And we’re off…

Today I introduce Adobe Captivate and look at what it offers you as a teacher. Today is a simple overview as to what Captivate can do. Just like many teachers starting a course with students, today there is no homework – enjoy!

You can find today’s tutorial here, or by typing this link into your browser:

http://www.swict.com/resources/captivate/video/01.asp

(Today’s tutorial lasts 4 mins 55 sec)

Tomorrow, we’ll have a look at getting started with Captivate, and what type of screen recordings you can make.

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There is a terrible advert on TV at the moment for some type of cosmetic where the carefully chosen actor tells us why the product would be her ‘desert island face-care product’ – the thought crossed my mind that were I stuck on a desert island, the last thing I would be worried about would be whether I had my favourite face-care product with me or not – I’m sure I’d be more concerned about where my next meal was coming from. Anyway…

It did get me thinking though. As an Education Support Officer for ICT I would regularly get asked “time is limited – what’s the most beneficial application to learn how to use as a teacher?” My answer would always be “the browser” as you then have the world at your fingertips.

The browser is however only useful up to a point though. Unless you strike lucky and someone actually has created a resource that explains something exactly the way you wish, then at some stage you will want to make a resource yourself that helps your students understand a concept or develop an idea. Ideally, you’d want to use the technology to track your pupils progress to help you further their learning.

There are many applications that would help you try and achieve this, but the one that addresses this best and most simply for a teacher in my opinion is Adobe Captivate. I’ll try and state my case as to why -

Captivate lets you create interactive presentations simply. You can add graphics, audio, video and animations easily. You can also create screencasts and have your user interact with them. If you have access to a Virtual Learning Environment (as almost every teacher and pupil in Scotland is soon to have through Glow), then you can track your users progress. All you need to view your created presentation is the Flash player – which is completely free, and the vast majority of internet users have on their machine.

In education pricing, Captivate is around ÂŁ40 per licence.

Starting on Monday, I’ll be posting each day a bite sized tutorial on how to use Captivate. You can subscribe to these simply through my ‘tutorial’ category. I hope you find these useful – and please feel free to spread the word!

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Normally about this time I’m settling down to the main focus of my day workwise, after checking out my feed reader and reading my email.

Not today though. Today I got into my work much quicker, as I’ve decided (yet again!) to try out a different feed reader. Yesterday I added my opml file to Google Reader, and it’s made things much quicker for me.

I love the way Netvibes looks – all layed out in tabs and columns, but using Google Reader I find I scan posts far more quickly. Can this only be a good thing? I appreciate that in scanning you may miss out on things you might otherwise read more carefully, but using Google reader I find that I’m covering the same ground more quickly.

Well worth a look if you aren’t too content with your present feed reader?

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A rare trip into the office this morning, and Maggie was telling me in passing about her latest gadget!

I can’t believe I haven’t seen one of these before!

The ‘AB USB Guitar’ fund is now officially open… all donations are gratefully received!

(I’m not sure how good a guitar it’ll be for $99, but that’s not the point…)

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Last week in my thoughts about Glow I said:

In a Connect meeting room I can rearrange the layout of the pods on the screen to suit my kind of presentation or my purposes. Whilst you could collapse or expand the chat and video screens in the Marratech room, you couldn’t rearrange them to be viewed as you like.

I was however wrong – when setting up a meeting room, you can determine the layout.

I’m glad this functionality is there. In playing with a meeting room, it was quite clear that the video, chat or whiteboard could prove to be a distractor at times, depending upon how you wished to organise your meeting or lesson. It’s great to see that the host can determine how the meeting room is presented to others.

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“There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed” Napoleon Bonaparte.

I’ve been thinking about this one quite a lot of late – for a number of reasons that I’ll return to throughout this post.

Things ‘go wrong’ all the time. I love this whole notion. Quite often, things don’t work out as we intend for a whole host of reasons. In the (terrible) film Her Alibi, one character says to the male lead “There’s no such thing as an accident; only other people’s plans they forgot to tell you about” – I love this reworking of Napoleon’s classic line.

Working with technology, things frequently ‘go wrong’ – everyone that has struggled with the whole ‘turn on mirroring’ or ‘Ctrl + F7′ thing when connecting a computer to a digital projector knows exactly what I mean here. Through a building up of experience, we learn how to deal with problems. The more you do something, the better at it you theoretically become. This is only true up to a point though. If you plug your computer into the same digital projector every time, then you don’t build up the skills necessary to cope with what to do when you encounter a different kind of projector. The more we try to do, the more potential pitfalls we encounter. All of this builds our confidence. So the key to confidence here then is variety.

