Last year flex:ed supported the Children’s Services area of CIT in developing a video to be used as a tool in a child observation assessment for future Childcare workers.
This activity is generally used to demonstrate competency in recognising certain behaviours in children and is conducted in the workplace. We produced a video of a range of children interacting in a childcare environment, with a timestamp at the bottom of the screen. The advantage of developing a video is that the teachers are able to know what it is that the learners are observing, learners can all observe the same thing in a class and are able to discuss what they are seeing and it is possible to view actions more than once.
Multi media overlay in a Jazz piano video makes a fantastic advanced teaching and learning tool! Im something of a jazz piano fan and an amateur player so was impressed to find Doug McKenzies work on Youtube. Throughout Doug’s video the viewer is able to analyse Doug’s jazz approach to the song Some Day My Prince Will Come not only by watching the performance, but by reading the brief , intermittent explanatory script that accompanies the performance onscreen and following along with the onscreen keyboard that is lighting up showing the chords as they are played. It provides a top platform for advanced analysis of the player’s interpretaion and jazz style!!
This could be a useful teaching framework to enable advanced analysis of a complex task…?
Aaron started with us this week as our newest (and possibly shiniest) educational designer
Aaron will beef up the FLS team with his enthusiasm and his skills in imagining CIT’s next generation online learning environment (whatever that may be).
Aaron comes to us with a varied background (always a handy thing) and has worked in the school and VET sectors for many years. Although he reckons he’s never ‘gotten into blogging’ before, he’s just started one today!
He’ll be making the rounds at CIT, as well as further afield, so please make him feel welcome
Recently I (Rebecca Trynes) worked in collaboration with the people over at Communications Media and Music to provide a new look for their whole of department course – “The Communication Lounge”. This is an information course for students that provides online resources such as Manuals for all the technical equipment they have, information on upcoming events such as MICfest, the Folk Festival and the Fat Awards and much more.
Below is the homepage for the course. When elements are rolled over with the mouse text appears to tell you what’s underneath. These areas link to content modules, organiser pages, discussion boards and email that have been created in WebCT using the built in tools. The homepage is constructed using a stylesheet and background images so that the important information (the links) load quickly on people’s machines, regardless of the speed of their internet connection.
The image was created using a variety of 3D programs. Poser 7 was used for the people, Bryce 5 was used to create the room and most of the furniture and objects and Lightwave 7 was used to create the video camera the woman in front is holding.
As part of activities held for Library Information Week, I attended the launch of the CIT Library’s new search tool called SuperSearch. It’s a search tool that allows users to search across a range of databases (plus the existing library catalogue) and filter search results to full-text, by author, and so on.
What’s so special about this tool? Well, probably nothing much to the eye, except that it can potentially lift the rate of use of the databases CIT subscribes to, making it even more cost-effective to have them in the first place! Also, with many of our students (often studying in highly practical contexts), getting to understand how databases work can be more trouble than it’s worth. So the SuperSearch tool should go some way to alleviating the frustration of locating a relevant database, searching (and each database has its own search method), and retrieving or saving results for later use.
SuperSearch allows you to email search results (which you can filter further by checking those you wish to keep) and the email contains the direct link to the article you found. You can also save and download a copy for offline reading.
