Low Cost Tools for eLearning

In case you haven’t heard, Aviary, the on-line image suite of tools, is not free. While, it used to be fairly cheap, not being free is even better.

It’s also part of the new Google App Stoe, and you have findout more about it in this YouTube video.

Walter Wimberly News aviary, free, Image editing

Part of the projects I’ve been working on over the past year involve the classes I teach at a local college.  Recently I’ve started posting short snippets from my class examples on YouTube.

YouTube allows videos that are less than 10 minutes long, although most of the videos are under 5 minutes. You can find a link to the videos here.

I’ve been creating the videos almost entirely with Camtasia, which I guess I’ll need to do a review for.

Take care an enjoy the videos.

Walter Wimberly News Video, Web Design and Development, YouTube

As I spoke last year at the eLearning Guild’s Annual Gathering (2009) I will be speaking at the 2010 convention as well, although it has been renamed Learning Solutions.

I’m session 101 – Using Web Analytics to Track the Use of Formal and Informal Learning. The title is fairly self explanatory – but we will be looking how do we track usage of our learning site(s). I will show this using the free Google Analytics tool.

Given that I am Session 101 – I will be presenting the first day, Wednesday March 24, 2010 10:45 AM.

I hope to see you all there.

Walter Wimberly News Distance Learning, E-learning, Education, Online Learning, Online Teaching and Learning, Online Training

I have gotten sooooo far behind in publishing these reviews, helps, and hints; and it’s all my fault.

This past year has gotten so busy, and I keep finding new and cool software to play with (that is free or very low cost) and not finding the time to post about them.  My apologies. I will endeavor to do better coming up. I working on a posting schedule which should help – and I’ve got some great stories to tell as well. You should also be (hopefully) seeing some changes to the site in the next few weeks as I work on the layout a little bit – moving it from the default that I downloaded, into something even more “me”.

Walter Wimberly News

I found out my speaking time at Total Connection 2009.  I’ll be speaking on Wednesday from 4 to 5PM.

My topic, if you didn’t remember, is Introduction to Web Analytics: Measuring the Use of your LMS.

Hope to see you then, and if not, I’ll be posting notes here as well so you can see how to, for little to no cost, measure the effectiveness of your website.

Walter Wimberly News

If you attened eLearners Guild Annual Gathering, you know I try to give you all something to walk a way with.

I’ll be doing the same at Total Connection 2009 (not sure which day I’m speaking on yet).  However, I will be presenting Introduction to Web Analytics: Measuring the Use of Your LMS. It is being offered as part of two (2) different learning tracks (Metrics and Report Tracking and Pathlore Deep Dive) .

As is normal for me, I’ll be showing how to use the free tool Google Analytics to measure how users interact with your site, and how to help determine if your LMS, or learning website, is helping or hurting your ability to  train.

So if you can attend, I’d love for you to stop by so I can go over how to help you with measuring the usage of your learning site. If you can’t attend, I’ve written about analytics measurements on websites before on my own blog, http://blog.waltdesign.com/

As normal, you can expect to see my slides later one as well.

Walter Wimberly News Google Analytics, Searching, Website

For those who are used to Photoshop, Gimp is a good, but secondary type of tool. While Gimp is very strong, it does lack some core features which make it a little more difficult to use.

However several people have worked on adding plug-ins and skins to make Gimp more like Photoshop. Smashing Magazine has a list of  “tweaks”  to Make Gimp Replace Photoshop.

Definitely worth checking out if Paint.Net doesn’t do everything you need it to, and Gimp isn’t quite what you were looking for, but Photoshop is a little too much.

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• Focus on GIMP Plug-ins (graphic-design-software.suite101.com)

Walter Wimberly News gimp, Graphics, Image editing

GIMP is another free image editing software tool. It is more advanced than Paint.Net, if you need the added funcationality, and it supports linux as well as Mac OS X in addition to the standard Windows.

GIMP, is a full featured image editing application, supporting layers, plug-ins, as well as standard features for editing your images. Standard editing tools include perspective fixing, wide range of image reading and writing, photo editing, and more.  So it is full of strength.

Unfortunately, it is not as easy to use as some other tools. However, some people have added plugins and skins to make it easier to use.  Well look at those shortly.

Walter Wimberly Reviews free, gimp, image

If you are working on brainstorming ideas, using a “Mind Map” tool is often a great tool to see how things interrelate to one anonther.

Here is a tool I found recently Mind Node , which works on the Macs for developing Mind Maps. Designed to be simpler to use, it might provide what you need if your looking for an easy to use tool.

Mind Node has a free as will as a paid ($14.95) version. Something to look at if you run OS X (10.5 or greater is required).

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• What is Mind Mapping? (dappledair.blogspot.com)
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Walter Wimberly News free, Mac, Mind map

At the AG09 conference, there was a lot of discussion about using social websites, and putting them in a corporation to capture knowledge. This article list some software for building social community types of sites. So if you are wanting to build a social aspect into your company, this might be a good place to look.

Many in the list are free, which is great.  Unfortunately, it does come at a slight cost – that is a loss of some functionality. That functionality is usually in the form of not integrating with your Active Directory so you can have automatic logins. You also might benefit from someone who knows how to set it up, configure, and brand it to look the way you would want it to.

In many of the sessions, people talked about using something like Share Point from Microsoft. While a good application, it is expensive. However, it does give you the the ability to automatically login. It also has lots of features, which might be expensive to add-on, and/or learn to use. However, you can find classes to take on-line and at training centers.

The list is a bit old, unfortunately, which means some of the software projects are not supported, and there are some new projects out there. I have noticed that 1024 is no longer in active development. I am currently looking into BitWeaver from this site however for a web site I am developing. One thing I like about it is that you can add on features as you might like to increase it’s functionality.

One application not listed in the article was Buddy Press.  Built on the same foundation as Word Press (which powers this blog), and by the same people. I’ve heard of several people who like it.

I plan to start implementing Bit Weaver in a little bit. I will follow up with what I found out about it when I complete the project.

Walter Wimberly News buddypress, social software, WordPress