E-learning livens up at Lalor

It's probably time to profile one or two e-projects and their early progress. The other day I took the opportunity to visit Assunta and Carmela at Lalor to assist them with their first e-project and to review some of the resources available for their e-learning and networking generally.

Neither of the two e-leaders are teachers of ICT yet they are targeting their first project to beginner ESL students entering the computer room for the first time: developing an enhanced Powerpoint presie showing how to sit, use a mouse and log on to the computers, an e-learning 'object' that can be played whenever needed by students in the computer room. It will have photos, captions and audio narration.



Assunta and Carmela had planned and taken the photos beforehand. And, whilst Assunta had downloaded images to the PC before, she  had never prepared images for use in a presentation. So I introduced them to Picture Manager, an accessible Microsoft tool which we immediately pinned to the Start Menu (Windows XP) so they wouldn't need to go looking for it next time.

Whilst Assunta adjusted Contrast and Brightness, Carmela joined up to the CNLC Staffroom wiki in order to be able to access existing web resources assembled in the e-skills section there. Unfortunately there wasn't much for Powerpoint 2003 version, so we googled some help files at the Microsoft website to assist us to record narrations for the slides. She also joined the CNLCTalks students' wiki to see how a learning hub can work. (Both these wikis are still private but I'm hoping to open them up to the world in 2012 so they can be shared easily.)

Assunta and I checked that recording of narration was working - microphones on headsets worked beautifully (not always the case...) and they then copied their work to a USB to continue the project from home. Altogether a highly productive session.

Pretty soon they'll have a resource that will be immediately useful to the most beginner ESL students. It will be accessible in the Computer room from each computer and viewlable together via the projector - now that the projector has been repostioned so that viewers don't get a stiff neck!

Later, if they wish to, they'll be able to open it in Powerpoint 2010 and use ispring to convert it for uploading to an internet hub for sharing.