Getting students to engage and interact with one another is not always easy when they are sitting together in a room. So how about when they are sitting at home, in front of their computers? This is, of course, one of the biggest problems we have when looking at distance learning courses. In this blog post, we’re going to take a little look at the theory behind using discussion boards and also suggest some ways to get your students using them.

Yesterday I found myself in the not too unfamiliar situation of having lots of large photographs that I needed to resize before uploading them online.  When I say “lots” I’m talking about 200 (that had been filtered from hundreds more!).
I needed to resize them for a number of reasons but mainly because in some cases, the file size of a single photo exceeded the allowed limit for the website I was uploading to.  Secondly, a knock-on effect, the large file size photos that were allowed would take absolutely ages to …

Not that everyone uses Firefox, and even those that do don’t all have my bad habit of opening lots of interesting things in lots of tabs, making sure that in options ‘open all tabs from last time’ is ticked but then still periodically be wiped out by a multiple crash….
Anyway, if I’m not alone in this, here’s a couple of nifty little tools that help you collect lots of open web pages – not just to avoid losing everything on a crash, but to collect and keep or collect and …

This is possibly a little cart before horse, as I guess I should first write a reminder about how much amazing and dynamic content there is out there for you, your research/networks and also – or even especially – your courses and your students. I hesitate to say especially for your students, because I think that there is phenomenal value for academic staff to use social media and the web to engage with their own peers and contacts to collaborate, learn, follow, research, test out and disseminate. Unless you’re comfortable …

Over the last year I’ve heard a lot about lecture capture or see recording at events – eg conference papers and keynotes (been recorded giving papers and keynotes in fact) and I’ve also heard – though not actually tried it yet – about YouTube’s auto subtitling (I have absolutely no idea how that would work, so I should check it out to find out!), but, instead, here is a really (really really) cool way to ‘caption’ an event video. Synch the video with the twitter stream that took place in …