Flowgram

Some of you will know that I was an enthusiastic user of the Flowgram on-line presentation tool. I made several presentations and web tours with it this session, including Effective Presentations (reported in Fresh and Crispy), How to Cite, Research Techniques and Tools - The Presentation, Introducing Blackboard, Pebble Pad and LEAP and an Introduction to Flowgram itself. Not all experiences were postive: for example, in Always Have a Plan B, things didn't quite go to plan on the day, and beacuse of technical problems, How to Cite was finally published on Slideshare rather than Flowgram.

Even so, I am sad to report that, due to a failure to monetize their service in these difficult times, Flowgram will be shutting up shop at the end of the month. My only way to rescue my content is to convert it to video, which means that I'll have to regenerate it in some other form next year. It also means that the Flowgram slide-shows will presumably disappear from both from this blog and Blackboard on that date.

I guess it serves as a salutory lesson about trusting your educational content to third parties, but i shall morn its passing.

Research Techniques and Tools - The Presentation

This is the Flowgram for my upcoming presentation on Research Techniques and Tools that was mentioned in the previous post. I will be presenting this to level 3 engineering students at 5.00 pm on Thursday 16th October in the Faraday Lecture Theatre (and you are welcome to come along) but as promised, I thought that I would give the learning-lab community a sneak preview. Although developed for my module EG-353 Research Project, and aimed at a particular group of students, much of what I say about the library resources and the use of Web 2.0 technology for finding materials, recording what's found, reflecting on what's been read or discovered, writing up research results, time management and backing up would be applicable to most disciplines I think. Any feedback you have (particularly from the library professionals!) would be gratefully received.

Introducing Blackboard, Pebble Pad and LEAP

Some of you may of heard of the Blackboard Quest that we use in the School of Engineering to ease our first year students into our MLE of choice! This year the quest was expanded a little to take in brief tours of Pebble Pad (the new Personal Learning System which replaced Oremi this year) and the University's LEAP provision. I used Flowgram to create a presentation/site demo that will go on Blackboard after I've presented this live in a lecture next Monday. I found Flowgram very useful for this combination of PowerPoint and live web sites. Hope it inspires you to try something similar youself.

Follow Up

One issue that I noted was the fidelity of reproduction of the web pages for the University was not good in Flowgram's live interactive view. I'm not sure if this is a feature of the way the CMS works at Swansea, but the pictures are missing which means that big chunks of the functionality is missing too! Work around is to use screen grabs or screencasts but that rather defeats the object!