Tag Archives: Course blog

A new dimension for your posts

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Introduction

Finding new ways to make your posts more interesting is always fun and can also help demonstrate employability skills such as those in technology! Here you will find out how to sign up for “Slideshare” and “Prezi” two different ways of adding presentations to your blog. We will also show you how to “embed” these types of presentation in your blog.

Slideshare

“Slideshare” is a simple way of uploading and sharing Powerpoint presentations. So if you already know and use Powerpoint you may want to use this to share your employability skills presentation.

This short screencast gives the steps for signing up to Slideshare. Once you have signed up you are directly in an upload screen. However you will get an email with a link for you to click to confirm your membership. Remember to click this or your account will disappear!

The embedded Slideshare below will show you how to upload and embed a Slideshare

Embed slideshare

View more PowerPoint from Jo Hart

 

Prezi

Prezi is a tool for producing and sharing presentations completely online. The main features are that unlike Powerpoint it is not linear and that it uses a zooming technique to move between items.

Here is a screencast on signing up for Prezi

The short embedded Prezi below will show you how to embed a Prezi. For learning how to use Prezi checkout the help in your Prezi account

Give your blog a “Prezi” on Prezi

Vokis

For making and embedding Vokis see “Lina’s Blog”

Conclusion

We hope you have fun embedding Slideshares or Prezis and Vokis in your blogs. They are a great way of adding an extra dimension.

 

What you SEE is what you learn!

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Introduction

Visual texts and increasingly audio-visual texts are something we meet with all the time. Visual texts are ones where images or graphics of some kind play a major part in “getting the message across”. This doesn’t mean they are necessarily “word free”. Many visual texts combine words and images to strengthen their message. Audio-visual texts combine voice or other sounds with images to achieve their objectives.

“Good” visual texts

To be able to “write” good visual texts you need to know about some of the features that can be used to create effects as well as about the factors such as audience that will affect the content. We talked about some of these in virtual class. If you need to revisit them login to the course website and checkout the recordings for “Week 2 Day 1 – morning” and “Week 2 Day 2 – morning”. Or take a look at the slideshare

Vis texts
View more PowerPoint from Jo Hart
where you will also find information on signing up to ToonDoo. This is the medium we are going to use to make visual texts on online safety.

Making a visual text using ToonDoo

Those students and lecturers for our first pilot ELFADA course who were online during the virtual class session on visual texts made a Toon together. We did this through desktop sharing with each person taking turns to control my desktop and add their own choice of character and text.
This was great fun to do. Toons are a great way to express your personality online whilst staying safe! Making visual texts is a good learning activity for any subject you are studying. You can use them as we are doing to learn about and share your own ideas about online safety.
The wonderful thing about posting to blogs is that you can update posts when something changes. I am doing exactly that here by adding the joint ELFADA toon from the second group of ELFADA students. As with the previous one this was great fun to make!

Our second group joint ELFADA toon

However there are lots of other ways to use them to make learning more fun.
For example to help you remember the different meanings of two words that sound the same but have different spellings and meanings, as in this simple text above.

Saving Toons

Something we did not really cover in the session was saving your Toon and capturing the link so here is a screencast to help you if you get stuck on this.
You can add your Toons to your blog posts in two ways. We have already look at adding a link – you can do this with your Toon by saving the link and inserting it in the post. Next week we will be looking a adjusting images to a suitable size and inserting them in posts.

Conclusion

Visual texts are a great learning tool as well as being fun to make. We hope you will carry on making Toons and other visual texts for learning. Remember to leave a comment on this post. The more practise you get at commenting effectively the better. Was the post useful for you? In what way was it useful? Was there anything about it that you thought worked very well and why was this?

Welcome!

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Introduction

This is our course blog. The word blog is short for “weblog” which is just a name for a type of website or a where you can easily upload “stuff” for others to see. It can be all sorts of different things – it doesn’t have to be just writing. Your blog is what you want it to be – or sometimes what you need it to be to show off your skills! It can be any or all of these:

  • an online diary or record of things that you do;
  • a place to write and share ideas;
  • somewhere to include pictures, videos or other media;
  • a professional or business place;
  • a personal place where you write for yourself;
  • a portfolio where you gather evidence of your learning and/or your skills;
  • somewhere to tell others how you do things.

A piece of writing or other media that you put on your blog is called a “post” and when you put the post on the blog this is known as publishing.

What is this blog about?

This course is about making your own blog and using it to showcase your learning and skills by making posts and uploading files and using e-tools like the Voki to make your posts more interesting to make and visit. Doing this will also help you to gather evidence for three units in one of the Certificates in General Education for Adults.

This blog is here to help you with your own blog – we will do that in several different ways:

  • posts that “show and tell” how to use some of the e-tools you will use to make blog posts – they will use a mixture of writing, pictures, diagrams and sometimes audio and/or video;
  • posts that give you links to useful e-tools and how to use them;
  • we will use different e-tools to make our posts so you can see how they can be used;
  • we will comment on the posts we write so you can see how to add comments – and we will ask you to comment on the posts too.

We will set up your own blogs soon and help you to log in and get started.

Before you start with your own blog we would like you to start with making some comments on posts on the course blog. You will see that there are comments on this post, you can use these to help you get ideas about how to make comments on blog posts.

Once you have looked at the first comments on the post have a go at writing your own comment. Look at the “how to” below and follow the instructions to add your own comment.

Your comment will appear soon – at the moment we have the blog set for comments to be checked before they appear.  We will change this once you have had some practise.

Good luck with your first comment!