Pat Walsh

Today I hosted a workshop as part of the Dublin eLearning Summer School. The purpose of the workshop was to demonstrate the analytic features of Blackboard Learn 9.1 

It went well, there was about 10-12 people in attendance and I felt there was some genuine interest in the tools. I used the workshop as an opportunity to launch the resource website http://webcoursesanalyics.wordpress.com and encouraged the people in attendance to run the analytic tools themselves on their own Blackboard modules. I also encouraged those in attendance to refer to the website if they were interested in finding out more about these tools.

Can Technology Enhance the Student Experience?

She discusses how she incorporate web 2.0 technologies into her classroom environment. These technologies facilitated a more collaborate , student led approach. She highlights the positive impact this approach had on her student cohort and shares her experiences of how educational technology has transformed her educational practice. I have referred to this video in a number of reflections during the course of the MSc.

Having a background in I.T I can see enormous potential for technology to impact on education. Our own Institutional virtual learning environment has many web 2.0 technologies that enhance the student learning experience. Once such tool is a webinar technology tool called Blackboard Collaborate. Please click on the video to learn more about this feature.

The annual Horizon Reports highlight so many technologies predicted to impact on 3rd level education over the coming years. Whether we see them being adopted by Irish 3rd Level Institutions is another debate as some of these technologies require considerable investment, time and people to champion them.

Please see my post below for more information on the annual Horizon Reports.

Project Loon is a fascinating project ,very much in its infancy stage which aims to bring internet access to everyone across the globe.

The idea behind Project loon is that everyone on Earth will have internet access. Two thirds of the world’s population still does not have internet access.

Project Loon is a network of balloons traveling on the edge of space, designed to connect people in rural and remote areas.

Please click on he the Project Loon video for more information

Elevator Pitch -Virtualbox

Today in class we were asked to present a technology that assisted us in our professional practice and made our lives easier.The technology piece I presented was a software program called VirtualBox.

Based on the concept of virtualisation, Virtual box is an application that can be installed on mostly any operating system such as Windows, Linux or Mac.

It enables you to extend the capabilities of your existing computer so that it can run multiple operating systems, it does this by using a portion of the existing hardware on your pc. 

So for example, say you could have a Windows 7 pc that you use for your everyday work but you a software program that will only run on Windows 8 or XP. Using virtual box you can set-up and configure a Windows 8 client and run this piece of software using virtual box.

It is an extremely useful application 
to use in a testbed environment. 

Please click on the video for a more detail demonstration 

Apps 

 Jan 2013   - 40 Billion Apps

Apple announced today that it hit the 40 billion mark in terms of app downloads from its app store.

Almost half of these  "20 billion" apps were downloaded in 2012.

More information on this can be found by clicking here

The Horizon Report 2012 cited a study by Distimo predicting that 44 billions apps will have been downloaded by 2016.

They clearly under estimated the popularity of apps.

These figures released by Apple highlight the growing demand and popularity of apps and it will be interesting if Apple ever release details as to how many of these apps would be classed as educational apps.

It would appear that figures referred to in the horizon report were grossly under estimated

Horizon Reports 2010-2014