeakland Foundation.
Etoys, is an educational tool that teaches kids some powerful ideas. It is a free software program that runs on almost all personal computers. Using Etoys, children make their own models, stories, and games. They learn math, science, and language arts the fun and effective way.
Read the full posts here and here about how children as well as adults at the Squeakfest '09 learned Etoys to explore and acquire more knowledge.
The first part of my post featured the Video Recorder in the Authoring environment. In this post, we will look into Video Recorder in Monitoring Environment.
Summary Screen
The Summary tab for the Video Recorder allows the Monitor to view learner submissions for the activity as they are recorded and uploaded. Sequence monitors can also record their own messages for students and delete submissions, where necessary. Monitors cannot rate or comment on video submissions.
In a not so recent post, I mentioned about the LAMS Audio Video Recorder as one of the new improvements in LAMS 2.3. It is among the 5 newest tools included in this latest version.
The LAMS Video Recorder tool allows authors to record instructions for their learners and embed them into a sequence.
The Video Recorder comes as a seperate activity, which allows learners to upload their own videos and optionally comment and rate on each other's recordings, and the tool also includes a FCKEditor plugin, which allows Authors to record a video and insert it into "any activity" they choose. As teacher, you can record a "starting point" video to start off the conversation, then the students can share their videos, add comments and ratings to each other's videos.
In this post, let's know more about the other remaining activities scaffolded by the Activity Planner.
- Introducing New Ideas
This planner contains different types of activities to accompany the introduction of new ideas such as n a lecture or talk. The activities can be for before, during, or after the presentation of new ideas, or a combination such as both before and during a lecture. This strategy emphasizes the rationale that helping students to articulate their existing ideas will enhance their subsequent engagement with the lecture/talk.
Below are the types of activities that can be used to introduce new ideas:
- Identifying Misconceptions. These activities ask students to articulate their existing views of an idea, with a focus on trying to elicit misconceptions or misunderstandings.
- Reviewing a Key Resource. These activities ask students to review a key resource on the new idea such as an article, website or other resource. The focus is on building prior knowledge of the idea before the lecture/talk.
- Personal Reflection. These activities encourage students to reflect privately on their existing views and ideas, without seeing the ideas of other students or sharing their own views with others.
- Relating to Contemporary Events. These activities focus on contemporary events that illustrate the new idea.
- Responding to a Provocative Idea. These activities challenge students with a provocative idea, and ask them to articulate their own views in response.
- Seeing Two Sides. These activities present two different view of an idea, often opposing view, and ask students to respond to both sides, often by realizing they agree, at least in part, with both views.
- Finding a Hidden Bias. These activities present a resource about the idea that contains a hidden bias, and asks students to identify and explain this bias.
- Explaining a Striking Statistic. These activities present surprising or striking statistic and asks students to propose ideas to explain this statistic.
- Brainstorming Ideas. These activities ask students to brainstorm different ideas in response to a key question.
- Collecting Data. These activities require students to collect some sort of data so that the teacher can illustrate the new idea using the collated student data.
- Identifying Misconceptions. These activities ask students to articulate their existing views of an idea, with a focus on trying to elicit misconceptions or misunderstandings.
- Topic-based activities
This provides activities for particular disciplines or topic areas such as Introductory Psychology.
Below are some of the typical topics covered in Introductory Psychology;
- Introduction and History of Psychology. Introductory activities and history of psychology activities.
- Research Methods and Statistics. Activities about the research methods used in Psychology, including the use of statistics.
- The Brain and Nervous System. Activities about the function of the brain and nervous system.
- Sensation and Perception. Activities about how we experience sensations from the world around us.
- Learning and Behavior. Activities about behaviour and how learning takes place.
- Developmental Psychology. Activities about different types of development (physical, cognitive, emotional) and their stages.
- Intelligence and Individual Differences. Activities for exploring intelligence and individual differences.
- Social Psychology. Activities about social interactions of individuals and groups.
- Personality. Activities exploring human personality and differences.
- Introduction and History of Psychology. Introductory activities and history of psychology activities.
LAMS 2.3 has a lot of new features in its latest release. One of these is the Activity Planner: an alternative way to create educationally solid learning designs.
