RSC NewsFeed

Two for the price of one in this post. First off try Google for Educators a pointer to a comprehensive collection of information, tips and tricks connected to the Google application and search engine family.

Here you’ll find everything from conducting a basic web search to the finer points of Google Docs and all with an eye on optimising their use in education. Mighty comprehensive and mighty impressive. But so is the mechanism which is facilitating the gathering together in a coherent package of what might otherwise be a vast sprawl of information. 

Step forward LiveBinders, an online facility which describes itself as ‘The Knowledge Sharing Place’ which offers the possibility of storing documents, images and videos online. Imagine a huge online box file and you’re getting close to the underlying idea of this site. Google for Educators provides just one example of how it might be used. Best of all the facility is free to use.

The UK SoundMap from the British Library is setting out to map the full range of sounds which can be experienced around the UK from torrential rain in the south of England to the sound of the Atlantic Ocean rolling on to a beach in the Hebrides. A number of technologies are combined including Google Maps and Twitter to make this a fully interactive and immersive experience and you are invited to get your sound recording kit out and take part.

What are the distinctive sounds of your area and how do those sounds impact on you and the people living around you? Click here for full details of the UK SoundMap and to see how you can take part.

HistoryPin was created by the social movement We Are What We Do, in partnership with Google. The idea behind the site is to juxtapose images of the past with their current location as pulled in from Google Street View. Buildings and streets are aligned automatically and the results can be startling and impressive as can be seen from the example of John Knox’s House in the Royal Mile below. A 90-second video on the home page gives a detailed explanation of how the site works and how you can become involved.

We don’t normally offer a free plug to commercial companies here on NewsFeed but one good turn deserves another….London-based Mouse Training are offering free training manuals to download for all of the major components of the Microsoft Office suite. Click here to check it out.

A clever tool bar designed to help students with literacy difficulties to interact with text on screen is helping schools, universities and colleges to save money across the UK and internationally.

MyStudyBar is the latest initiative from the JISC Regional Support Centre Scotland North & East and consists of a collection of freeware and open source software specially selected to help students with literacy difficulties (planning, reading, writing, vision and voice). Although MyStudyBar is designed to support learners with literacy-related difficulties such as dyslexia, the toolbar can offer potential benefits to all learners.

Thousands of downloads from as far afield as New Zealand and Australia equal savings of more than half a million pounds as the commercially equivalent price of the applications on a single MyStudyBar download is around £120. Garth Ritchie from the Ministry of Education, New Zealand, comments that the package “will make it easier to get assistive technology to the students in schools for whom it would not be considered otherwise. [JISC’s] work has direct spinoffs for inclusive education around the world.”

The tool bar includes a range of tools to support inclusion such as mind mapping, screen masking, word prediction, talking dictionary, text-to-speech, different saving options and voice recognition.  Together, these have been designed to support the complete study cycle from research, planning and structuring to getting across a written or spoken message.

Since it was launched in early 2010, thousands of individuals and organisations have downloaded MyStudyBar, from the John Moores University in Liverpool to the Fundación Todos Podemos Ayudar in Colombia. As Andrew Edis from New College Nottingham comments, “We have already distributed 16,000 USB sticks containing free and open source software …right across the college. I must say I’m impressed with this – in times of financial squeeze the fact that MyStudyBar is open source is a major plus.”

MyStudyBar has been produced by the same team at RSC Scotland North & East which created the award-winning AccessApps software suite.

More information on MyStudyBar

Software collections that make up the EduApps family

by m.bohn@jisc.ac.uk (Maike Bohn)

Google have announced a new online video editor for YouTube. The editor is browser based requiring no additional software to be installed and makes it easy to add existing videos, trim clips, add a new soundtrack before republishing at a click of a button. The video below is YouTube take on the process:

In a related development Martin Hawksey, e-Learning Advisor for RSC Scotland North & East, released his latest experiment using twitter for video subtitles with a prototype tool which allows timeline commenting of YouTube videos.

No doubt to counter the growing interest in Google Docs, Microsoft this month released the beta version of its own free online suite of office programmes. Marketed under the title of Office Web Apps are free online versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.  In addition users can claim 25 GB of free online storage to store their documents on Microsoft’s SkyDrive service. To take up the offer you first have to sign up with Windows Live online and then you can begin to generate new documents.

With LiveWeb (a free PowerPoint add-in) you can insert web pages into a PowerPoint slide and refresh the pages real-time during slide show so that you don’t have to go outside your presentation to show your audience a web page. All versions of PowerPoint are supported for 97 to 2010 and this very clear explanation from makeuseof.com explains how to download, install and then run the add-in.

This time last year the newswire was abuzz with news about Google latest project Wave. Riding the hyperbole was RSC Scotland North & East’s Higher Education blog with a collection of posts exploring how Google’s new real-time collaborative platform could be used in education. After the initial hiatus for invites to join the Wave Beta programme, which included invites being sold for $5,100 on ebay, the interest in Wave has calmed as both Google and users work out how this product can be best used.

Today Wave is still in active development, but Google are confident that enough of the rough edges have been knocked off and are making it available to all:

Starting today, we are making Google Wave openly available to everyone as part of Google Labs. You no longer need an invitation to wave — simply visit wave.google.com and sign right in. Likewise, if you are a Google Apps administrator at a business, school or organization, you can now easily enable Google Wave for all your users at no extra cost (more on ourEnterprise blog).

In the announcement made on the official Google Wave Blog they highlight how some educational institutions are already using Wave:

University students and professors worldwide have used waves within and beyond the classroom to collaborate on Latin poetry translations, write academic research papersand even build new functionality with Wave’s APIs. An ICT teacher also enjoyed having her 5th-graders do their class research in Wave.

Click here to read the announcement on the Google Wave blog

I’ve been using Microsoft Office 2007 for over two years now and I still struggle to find things in the new menu bar also known as the ‘ribbon’. A recent minor breakthrough was the realisation that not all of the commands are actually displayed (if you click on the round home button, top-left, select ‘Word Options’, then ‘Customize’, you can list all the hidden commands by changing the ‘Choose commands from’ option to ‘Commands Not in the Ribbon’. I’m sure there are many commands in this list that you don’t recognise, equally the features of Microsoft Office are so vast that I’m sure you are not aware of some of the simple things you can do to improve your productivity. If you don’t have the time to attend your institutions MS Office training (if they still provide such a thing), you might want to try Microsoft Office Labs Ribbon Hero.

Ribbon Hero is a free Office add-on which allows you to learn about Word PowerPoint and Excel into more bite-sized chunks. By taking ‘challenges’ you can learn about increasing your Office productivity, and to motivate you towards Office mastery you are awarded points (with the option of comparing how you are getting on by uploading to a leaderboard on Facebook.  The video below shows you how to ‘play the game’:

Click here to download Ribbon Hero