Week4 Final Project

References:

(2010). Epsilen environment. Retrieved September 13, 2010, from http://www.epsilen.com/LandingSite/index.aspx

Shirky, C. (2008). Institutions vs. collaboration. Retrieved September 13, 2010, from http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration.html

Week4 Udutu Project

My Udutu lesson is on the Frog Life Cycle and it is geared towards lower elementary. In all honesty, at first I was not excited about using the Udutu because the format was foreign and challenging. But, I will say as I got started and played around with it I did enjoy myself. The best experience was Skyping with peers and asking each other questions and working through a portion of the workspace together. As a learner I do much better with instant hands-on direction. After Skyping it was much easier to navigate and understand the Udutu formats. Who knows I may even use Udutu in the future.

http://publish.myudutu.com/published/launcheval/23104/Course41659/Launch.html

Week4 Comment 3

The beginning of my experience with udutu was nothing but negative. Being used to many complicated programs that can allow many tasks at once, with customization at the fingertips, I was nothing but disappointed. The videos did not load (there is no loading bar to show progress). I had to have live consultation with my classmates. I discovered that they also struggled with many issues I had and were willing to share many great tips with me.Monika,

I love this Udutu and I can see it being used in the classroom. The videos are engaging, the content is academic, and the assessments are fun. I found myself wanting complete your entire project. Thanks for sharing.

Week4 Comment 2

This week we were to work on the Udutu project that was proposed in week 2. I found Udutu to be a great authoring tool that has some good templates to get a course designer started. The navigation and instructions could use some more development. Like a progress bar letting me know my media files are being uploaded and how much longer it will take. It would also be be nice not to have to type the word delete in all caps when I want to delete a page in the lesson I am creating. However for a free tool I think this works well and I really don't have a lot of issue with it.

Q,

I enjoyed your presentation. You have wonderful “stage” presences and the videos were quite enjoyable. The interactivity within your Udutu was fun and engaging. At the end for the assessment I choose wrong answers and the result of acknowledging that the answers were wrong and to try again was good feedback. Way to go, Q.

Week4 Comment 1

The UDUTU was not difficult to use but the media controls leave a lot to be desired. My project, a software tutorial created in Captivate 2.0, only publishes to a .swf file. From there I had to convert it to a .mov file, which is a format that is supposed to be supported by UDUTU, but will not load due to file size. As per the wetpaint wiki, I used the Adobe Encoder to convert the .mov files to .flv files, which then only took about 3 minutes to upload to UDUTU. UDUTU then further compresses and re-scaled the media files, resulting in very poor quality. NOT a tutorial that I would want to distribute to anyone with expectations of any learning to be achieved. Going back to my original Captivate file, I tried to rescale the project from the original source, but it would not reduce sufficiently without loosing a good bit of my screen capture and graphics. To get it the size down effectively, I would have had to re-create the project from scratch, which seemed to onerous a task just to learn how to use UDUTU.

Laura,

What a great idea to share about archiving. Your tutorial is informative and gives good reasons that would benefit a user to answer the question "why" to archive information. I liked the option to choose which video I was interested in watching rather than clicking to the next slide and going in a mandatory format. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

Week3 Link to AR Blog for month 10

This is the link to my AR Blog for month 10:

http://web.me.com/colishizaki/AR_Website/Ishs_Blog/Entries/2010/9/19_LMO_month_10.html

Week3 Comment 2

In this weeks reading I decided to take a look at what the future may hold for LMS/CMS. The great part about this is we can speculate all we want. There are some great things to come based on the readings and some of the trends that researchers are looking.

Q,

This is an amazing time as a professional in education. I have found as a teacher of 5^th graders to embrace that they may know more about a Web 2.0 tool or a software program than I do. My job is to help my students expand their knowledge utilizing these tools. The advancement within Web 2.0 tools is changing quickly and it is my endeavor to be sure there is still human contact and interaction with student/teacher relationship. Some things cannot be taught by technology…successful human interaction is vital for happinessJ.

P.S. Love the visual, I know it is from Wall-E but it reminds me of a spaceship from Star Wars.