RSC Wales’ information and resources area (Moodle) has had a facelift! For the last 9 months or so we have been gradually developing the contents of the RSC Wales’ Moodle to make it into a (hopefully) useful place to visit if you are looking for information and resources on things like access management, accessibility,  eBooks, emerging technologies, information literacy, Moodle, reader development, using technology in teaching …

We decided that we would like to start the new year with a cleaner, fresher look to the homepage and have gone down the route that a number of others (including Moodle.org) have gone down, with a largely icon driven / visual front page (Note: the icons used are from the same source as those used by Coleg Gwent). As the amount of information and resource areas have grown and are continuing to grow the facelift means that rather than having one long A to Z list of all areas we have also grouped similar topics by introducing the categories that you can see identified by the icons on the front page … shared resources, Moodle stuff, technical things, ACL, WBL and HE information.

Enough about the facelift – we just hope that you like it and that you are happy to share any comments you have about it with us.

BUT before I go … a note of caution. Although the majority of the areas in our Moodle are open to all (i.e. no login required) at the moment you may experience some difficulty logging in if, for example, you want to post to a forum. Unfortunately we are having a few problems with the site’s security certificate because of a domain name ownership ‘issue’. This means that when you try to login securely to our Moodle you may be presented with some scary looking warnings. For some idea of what I mean, click here. I want to assure you that our site is secure, please choose to ‘continue anyway’ (Internet Explorer), ‘add an exception’ (Firefox) or ‘proceed anyway’ (Chrome) and we will resolve the ‘issue’ as soon as we possibly can.

This is probably something that those of you reading this have heard many times … technology should be used as a tool with a real purpose, not just because you have it, or think it looks good, or because you like it … and that is what being a learning technologist is all about isn’t it … taking a technology (hardware, software, website, the latest gadget …) and figuring out if and how it can be best used as a tool to support learning? I guess I really am stating the obvious here but bear with me … this is my first post to a blog and I’m feeling a little nervous!

I am in the process of examing a number of these ‘tools’ at the moment (see the Box of Tricks 2.0 area in the RSC Wales information and resources site) and had a eureka moment with one of them which I had seen and dismissed a few months ago … Jing … the simple to use online screencast tool. Initially I thought that the likes of Wink and Captivate were much more useful because they had far greater functionality … and then I needed to put together a very quick demo of how to do something in Moodle for someone and realised its worth. As well as me being able to ‘teach’ someone how to do something very quickly I can see how it could quite easily be used as a means of capturing evidence as to a learners ability to complete a short online task … searching the web effectively, adding a formulae to a spreadsheet …

If you haven’t seen it before have a look at the Jing I created in seconds about our RSC Wales Information and Resources area (the lack of editing and fancy twiddly bits are deliberate … less is more and all that jazz) – any comments welcome.

Phew … first post out of the way, hopefully things can only improve from here