Glad the session went well too - in my experience of running Xerte training
sessions it's easy to engage the group because of how great the tools are.
The challenge is to the support all the individual questions and ideas that
inevitably ensue - but I guess that's also a positive and I was discussing
this with a colleague this morning - the built in ease of use, interactivity
and accessibility and collaborative features means it's much quicker to get
to a point when what is being discussed is pedagogy and effective practice
rather than the tools themselves. That's partly what we established this
particular mailing list for to discuss the teaching and learning side of
Xerte and to share examples and support the non-technical community.
Julian has obviously responded to the flickr question but what I would add
is that similar problems exist with any searching especially youtube so
where you need to be more certain of the results try using more unique terms
and obviously where it's content you're uploading yourselves just agree a
unique tag in advance. e.g. on youtube a search for xerte brings up lots of
xerte specific videos but does also bring up one or two undesirable clips or
at least irrelevant to the search term. With the xerte screencasts I've been
uploading I tagged with xerte and qadxerte and the latter is obviously more
unique and only results in my clips - at the moment! ;-)
It is a pain that Flash doesn't run on iOS devices especially the iPad but I
think it's true to say there are lot's of things which don't run quite the
same on the iPad and there are of course lot's of tablet devices on the
horizon which are likely to run Xerte content extremely well via Flash 10.1.
That said as Julian mentioned there are some things which won't quite work
at the moment and more importantly even if the LO's are technically
compatible usability and readability may not be practical via the standard
template given that it's optimised for 800 x 600 or above. However the power
of Xerte is that it is open source and can be extended so templates
optimised for smaller screens or even an alternative non-flash player are
possible. We've discussed this previously and hopefully at some point the
resources and opportunity will become available to target different mobile
platforms and devices. I had a dabble a few weeks ago with a version of the
main toolkits template optimised for a HTC Hero I upgraded with 2.2. and
Flash 10.1. Haven't touched it since but I put an LO online for testing with
just the image and sound page and quiz page modified for the smaller screen
and also some buttons removed. If you have an android device with Flash
Player 10.1 I'd be interested to hear how this works
http://mitchellmedia.co.uk/xerte/hero/
Final point - with LO's set to full screen or fill window they work very
well on the myriad of netbooks and UMPC's etc - at least those with Flash
player!
HTH
Ron
-----Original Message-----
From: A list to facilitate and support teachers using Xerte Online Toolkits
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Julian Tenney
Sent: 22 September 2010 13:07
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Feedback from Xerte OT hands-on session at U of Bath
I think the flickr search is 'safe' so it might not be same set of results
as a raw search. I'm not sure, perhaps it's also filtered for CC licensed
stuff. That's certainly the case in xpert, which is why you're not getting
all the results you see in flickr (unless you're telling me that the search
in xpert returns different results to a cc filtered search in flickr).
I ran some content on Android 2.2 recently and was overjoyed to see it work
reasonably OK. One key thing is different: there is no drag events broadcast
y the flash player in Android, so not all the interactivity works properly
(you can't drag anything - maybe some of the other events were different
too?)
Glad it went well.
J
-----Original Message-----
From: A list to facilitate and support teachers using Xerte Online Toolkits
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Julian Prior
Sent: 22 September 2010 12:03
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Feedback from Xerte OT hands-on session at U of Bath
Hi all,
I ran an introduction to Xerte Toolkits session this morning with the
elearning Team at University of Bath - thanks to Julian T and Ron for
their helpful suggestions regarding what to cover.
It was quite an informal session which started with the YouTube video
recommended by Ron with some back story about Xerte which I compared
with some of the commercial offerings out there (Articulate, Captivate
etc.) as well as some free alternatives (Udutu, eXe). I then talked
about some of the benefits of using the Toolkits (accessibility, ease of
use, browser based, creation of OER) and demoed the different page types
at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/toolkits/play_560 and showed how to set
up a project and the properties panel on our own installation. Using the
techdis 'creating your first LO' handout the team then split into pairs
and spent 30 mins or so mocking up a test LO.
Overall everyone was impressed with the tool and talked about a number
of ways they envisage using it to create everything from CVs/portfolios
to elearning training materials for staff. Some asked for some more good
practice examples so I'll have a trawl around these discussions and come
up with a list. A couple of interesting pieces of feedback which I said
I would post on here:
(a) There was some criticism of the relevance of the images pulled in
via the Flickr page template. They seemed to be less relevant to the
search term than an equivalent search on the Flickr website itself (the
same criticism was made of the Xpert attribution tool).
(b) A few people asked whether the finished LO could be accessed on
mobile devices including smartphones. Most people happened to have
iPhones and iPod Touches and from what I understand as Xerte is a
flash-based tool this is currently not on option on Apple devices (but
presumably would be fine on an Android device?). A shame as a Xerte LO
would look great on an iPad! Any future plans to develop an app that
enables this? ;-)
These were minor issues though and I think we'll see some more people
using the Toolkits at Bath in the near future.
cheers
Julian
___________________________________________
Julian Prior
e-Learning Development Officer
Division for Lifelong Learning,
University of Bath,
Claverton Down,
Bath BA2 7AY
Tel: +44 (0)1225 383864
Email: [log in to unmask]
http://www.bath.ac.uk/lifelong-learning
http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/elat
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