Just what I need- discounts and coupon tweets, right to my phone. If only I could filter and only see stuff that’s relevant in my area, or in my area of interest… http://www.twitdiscounts.com/

US News defines Commonly Used Terms in Online Education and links to other articles on eLearning at http://tinyurl.com/dx7ugv .

I find it interesting that they include CBT (computer-based training) in their definitions, since I haven’t heard that term used for, oh, 8 years or so.

And I see they’re still identifying “Best Colleges”.. wonder if that’s self-reported data like it was when I contributed. A report’s only as good as the data, and the stuff that’s self-reported may not be the most accurate. I’m just saying…

I don’t really understand Alfresco
… it’s a repository of sorts where you could put an elearning activity [piece of a course] and then pull it into whatever moodle courses you want. The benefit I think is that it could be shared from there, and maybe even edited and it would magically edit wherever it was used. I’ve really gotta play more with this. The concept of having ‘pieces’ of courses on a shelf that could be pulled into a course has intrigued me for a while now.

And Remote-Learner hosts our moodle sites, and they recently partnered with Alfresco, sooo that would imply that the two should work together seamlessly.

Hmmm…there’s more info at http://vodpod.com/watch/1014425-alfresco-tie-in-in-moodle-2-0?pod=moodleman

and then there’s MrCute…

I am SO intrigued with the idea of using images for categories instead of category names.

http://tamingmoodle.blogspot.com/2009/01/ugly-category-names-on-front-page-pimp.html

One of these days I’m going to carve out some time to play with it.

Imagine that you order something for the office. You can go to UPS and enter the tracking number, or maybe even get email notifications as to its status. But even cooler is using trackthis.

It can even integrate with facebook or twitter.

What a cool way to keep tabs on your work purchases. Guess it would work with personal purchases too LOL.

I wanted to create a scenario-type activity for an online course, and, because I had to think and do at the same time (pre-plan? huh?) I started working in PPT. That way I could make buttons, links that went to one slide or another based on what answer (button) was selected. And I could see better what I was doing than if I used moodle’s lesson tool, which is fabulously versitile but the procedure of laying everything out is quite text heavy and I can’t SEE what I’m doing with text. So I used PPT, and thought at some point I’d convert it to flash or something. I tried to save as HTML in PPT, but the links didn’t save. So I tried PPT2HTML. It was easy, uncomplicated, and it worked! Saved each slide as it’s own JPG and HTM, and retained the links. Vunderbar! Also, since it’s HTML, I can open it on my phone

http://eit.tamu.edu/JJ/DE/4HGTTP/sally1.HTM

offers PPT2HTML and other tools at http://www.pptools.com/ppt2html/index.html
I purchased PPT2HTML and am very pleased with what it does. What it does is save PPT as HTML, without making ugly code, and with saving all the links etc that are have been created in the PPT. So I was able to create a scenario/game activity in PPT, with links and everything, and save it as HTML and zip it and upload it to the moodle server to put it in the course. It’s not real sophisticated, as it saves slides as images and so you can’t (at least I couldn’t) edit the HTML it created in Dreamweaver. But I can change the PPT and re-generate the PPT and upload it and all is well.

The Rapid eLearning blog at http://www.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/

is a fabulous resource. It has practical ideas and simple steps that make sense in the real world. Hurray!

Check out their tutorial on how to build a puzzle animation in just a few steps

puzzle image

There are a couple of new [or at least new to me] sites to help you learn moodle and use it better. One is http://www.moodletutorials.org/ has nice video tutorials and a flashpaper “moodle guide for beginners” is at http://www.schoolanywhere.co.uk/schools/pri_vle/moodleguideforbeginners.htm

Check them out! And happy moodling…

Lifehacker alerted me to a Powerpoint plug-in called iSpring that converts PPT to Flash for free! Sounds like there’s something else out there for people who can’t afford – or would rather not pay for- something like Camtasia.

Looks like there’s a free and paid version that you can download from http://www.ispringsolutions.com/ Anybody tried it??