8th Irish Variety in Chemistry Teaching Meeting

DIT played host to the 8th Irish Variety in Chemistry Teaching meeting, modelled on the very successful UK Variety in Chemistry Education (ViCE) meeting on Thursday May 10th. There was a workshop in the morning covering two aspects of technology in chemistry teaching; using wikis, by Claire McDonnell, who demonstrated how to set up, edit and modify a wiki, along with highlighting the advantages of a wiki for monitoring group work – the ability to be able to track who did what and when. Claire identified this as the most useful aspect of wikis from her perspective in teaching. My…

Activity progress bar in Articulate

Sometimes there are several things going on in one Articulate presentation slide and the progress bar (Seekbar) at the bottom is not informative about individual activities occuring in a slide. I wanted to include an activity progress bar to show how long a video was going to take (and give a sense that what was being shown in the video was “live”). I used a wipe animation as shown in the Screenr below.

Pre-Lecture Resources Webinar 26 Jan 2011

I’ll be giving a webinar as part of the fantastic Sligo IT webinar series this Wednesday at lunchtime. You can register and find out more here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1135441135. The webinar will cover some of the work I’ve done on my Teaching Fellowship on the area of pre-lecture resources. It’ll be my first webinar – I’m quite nervous about it, but looking forward to the instant interaction of the audience as I give the talk! Abstract: This presentation will outline the use of online pre-lecture resources to supporting in-lecture material. The design rationale is to develop a cyclical approach between online resources and lectures,…

Articulate: Timed response for game/simulation

I’m interested in creating an interactive simulation around a titration, whereby a student, watching a video of a titration, has to click a button when they see a colour change. I think this should be fairly easy to do in Articulate – I’ve made a Screenr of how I intend to do it (buttons etc are rough and ready for this demo). I’d suggest watching it in full screen/HD:

Podcasting and screencasting for supporting lectures

Prompted by my visit to Edinburgh next week to the “More Effective Lectures” workshop, I have compiled several blog posts and bits and pieces of other writing into a Resource Pack that I hope might be useful to other practitioners entitled: “Podcasting and screencasting for supporting lectures“. The resource is a PDF file and is available at this link: Podcasting and Screencasting for Supporting Lectures or click on the image below. The resource covers: Introduction to the use of podcasts/screencasts in education Overview of the design of e-resources Tips for preparing podcasts and screencasts Tools of the trade: Audacity, Camtasia and…

Iodine Clock – Pre-Lab Activity

This is an Articulate interaction which incorporates video demonstrations the various aspects of the iodine clock experiment and then has a quiz towards the end. This could be used as a pre-lab activity, where students could print out their response to the quiz and bring it to the lab, or alternatively link the quiz to the VLE by SCORM. Click on the image to access the resource: Funding from NDLR and DIT gratefully acknowledged.

Maths for Chemistry Resources

Published 11th themed resource (along with a few sub resources from these not given below) on my site Maths for Chemistry today. Five more on basic chemistry calculations on the way! It’s amazing how much I’ve learned about Articulate in doing these, and interesting to track my own development ability (slowly improving 🙂 ) 11. Titration calculations 10. Basic Statistical Analysis 9. Paired t-test 8. One-sample t-test 7. Mass-mole calculations 6. Completing an F-test 5. Student’s t-test 4. Functions and Calibration Plots 3. Raoult’s Law 2. Logs in chemistry 1. Simultaneous Equations in Chemistry

Button in Articulate

Having watched @elearning‘s Screenr demonstrations on using icons and following on the same theme from before on my toggle switch demo, I was interested in seeing how to use animation in PowerPoint to mimic a button depress. This demonstration shows how a shape over the button on each slide which rapidly disappears (Exit animation) gives the impression of a button press. It needs tweaking but it *could* look good! Demo 1 shows an example Demo 2 shows the effect of different fade rates – seems the faster the better!