Sue Waters

Last week I posted on how:

• Nancy White made me into a bullet-less person (no bullets allowed in PowerPoint presentations)
• Vicki Davis and Gabriela Grosseck inspired me to go Presentation 2.0

Now that I have let my imagination inspire me, learnt how to locate photos in the creative commons section of Flickr and changed the whole thinking process of how I would prepare a PowerPoint I love this method of creating PowerPoint (Tips: keep all photos in one folder on your computer. Have a separate document that list the photos and their original source so that you can credit the source).

I used this method to create my presentations for Central West TAFE this week (if you have not already checked them out they are located in my slideshare account). I think the participants enjoyed them – laughter and attention was definitely paid to some of the images. Unfortunately I failed to take into account the participant’s imagination or how they might see things differently from me. They definitely are not going to forget my explanation of the difference between podcasting and audio streaming:

1. Podcasting – has feed. Compared it to a newspaper being delivered right to my front door (like to use newspaper landing on my lap open on page I want to read but did not have a photo – will have to take one of my husband in bed when he is not looking)
2. Audio/video streaming – no RSS feed. Not delivered to me. Have to drag myself out of bed, get dressed, go to local store, buy it and then drive home. If I am lucky I get back into bed in 20 minutes.

Well the picture of the store was excellent and also showed a great selection of contraceptive devices. Trust them to notice something that I hadn’t. Oh well I wonder how they will explain audio streaming now?

Message to self – make sure check photos to ensure they are suitable.

What I did at Central West TAFE

Day 1 Overview of e-learning options

The workshop on the first day was for participants from their Learnscope project. The participants were from a range of industry areas and had varying levels of exposure to e-learning (from minimal up). I was asked to overview e-learning options so that participants could make decisions on what type of e-learning would be best suited for their area. Thanks Darren Draper for the example of Flickr being used with students. I would have really loved to spend more time working one-on-one with each participant so that they could have started working on their preferred option for their students.

I was very impressed with how motivated and enthusiastic the group was. They wanted me to overview different options to inspire participants – I hope I did although I am worried that I overwhelmed them. Happy to report iGoogle pages were set up by some participants.

Day 2 m-learning overview (morning) and hands-on podcasting (afternoon)

The next day my workshops were for their Quality week, and any staff could choose to attend. Morning session was an overview on m-learning mainly focusing on PDAs and then the afternoon they learnt how to create audio podcasts. Once again I was very impressed by their enthusiasm (but I must remember to add back in the definition of PDA in my presentation 🙂 ). All participants managed to create and upload an audio podcast to the podcast site. Have to say most were much more imaginative than me in creating a podcast. Once again would loved to have spent a lot longer with them so that we could have repeated the process to increase their skills development – I think you need to repeat the process a couple of times with staff.

If any workshop is going to cause me problems it is always audio podcasting. Unfortunately a lot of the computer labs in schools and TAFE have not been set up for audio (in terms of the microphones). Thankfully their IT department worked really hard to make the microphones work – which they did by installing new sound drivers – although still not recording audio as loud as they should which is why the podcasts are so noisy (you had to yell to get the right volume).

The photos from this trip are located in my flickr account (tagged Central West TAFE). I strongly recommend that you download Flickr uploader onto your computer, as it makes uploading photos to your Flickr account so much easier.

Thanks to Central West TAFE – I had an excellent time 🙂