What’s really going on in K-12 educational technology (Sunday, July 29th, 2007)

Published by Aaron Sumner in Instructional Technology, Work at 5:32 pm with no comments.

I spent three days last week at the MACE MTI Conference in Bonner Springs, Kansas. There were some really slick presentations I hope to write more about soon, and a couple of total duds (Apple’s podcasting presentation probably did more of a disservice than anything to their wonderful suite of tools for this application). What […]

Editing screencasts in iMovie (Monday, July 23rd, 2007)

Published by Aaron Sumner in Instructional Technology, Moodle, Work at 7:36 pm with no comments.

After many disappointing efforts to edit my screencasts in iMovie, only to have the software totally munge the video quality during the conversion to one of its native formats, I finally hit upon the right string of Google keywords to find what I needed to know. Simply put, you need to determine your resolution up […]

Easy slideshows in Moodle with Keynote (Tuesday, July 17th, 2007)

Published by Aaron Sumner in Instructional Technology, Moodle, Work at 10:13 am with 1 comment.

Everybody knows I use Moodle quite a bit, but what they might not now is I now use Keynote exclusively for anything I’m doing that’s slide-y in nature. Hey, if it’s good enough for Steve Jobs it’s good enough for me.
One of the things I like about it is just how easy it is to […]

Moodle outside of K-12 (Sunday, June 24th, 2007)

Published by Aaron Sumner in Moodle, School, Work at 8:40 pm with no comments.

I’m a week into my online Moodle course now. I’ve actually learned some things, and had a highly productive session involving the built-in chat and a wiki. It worked out really well–three of us worked together in the chat room, and plugged in content in a wiki-based rubric. It’s great because it gives me a […]

On this week’s new gadgets (Wednesday, May 30th, 2007)

Published by Aaron Sumner in Palm, Work at 8:49 pm with no comments.

Whew, I’ve been knee-deep in a week-long workshop on Teaching Content to All–although I’ve been getting regular exposure to the concepts being introduced for a good ten years, it was nigh time to get some formal instruction. It’s been eye-opening–even though I don’t really do face-to-face instruction, my shop is doing more and more online, […]

The great project mgmt. experiment, cont’d. (Tuesday, May 1st, 2007)

Published by Aaron Sumner in Work at 2:53 pm with no comments.

I’ve come to realize that Project Management (capitalized) as it’s typically known is mostly a tool to keep managers looking busy to their superiors. I’m not interested in Gantt charts; I’m interested in communication and seeing what’s gotten accomplished–not what someone promised would be done by now and is now hopelessly off-schedule.
So we’ve begun (actively) […]

Project Management (Tuesday, April 24th, 2007)

Published by Aaron Sumner in Work at 4:22 am with no comments.

I’m going to a workshop on project management today; one of the perks of being faculty/staff at KU. I’ve felt a lot of internal pressure to become better at this craft and, while I don’t expect this workshop to cure any inadequacies I have in this department, I hope to get a few tips on […]