 
Welcome to "Learning with Technology".
It is a site for inservice teachers, preservice teachers and others interested in using technology to promote student learning. There are links to online course materials, professional development programmes, Mahara e-Portfolios, Moodle course sites and lots of other things.
Master of Education - Education Technology at the University of Brunei.
The UBD Master of Education educational technology programme (MET) is designed to meet the needs of educators at any level. The programme is course based (no exams) and runs over 12 months. The next intake will be in January 2013. The programme is open to all inservice teachers and to undergraduates in the last year of a degree in Education. There is no need to have a background in computing and candidates other than inservice computer teachers are strongly encouraged to apply. Interviews for the January 2013 intake are ongoing, so if interested please contact Michael Moroney (michael.moroney@ubd.edu.bn) or make an application in the usual way through the University of Brunei website (http://ubd.edu.bn) or faculty of education website (http://shbie.ube.edu.bn).
Tools and sites our teachers and students use
The list below is a growing collection of information about the tools our Brunei education community uses on a daily basis. To the left is a list of resources that showcase some of the recent activities that our community has been involved in here in Brunei.
YEd chart construction http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yed_about.html is a very good diagram construction programme. It is useful for creating stylish flowcharts and many other types of chart. yEd is a free download and runs off your computer without the need for an Internet connection. It looks like a good option for students that need to create flowcharts - all those computer studies candidates out there!
Edtech Xperts professional learning network site http://edtechxperts.edtechlearn.org This is a newly created site (under development) to be used as the knowledge base repository for the edtech xperts professional learning network. It is a site powered by the Joomla content management system. Hopefully, in the future, this site will serve the needs of an educational technology community of practice, the existing PLN and made public as well.
HTTrack http://www.httrack.com is an offline website burner used to make an offline copy of a website. This is a very useful for teachers that do not have reliable access to the Internet. It is possible to download and burn to hard disk an entire site to your hard drive and then display the site as if you are connected to the Internet. Thank you Norizi (and maybe Lee Yong?) for bringing this site to our attention :-)
TweetDeck http://www.tweetdeck.com TweetDeck is a programme for managing tweets from your desktop. It is a free download (about 13Mb) and there are versions. Twitter is used extensively by our community and tweetdeck on an adroid mobile or PC is very good.
search-cube http://www.search-cube.com An interesting visual search engine that presents search engine results in a 3D cube format. Rotate the cube to see different search results. Found images from this website by typing "edtechlearn" into search-cube box so it must be good...Thanks Norizi for sharing this information about this site.
Gizmo's Freeware http://www.techsupportalert.com is a very good site to find best of breed free software to do just about anything (thanks Chris for sharing the site). Definitely compulsory viewing for teachers or students wanting to find downloadables for a lappy :-)
cooltoolsforschools http://www.http://cooltoolsforschools.wikispaces.com contains a large number of links to web 2.0 tools that students and teachers might use.
iRubric http://www.rcampus.com/indexrubric.cfm is a site that is well worth visiting if you are either looking for a rubric, wanting to build a rubric or simply wanting to view existing rubrics to get an idea about how to write descriptors. Valuable alternative sites include Kathy Schrock's sites (see below) and rubistar. But for me, iRubric is the best of breed at the moment.
Kathy Schrock's guide to everything. Kathy Schrock has created a well organised and useful teacher resource site that has many useful sections. For example, go tohttp://www.schrockguide.net/bloomin-apps.htmlto see a list of technologies to use at different levels of Bloom's taxonomy. And visit http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schrockguide/assess.html for a large list of useful Web 2.0 tools that teachers and students can use. When linked up with www.go2web20.net (see below for details) then a teacher may have more tools than they know what to do with :-)
EDU 2.0 www.edu20.org. An interesting free online learning management system that may be used by schools and universities. I do think that educators need to be aware however that the features available in the first 30 days of use are not the same as the features in the free version availabe after the free trial. This being said the system is easy to use and has plenty of good features in the free version :-). I am sharing a course with a lecturer in the Philippines at the moment and we use EDU 2.0. Other online tools that are worth considering include Edmodo and enGrade. I have looked at both of these but not in enough depth to be able to say definitively which I prefer. But certainly from my point of view connection speed is probably the factor, and personally I am also interested in a really flat learning curve so that teachers can instantly be gratified rather than have them go through a long learning process.
Freeplane www.sourceforge.net/projects/freeplane Another mind mapping or concept mapping tool, but the one that I prefer most at this time. It is simple to use, has an excellent user interface and and some nice features not present in other similar applications. It is the sort of productivity tool that you might install on your PC and begin using immediately - no real learning curve :-)
Tiny URL www.tinyurl.com A site that may be used to convert long URL addresses into short addresses. This is particularly useful for students wanting to reference sites in bibliographies because sometimes addresses are too long to fit on a page. For example, http://shbie.ubd.edu.bn/ice2012/ICE_2012_Website/Call_for_Papers.html becomes http://tinyurl.com/6rv9ad2 . To create a tiny URL all that you need to do is to go to www.tinyurl.com and enter the original URL. The new URL can then eb created.