“If I have seen further [than certain other men] it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants” Isaac Newton

Whilst I love the sentiment of Newton’s quote, I wonder if this is truly possible when working with technology? Sure, I can be told how to deal with numerous things, but until I experience them for myself, do I truly own that knowledge?

In a recent forray into a meeting room in Glow, Liz O’Neill loved the fact that so many of us were calm when things didn’t go according to plan. Are we all calm by nature? I don’t know. I suspect we were all calm in the meeting room, as we understand that things go wrong.

I wish we had been able to record the first meeting room we had all been in. Were anyone able to watch that back, you would have seen a collection of people that are quite comfortable using technology trying things out. Clicking icons and seeing what they do. Asking that all important question “What if…?”

We don’t learn by doing the same thing over and over again – we learn by asking “What if…?” What if I press this button? What if I plug my computer into this type of projector? What if I follow this link?

The road not taken

What’s the worst thing that can happen – you have to turn the machine off and switch it back on again?

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Last night, a group of around 11 of us spent a bit of time in a Marratech meeting room in Glow. We had previously met up for a ‘wee play’ in the meeting room last Wednesday, but last night saw us use the meeting room in earnest, with four people presenting to the group.

I think it would be fair to say that the general consensus of the group was that the meeting room is the best bit we have seen of Glow so far. Some of the group had also spent quite a bit of time trying out the discussion boards, the web hosting and video streaming facilities offered in this trial version of Glow. Whilst each of these offered great potential to Scottish education, none were without their problems at this stage – you would expect that though – that’s the entire point of a ‘trial’ phase after all, to iron out the issues and resolve them.

I did say I would come back and note down my thoughts about the meeting room, so for what it’s worth – here they are:

Marratech isn’t Breeze, sorry Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional.

(For the record, I have no affiliation to Adobe, so this is my personal opinion, not my bought voice, or any other vested interest)

Well, why not? Many people will make comparisons, and to the uninitiated, they look very similar. Both offer web conferencing, shared documents, audio, video and chat facilities but the similarities end there.

What does Marratech have that Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional doesn’t? Well, Marratech offers ‘shared whiteboarding’ – which in its defence is a brilliant tool. I haven’t looked at the most recent version of Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional, but to my knowledge, it doesn’t have this facility.

(GE offer this for free in a Flash format on the net though)

What does Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional have that Marratech doesn’t? Well, first of all, I can share any type of content in a Connect meeting room. I can’t stress this enough. I can share Flash files. Therefore, I can share any video, audio or learning interaction I like. As a teacher, that means a lot to me. I could share a YouTube or TeacherTube video, which I can’t in Marratech, as swf or flv aren’t supported file types. The only way I could try to do this is to share my application, but the screen refresh rate or frame rate won’t equal that of the Flash file, so it won’t display properly.

Secondly, in a Connect meeting room I can rearrange the layout of the pods on the screen to suit my kind of presentation or my purposes. Whilst you could collapse or expand the chat and video screens in the Marratech room, you couldn’t rearrange them to be viewed as you like.

Thirdly, in a Connect meeting room I can record the entire meeting room – and I mean the entire meeting room – the video, the audio, the shared area and the chat. The entire thing is wrapped up in a swf file – which anyone could therefore use if they knew the URL. Although the Connect room uses a full screen variant of the Flash player, this too is free and is well supported. The Marratech meeting room allows you to record only the video and audio, and does not synch this with the shared document area or the chat – therefore I am only getting one third to a half of the meeting at a later date. In education, this could mean that a lesson is delivered and then viewed in its entirety elsewhere by others interested in the subject area – a brilliant revision tool. (Incidentally, having done this, it feels as if you are actually there at the original time it was recorded as a passive participant, and not merely watching it played back for you at a later date – this is a brilliant facility)

What else? Well, I have now tried on three occasions to get two Vista machines (one 32 bit, one 64 bit) to work with Marratech, and they won’t. I appreciate this could be more of a Microsoft or Sun issue at the moment, but it is a significant problem. New machines are coming shipped with Vista after all.

Last night it took a full 10 minutes to load the Java app on an XP machine to open the room – (one other participant had the same issue on a brand new Mac) – that requires significant planning on the part of a teacher – were I teaching a full day I wouldn’t be doing this, as it was too time consuming to set up. I was also aware that I was running a reasonably fast machine on a broadband connection that has the same connection speed for me personally as my entire local secondary school of 1500 pupils – the infrastructure needs significant investment for this to work well (this isn’t just a local issue either).

