Portable web apps

With must students and staff having there own portable memory sticks portable apps http://portableapps.com/ are becoming more popular.

These are applications that can be run from memory sticks, most of these are open source, so free to use. The portableapps.com platform that can be downloaded free of charge provides a platform that looks similar to the start menu on windows. With a area on the left with all the applications you have installed on your device, then on the right a filing area for all the files on the memory stick.

There is an option to download the suite in 3 flavours, platform only, light and standard editions. All over the platform then there is the choice of abiword (just a word processor) or Open Office suite (a full freeware version of office).
Along with other apps for browsing, instant messaging, PDF reader, antivirus and audio players.

In the applications section there is even more apps to download from xampp and notepad++ for developers. There is even an options of running Mac OS Classic 7 of the stick, with a promise of a version of Linux coming soon.

So what’s this mean? Well you can have all your favourite compute programs with you all the time, carry your bookmarks and settings on your memory stick to use on any computers running windows with out leaving any personal data behind.

This is one stage removed of having your own computer on a memory stick, so the excuses of not having access to your work will soon becoming a thing of the past.

Some other websites with similar apps though in my opinion not as easy to use are http://www.makeuseof.com/
http://www.portablefreeware.com/all.php
http://www.tinyapps.org/internet.html

If any of you use portable apps, or know of any other good stuff that can be run from a memory stick please leave some comments

Remember the milk

I saw this program while I was trawling the internet and it looked interesting http://www.rememberthemilk.com/
It’s a handy little web app that can be used as a calendar or a to do list. Split in to work study and personal tasks.
You can be reminded about these tasks via email, SMS, and instant messenger (AIM, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, Skype and Yahoo! are all supported).

Remember the milk mobile can also be accessed via mobile phones.

Tasks can be added to the list by email, your’ remember the milk account has its own unique email address. So that emails are converted into tasks and appear in the inbox.

Web browsers can be set up so highlighted dates and time can be submitted at the click of a button.

One of the biggest selling points about RTM is the fact that it’s in the clouds. The online interface is straightforward and clean. It has Google Gears, so you can access your tasks even when you’re not online. Get the benefits of having info online and also avoid trouble if the campus WiFi goes down.

Do you use or have you tried Remember the Milk? What do you think? OR What do you use as your personal organization system? Let us know in some comments!

Remeber the Milk

After a slight incident in the office invloving a carton of milk todays post will be about Remeber the milk program, due to lack of time i will do this later tonight

Second Life Update

After attending the Second Life (http://secondlife.com/) training/information session on Friday I am starting to see some uses of the program, but still not to sure about how useful it will be for college education. The island we have got is for over 18’s only so this cuts down on most of our students with them been 16-18 year olds. The plot we have is surrounded by other colleges participating in this pilot scheme and at the moment is just a barren patch of land for just our students and a central island which can be used and booked out, for a communal area.

The communal area has large screens that can have videos or presentations shown on them with a large amphitheatre seating area around the outside, so this could be used as an online lecture theatre. There are also possibilities of using the space and main building as an art gallery to display students work, or even booking out individual room for online meetings.

This is all very good but how will it work in practice, the online lecture theatre idea has potential but will students really log on and actively participate in this virtual online lesson? And how will it compare to just using the VLE to download the PowerPoint, and using the inbuilt chat function.

Using the buildings as an art exhibition also could have its uses but it would just be the current students that could access this to see the work, so they could go see the ‘real’ work in college.

Other proposed uses could be to model scenarios for example a reception in a hair dresses to help with client services.

I’m starting to warm to the idea of Second life and can see how it would be useful for long distance collaboration, but for use in a college where people can be brought together either in person or online using the VLE it may be overkill. There is no doubt that social networking is increasing and becoming more useful and there is a strong belief that this is how things are going to be in the future. My opinion is that the web started off all text based and simple then developed in to heavy picture based and flashes sites and has now gone back to the simple layout, indicating that users are more interested in the content rather than the snazzy layout. Is Second Life just a graphical front end to what’s already out there?
How are we going to use our plot of land remains under planning but I am researching how other institutes use theirs(http://secondlifegrid.net/about/how).

What others said about second life...

Second Life

Off to training today to see a demonstration on second life and how to incoporate it in teaching. Im a sceptic on this and cant see the real learning values of what I think is just a 3d version of messenger, I hope the course will change my mind.

All the big uni's have plots on there so there must be some value in it.
Any one have any experience of using second life in education

Fronter uploads

After crossing my fingers on the upload working after the no show yesterday, this morning was more promising. All the students are now on Fronter in there correct groups :) but are greyed out and unable to log in. After investigation the tick box for allow student in as normal user is unchecked. Using a template applied to all the students to set them as normal users which should solve the problem did not work. After phone calls to tech support and been told that the apply template solution should work, the call has been escalated. The good news then the students are on Fronter but unable to log on. We await an update....

Welcome to E-learning

Hi and welcome to the start of my new blog. I have been given the task of trying to incorporate as many web 2.0 technologies into our teaching as possible. Hopefully this blog will serve as both experience of publishing a blog and as a resource for interesting tools and apps I have found on my trawls on the net.I hope that this becomes a busy blog with both colleagues and people from all around the world.

Fell free to comment on any of the posts.

Matt