Although I had more important bug fixing and class related duties that I could have attended to, I spent today adding some eye-candy to flickrCC - now I can open other image sizes in a pretty little light box instead of as some ugly over-sized extra div on the existing page. I updated the training o2 version but not the instance on bluemountains.net, which I’ll hold off from until I’m sure it really is an improvement to the user experience.
photo credit: Zach_ManchesterUK
Posted on August 21st, 2008 by botheredbybees
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It must have been my weekend for creative laziness. Following on from my self-assessment add-on, I’ve created a function that will build printable (or cut and pasteable) quiz pages for a unit of competency.
It’s not quite as magical as it sounds - you need to have created some questions for the unit first (click on the ‘questions’ link below any submitted resource and you’ll see a form at the bottom of the page that allows you to quickly enter multi-choice questions for that resource). Or you can get your students to enter questions, and then vote on their faves (questions that get voted down to negative ratings won’t make it to the final printout)
To produce a page of all the questions for a unit visit the tools tab and click on the ‘Quiz’ link.
Here’s an example for the Unit: ‘Transfer content to a website’: http://trainingo2.net/quiz.php?category=ICAS4201A&s=ICA05
photo credit: darkmatter
Posted on August 17th, 2008 by botheredbybees
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I recently had to ask one of my classes to perform a self assessment of their current internet access skills. The idea was that we could then identify which areas everyone understood already and concentrate on those skills that folks nominated as needing more work.
It wasn’t hard to create a form from the unit’s performance criteria, but I figured that in future it would be even easier if there was a link on training o2 to make the survey for me.
I short piece of code later… and there’s now a link on every unit’s tools tab that looks like:
- Self Assessment
- self assess your current skill level for each of the unit’s performance criteria
^ this example is for the unit: ICAB4169A - Use development software and IT tools to build a basic website.
Once you have the page URL you can send it to your students so they can click on the radio buttons to fill in the form and then to print it out, or print the page and then make a paper copy for each class member to fill in with a crayon or something.
It’s so easy that I might just run one at the beginning and the end of each subject to see if we’ve made any progress in our time together.
It would be nice if there was some sort of back end that collated the results and displayed a class worth as a bar chart or something - I must put it on my to-do list.
photo credit: SuperFantastic
Posted on August 15th, 2008 by botheredbybees
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I thought I’d better check in with a post in case anyone thought I was dead or something. Truth be told I’ve been working on other stuff for a bit; most of it boring (marking, mentoring, indulging in political machinations to change our TAFE’s course offerings, housekeeping, etc.). I’ve also been up to some interesting activities not particularly relevant to trainingo2, to whit: the sidewalk circus, which chronicles one of my other interests (street theatre).
So, I’m still alive, and still thinking about to2, I’m just not focussed here at the moment.
photo credit: Simon Grossi
Posted on July 14th, 2008 by botheredbybees
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I finally tracked down a bug that’s been annoying me for the longest time in flickrCC. It turns out that unicode and quote marks in some picture titles were messing with the JavaScript and HTML.
I think it’s all squashed, so now all thumbnails should open correctly when clicked on.
photo credit: chrisgamemaker23
Posted on June 24th, 2008 by botheredbybees
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I finally got to look at cloZure in Internet Explorer today and found that it had some trouble with the ‘printable version’ link for cloze tests (a problem that had been pointed out through the feedback form). All fixed now.
photo credit: eshm
Posted on June 23rd, 2008 by botheredbybees
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With the end of semester upon us here at TAFE, I thought I’d put together a web app so that students can evaluate their subjects.
eValuation lets you create a survey for any subject or course in about 5 seconds. Note the URL and pass it on to your class to get some instant feedback - hopefully positive 
photo credit: aussiegall
Posted on June 22nd, 2008 by botheredbybees
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Since I’m slated to give a quick talk on wikis in the classroom this week I put a little effort into building a new to2 function that generates wikispaces pages from unit descriptions. Use the link marked ‘Wikispaces page’ on any unit’s tools tab. For example, click on Wikispaces page link on the Apply basic communications skills tools page
photo credit: benchristen
Posted on June 14th, 2008 by botheredbybees
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After getting some good feedback from various language educators I’ve added a simple English dataset to Clozure. This was drawn from a version of the wikipedia that’s written for people who’s first language is not English. There are far fewer articles (35,000 as opposed to 2 million), but they’re generally written in a more user friendly way.
While I was in a coding mood, I added a function to trim wordy articles back to a reasonable length, and fixed up a couple of small programming errors that I noticed along the way (for links and printable pages). This should make everyone’s experience of cloZure a lot more fun.
Of course, there’s still a few things on the to-do list, but I’m tired of computers for today, so I’m going to play with something else for a while.
photo credit: . jonathan.gill.
Posted on June 3rd, 2008 by botheredbybees
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there was nothing interesing on TV tonight, so I added some game playing elements to cloZure. Now you get a score according to how clever you are at picking the right words, and can lodge your name and score on a scoreboard for the topic.
You need to be pretty hard up for entertainment, but it should while away some minutes for a few poor folk
photo credit: 油姬
Posted on May 31st, 2008 by botheredbybees
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