The LAMS Activity Planner is designed to produce runnable learning activities that can be readily used with students. It guides authors or teachers through the design process to enable them to add their own content to educationally sound learning activities. Existing learning designs, resources, and learning objects can be reused, thus, assisting teachers and lecturers in the process without requiring them to become experts in learning design or theory.
Time Graphs and Charts are among the newest features included in LAMS version 2.3. Surely, authors/teachers as well as the learners/students will have their share of advantages from these.
In the Monitoring Environment, the graphs show how quickly learners move through the activities in a sequence. If you're an author or a teacher, you can quickly troubleshoot areas where your students spend a lot of time on particular activities. You can also easily identify students and learners who are moving at a slower pace than the rest of the class. The graphs show "live" information as the learners move through the activities in sequence.
In my previous post, I wrote about some of the new improvements in this latest, soon-to-be-released version of LAMS. In this post, we get to know more.
LAMS v2.3 will include 5 new tools:
- Video Audio Recording. LAMS Video Recorder Tool lets authors/teachers record their instructions for the learners or students. These video recordings can be embedded into their sequence.
The Video Recorder, which comes as a separate activity, lets learners or students upload their own videos, too. Students may also leave comments and rate other learners/students recordings.The Video Audio Recording tool also comes with a FCKEditor plugin, which lets teachers/authors record a videos and insert these videos into any activitiy of their liking.
Teachers and students may also export all recording on Export Portfolio.
LAMS v2.3 was initially planned to be released at the start of July. Good news is the latest version of LAMS is aimed to be released in May with a whole bunch of massive improvements, new features, and fixes.
Teachers and students will definitely get their share of advantages from the new features that make this latest version so much better than the earlier ones.
Let's look at some of the cool stuff in this new version:
- With its increased performance, users will not have to wait long. LAMS v2.3 will boot 75% faster and run 375% faster compared to the previous versions. To add to that, LAMS v2.3 will use only a quarter of RAM memory.
- With the New and Simplified Adding Lesson Wizard, teachers can create a lesson in just 3 clicks.
- Through the Activity Planner, teachers are guided through the design
process, adding their own content to educationally sound learning
activities. Teachers are able to find the right sequence they need through the help of the Wizard. The Activity/Pedagogical Planner gives teachers a cut-down and simplified version of authoring, presenting most of the content for all the activities that are part of the sequence in just one page through the help of the editor.
LAMS Activity Planner produces runnable learning activities that students can readily use.
Click here to see more of the Activity Planner in action. (source: LAMS Foundation). You may also want to see more blogging about the Activity Planner in this post.
- Integration with the LAMS Community. The new version allows the import of sequences directly into LAMS Author from the LAMS Community. Teachers/authors get to share their best sequences with everyone in the LAMS Community.
- Public shared folder gives authors a chance to share their designs with each other.
- Teachers and learners are able to communicate while they are working on a LAMS lesson through the Instant Messaging.
- A simple yet fully functional Gradebook lets teachers see all the marks that the students get in their lessons.
- Export Activity. Activity results can be exported to other Gradebooks such as Moodle, Sakai, .LRN and other integrations.
- Students can access support activities at any given time, for additional reference. These support activities are part of the learning design, but not necessarily part of the sequence of activities.
- Upgrade to fastest HTML online editor. LAMS v2.3 will use FCK Editor version 2.6.4. The updates include increases in speed and better rendering of content as well as as in-built media player.
- Graphs and charts to monitor learner's time in activities. In the Monitoring Environment, graphs show how quickly learners move through the sequence of activities. These graphs make it easy for authors to troubleshoot areas where learners spend a lot of time on particular activities. It is also easy to identify the learners who are moving at a slow pace than the rest of the class.
The graphs and charts show "live" information and will give precise information about the amount of time students are spending in a lesson.
In my next post, find out about the 5 new tools in LAMS v2.3.
Some important details on the application process, where teachers review the student applications while candidates receive email notifications about their status, were discussed in my previous post. Also mentioned was the need to have a waiting list to give teachers more control over the application process.
Let's get into more details about the waiting list in this post.
Requirement No. 3: The need to have a waiting list which gives teachers more control over the application process
In my previous post, I wrote about how Solution Grove, using an integration of its previously developed ecommerce registration module based on dotLRN and Moodle, answered its client's need to have a system where students enroll for a course and the teacher approves their application.