Don’t get me wrong – I really like the capacity Marratech offers. I think it could be well used in Scottish education. But in exactly the same way that Ford make ‘good’ motor cars until you learn about Rolls Royce (or any other car manufacturer for that matter?), Marratech is a good system until you see what some others offer in the same field. It’s good, but it’s not great?

Also, Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional isn’t without it’s problems either – the system relies on all the switches involved in connecting the meeting participants allowing ‘multicasting packets’ which is problematic for many networks.

I know I’ve talked a lot about Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional, but that is only because this is my area of experience. Similarly, I’ve seen FlashMeeting which looks good, and is being well used by people I respect in the world of education and technology at the moment.

This has been a really difficult post to write. I journeyed two hours to and from Glasgow today and agonised over posting it – if I did post, then I incur the criticism of those who will say that I’m not giving it a fair chance as it isn’t live yet. If I didn’t post, then I either effectively praise it by my silence or I risk criticism later on as to why I didn’t voice my opinion at the time. So there you have it. Hopefully, I’ll note down my overall observations of the portal in this trial state, or even further musings on some of the other web parts.

11 people, and only 2 have blogged about it. You’ve got to wonder why no-one is really talking about it? I suspect that everyone that left the meeting room last night didn’t immediately switch off their computer, so it’s not opportunity that is lacking here…

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A couple of days ago a couple of videos appeared on youtube which are being attributed to Intel. They show what the next generation of UMPCs could be like, and what type of integration they may offer.

I’m reading a book by Naomi Klein at the moment called ‘No Logo‘ which is a fascinating read – so I particularly loved some of the comments on the video stating how worrying it is that we let technology ‘define us’. (The video ends with the phrase – Ultra Mobile: It lets me be me)

For the record on this one – I’m ‘me’ with or without technology? So technology doesn’t ‘let me be me’ – in exactly the same way that clothes don’t ‘let me be me’ either.

I love that Lynne reminds us today that kids quite often reach for books just as readily as technology. Perhaps it’s the balance that’s important? That, and the understanding that you are a pawn in a game being played out by huge multinationals. Don’t think you are? Then think about this when you next see someone with Tommy Hilfiger emblazoned on their chest (which they paid good money to advertise for free?) or the next person you see with a nike swoosh shaven into their hair or worse still, tattooed!

What has this got to do with ICT? Well, if you only buy Apple, then at least know you are being manipulated. Incidentally, being ‘nice’ is a marketing strategy.

Rant over.

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Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled its ‘Flash killer’ – Silverlight. With the recent introduction of Microsoft Expression studio, it was clear that Microsoft were taking careful aim at territory firmly seated in Adobe’s realm, but with the anouncement of Silverlight, this battle just got notched up another level.

If you have been following this, then Silverlight is the product name for the previously codenamed WPF/E, and is based on a varient of XML (XAML) as its coding language. It claims to work with any back end environment such as Apache and PHP, not just the .NET it is based upon.

A very glossy, slick marketing site is up at the moment, where you can download the browser plugin and development tool to try out.

Flash killer? I don’t know. Let’s be realistic – at the moment, Flash has this part of the market cornered. Whether it’s the fact that so many sites rely on the Flash player, or the fact that all it takes is a site like youtube to make spreading the newest version of a player incredibly quick, Microsoft are taking on a giant here.

Although lets not forget that they are a giant too. All it takes is a site like youtube to use Silverlight technology, and its fate is sealed.

I’ll be really interested to see what it’s like to work with. Flash was (and is!) a huge learning curve. Will Silverlight be easier to learn? Will it allow more expeditious development? The future looks really interesting!

Want to see an example? The project for the British library looks impressive.

It’s also interesting to see this, where Silverlight and Flash work in harmony?

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Tonight at around 8pm, anyone with Mentor access to the Glow portal can join in for an opportunity to see a Glow Meeting Room in action. If you have access, you can get beyond the login page by following this link.

I’ve spent a little bit of time in Glow of late (but not nearly enough time… there never is though, eh?) I met up with a few others last Wednesday for a Meeting, which Neil, John and Tess have already blogged about. Hopefully after tonight I’ll come back and note down my thoughts.

In the meantime, here is a wee gem courtesy of heyjude – box.net is a lovely wee flash app that lets you share anything really simply on any blog or webpage without the need for any complexity or having to learn lots of code. Quite brilliant – things need to be nice and clean and simple.

Hopefully see some of you later?

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