PowerPoint alternatives - including PechaKucha

How else can you use PowerPoint? What can you use instead of PowerPoint? This demonstration seminar that I gave highlighted some examples and applications that you can use, including PechaKucha (10 years on).

A summary of examples and resources is in this SpicyNodes mindmap...

Text to speech

When I was asked recently about text to speech, I became diverted because there are many options. 

I had a reunion with lost friends, looked at different voices and characters and found a variety of resources.

In the end, I discovered that the person wanted a voice to read her text documents while she was commuting. I found some useful, recently published items too.

Here's the full article, presented as a Mahara page.

Moodle for colleagues working in the library

I created a Moodle course/web with several items, including selective release, images in the blocks, RSS feeds.

I used selective release to enable participants decide which topics they wanted to see.  Also they needed to add a message to the forum and an item in the glossary to release more items.

I created a guide to give instructions for access and made the course a self-enrolment with a key.

I presented it today to 28 library colleagues. They all managed to access it and all did most of the activities.

I'm sure that they learnt more than just a demonstration.

Dvolver example

I created the example very quickly from dvolver.com
As it automatically starts and has audio (music), I've put it under the more...

News (RSS) feed block to Moodle

These instructions show you how to add a block that shows RSS feeds to Moodle:

My video and printable PDF "how to" guides.

You can also add an RSS feed to a twitter account too.  To do this, I referred to a separate blog which works. (Today) :)  Here is the solution:

For an account called xxxxx you can use the feed link:

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=xxxxx

Put the name instead of the xxxxx

For example, for the user found at http://twitter.com/covcampus
I found that the following feed worked:

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=covcampus

Not any more! See the separate blog plus update.

Michael Peak, British Council

I attended a seminar given at Coventry University by Michael Peake on "HE Trends and Opportunities to 2020". It included research by the British Council on "the shape of things to come". The talk gave several sets of results comparing different countries' rates of students' movement between countries.

Some results included the following:

• UK growth rates of international students has always been positive since 1995.
• The USA growth rates of international students went negative after 9/11
• The Australian growth rates of international students decreased in 2009-10 following the tightening of related legislation. 
• Looking at a graph showing these rates over time, it looks like the UK follows Australia - will there be a similar decrease to that shown by Australia in the years to come?

Mahara for 198EM Students and their tutor

You can record what you've been up to using Mahara. (e-portfolio)
But you can do more than that.  You can also use Mahara for creating presentations and web pages.  And simple blogs.
This demonstration session gave some examples and included how a page could be created and shared in Mahara.

More Mahara - audio, templates, planning and more

So you have used Mahara to create a page and share it. There are more things that you can do with Mahara, such as adding audio, creating a template and using its basic planning application. This session demonstrated these facilities and showed examples of how they could be used.

Pre-requisites for this session

Summary of creating a page and secret URL

See Mahara guide (PDF) http://tinyurl.com/coventry-e-portfolio
NOTE: there's an Addendum to page 2 (PDF), to reflect the new access via Moodle 2 

Exporting some pages and adding them to Curve

Mahara Basics Demonstration Update (PDF) - see pages 3 and 4