Thursday, March 26, 2009

E-Guides Conference

Spent a happy day in Nottingham at the E-Guides national conference. Talked about iGoogle among other things. A question was raised about using twitter search with learners to weed out all their personal stuff and just see course related posts.

I guess that what I would do is use my favourite twitter gadget (I use BeTwittered) on an i-Google tab. Then think up a unique tag (first four letters of college name followed by a couple of random numbers would do the trick; so #Coll56 might be my tag.). Then when when you 0r your learners post make sure you/they put this code in the text (don't forget the # key to turn it into a Tag).

Now when you go to your gadget or Twitter account you can just click on the tag to see all the tagged posts and nothing else. With Betwittered I can click on the pull down menu above the posts to choose Search and type in the tag without the #. The only advantage is that it keeps the results in my BeTwittered gadget. I'm not sure it's worth the extra effort!

Don't forget www.ping.fm to set up multi posting to all your microblogs. And the use the Ping.fm gadget on i-Google.

Hope that helps!

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Magnify and click!

I have been on the lookout for a magnifying glass that I can use for presentations and if you follow my notebook link for e-learning you will find three examples listed. One, however, stands out over the others. Transinsight Labs offer the Lupe magnifier free. Not only that but it offers some nice shapes in the form of old fashioned magnifying glasses with handles. These are ideal for highlighting on-screen points. But the oval shape offers a great choice for personal viewing - and has transformed my Asus eeepc screen! Above all else you can click through so no more annoying switching on and off. I recommend this very highly. Don't go out without one on your laptop!

Go to http://www.transinsight.com/lab