In this post, we will go right into the details of the application process.
Requirement No. 2: "Applications" - Students submit requested information as they enroll for a course and the teacher reviews the students' data to be able to accept them into the course.
One of Solution Grove's clients that uses Moodle as an infrastructure for their online courses recently expressed the need to expand the user registration process in a number of custom ways. We have previously created an ecommerce registration module based on dotLRN for Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Boston Museum of Science. Our existing system is open source and supports a wide range of customizable use cases. We decided the best way to meet our clients' need was to integrate the dotLRN registration and Moodle.
The result is an incredible ability to support complex and custom student registration requirements. This post will be the first in a series of posts that outlines the different requirements needed by our clients and the solutions we used to answer and solve them.
(photo by solutiongrove.net)
It's my job as a technical writer to come up with a good documentation or help section of the application our company is developing. Two resources from the .LRN Community have given me insights on Help Systems: LMS Help Sections – Comparison and Introduction to Embedded Help and Examples for .LRN.
Most users don’t use the help section or, at least, avoid online help systems because It’s too much effort on the part of the user and the time invested isn’t returned with good results. To add to that switching back and forth between the application and the help system poses difficulty to the user. Their attention is split between the help system and the application itself. Thus, users are dissatisfied with the help systems.
Are you looking for polls that can be embedded into your page? One of our clients wanted to have polls embedded into their Web site. So I had the chance to search the Internet for free embeddable poll softwares and, I must say, there are a lot. My list was quite long at the end of my search but evaluating and reviewing the features of the softwares that I found cut my long list. I ended up with 4 choices. Let me refer to them for now as the Magic Four.
The Magic Four offer almost the same features and capabilities. I signed up for free accounts and tried them myself. Using any of them, surveys and polls are quite easy to create. You don't need to have programmer knowledge and skills to come up with one. Just drag and drop, type in your questions and choices, and click. You can also choose the theme or skin of your choice. You may even customize your own theme so your polls will have a look that matches you page. You may opt for a single choice or multiple choice polls. The polls can be embedded into your Web site, blog, emails, and what have you. This answers the need of our client. All you have to do is copy the code, which will be given at the end of your survey/poll creation, paste it into your Web page editor, and voila! Your poll is embedded into your site. Another feature is the survey or poll analysis. Voters can see the poll results, if the poll is made public by the author. Also, you, as the author, can export your data in csv, xml, or excel. Vizu and Polldaddy allows you to insert photos and videos into your polls. This adds more fun to your polls.
Part of our end-user support is to provide helpful tips and documentation matched with training videos and demos to assist clients in their daily applications. Our wiki and other content creation tools uses Xinha, a powerful What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor.
Our latest how to is on editing a table in Xinha. Just like in any other application, creating and editing tables should be quite easy. In Xinha, editing tables is similar to that in windows. This short demo should be able to guide you.
And to provide you with more reference on other related topics, I've organized, in one reference page, all of our company's written documentation and video demos on how to use Xinha and XoWiki. This page contains links to the following topics:
Whatever field you are in, good communication is one of the keys that make work easier. In search for better communication, one of our colleagues came across the Jing program and shared about it to the rest of the group. I was tasked to look into Jing and see what it can do for the company.
As I tried to learn how to use the Jing program, I read through a few of the comments and blogs written by some users who participated in the Jing Project by providing their feedbacks which in turn became useful to the design and development team of Jing. The comments and feedback paved the way to a newer and better version of Jing. My learning experience with Jing was quite okay, I must say. Some things I found advantageous and useful while others, just about average.
In this day and age, people write blogs for many reasons: one, to make money out of it; two, to gain popularity; three, to share their thoughts and ideas about what interests them; four, to tell their story, like what you do in a personal journal; or five, as a hobby, to simply destress themselves by expressing their hearts out.
It's interesting the way different people write about different things on the Web. Coming across some very insightful blogs and comments, I realized blogging can also be a way to learn and connect with people. I'm not a blogger myself, though I used to have my personal journal in my teenage years, but learning about some blogging tips, I thought it can be interesting if you only put your heart into it.
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