FotoFlexer www.fotoflexer.com An online site that may be used to edit digital images. There are many times when teachers need to change the size or resolution of an image to fit it into a presentation or notes - and this site is just right for that purpose. There is virtually no learning curve,
Whatsapp A mobile phone application for using a 3G service to send sms for free.
MoboSurvey http://www.mobosurvey.com Free online survey and questionnaire tool. works on smartphones, tablets and desktops.
f4 transcription software http://www.audiotranskription.de/english/f4.htm/ is software that researchers may find useful if they have to transcribe audio recordings of interviews of conversations. Afterwards, files can be exported into Atlas ti for content analysis.
PDF annotation with Nuance http://www.nuance.com/ is a PDF file reader application that allows the viewer to annotate content. Nuance has many other features including the capacity to convert files from PDF to other formats.
Social Network Analysis with SNAPP http://www.snappvis.org/ is a plugin that allows for analysis of discussion forums in real time. It is a really useful tool, in particular because it generates files for export to social networking analysis tools like UCINET. SNAPP is free, and it is easy to install. I think for those of us interested in promoting dialogue between students this is a helpful tool that produces useful diagrams that show what type of communication structure is taking place.
2012 ICE conference http://shbie.ubd.edu.bn/ice2012/index.html contains some informaiton about the International Conference on Education that is being held at the University of Brunei, Brunei, in May 2012.
pbWorks ePortfolio http://www.pbworks.com This is a site that supports the development of student ePortfolios. There is a free (limited) version that will allow a teacher to manage the ePortfolios of up to 100 students. This is a very good platform for supporting student collaboration online and is used by teachers worldwide. Perhaps my only slight misgiving (and it is slight) is that I would be interested in data about learner participation history and I am not sure that the site will provide me with that...
Shbie website http://shbie.bd.edu.bn/website/ This site (built by me and some of my students) contains up to date information about the faculty of education at the University of Brunei (where I work). The site is under development, but contains all the information needed to find out what is available in the way of teacher training programmes at UBD. Thanks to Eddie, Kharhan and Sahrol for their many hours of work helping to create this site.
TPACK site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Pedagogical_Content_Knowledge This is a Wikipedia page that I wrote . It is about the technological pedagogical content knowledge framework. It is a one page summary of TPACK with links to references that I have found to be useful.
Grammarly http://www.grammarly.com Checking academic writing. This is a site where you may cut and paste text and then get it checked for grammatical accuracy. It is a real time saver for people that are not used to academic writing and for those that just do not have much time. It is also an excellent place to go to learn HOW to write academically. Simply cut and paste text and then keep correcting it until the grammarly writing score is high.
Simple Wikipedia http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page This is a version of Wikipedia that is designed for high school children and is suitable for people that do not feel that their English is very strong. I hope that you can pass this site on to any teachers or students that find the need for something a little bit more accessible than the normal wikipedia site...
Penn State MTO repository website http://tlt.its.psu.edu/mto/index.html This site contains Multimedia Teaching Objects. These are animations that can be used by teachers in wide range of subjects. It may be not be easy to find something that matches your needs exactly, but it will at the very least demonstrate a useful range of animations that may help teachers to better understand the importance of visualisations and vitural models for explaining concepts.
Make Use Of tutorials site http://www.makeuseof.com/ is a very good site for finding out how to use different software or else just to find out about what different Web 2.0 tools do. It has a lot of downloadable PDF tutorials that are easy to read and use. There is an excellent e-book about PC security that you may download from this site.
Science annimation site http://nhscience.lonestar.edu/biol/animatio.htm contains a collection of links to all sorts of animations that may be used for teaching science.
National Academic Press http://www.nap.edu is the site of the national Acedemies Press. It is an excellent place to find up to date information about education. Research reports may be read online. Some need to be paid for before downloading, but others are free.
Tools for teachers http://www.4teachers.org works to help you integrate technology into your classroom by offering online tools and resources. This site helps teachers locate and create ready-to-use Web lessons, quizzes, rubrics and classroom calendars. There are also tools for student use. The Rubistar application is an especially useful tool for creating rubrics!
ScienceCinema http://www.osti.gov/sciencecinema/ This is a site that contains videos about science. They are large videos (like full lectures) that may be freely downloaded. The videos are of course interesting for science researchers in higher educaiton but they are also accessible to anyone with an interest in science wanting to know something specific. I entered a search phrase "velocity calculation" and found that there were 42 videos available for download. These aren't the videos that we might use in full in a secondary school classroom, but there are some parts of videos that could be used. The quality of the presentations is very high, and this alone is a helpful guide to making presentations for online distribution. Files are quite large - but you can download snippets of a movie rather than havign to download all x Mb.
Interactive whiteboard resources. This site has a large number of links to interactive whiteboard resources. There are good links to Mimio resources including prebuilt lesson plans and tutorials. https://21stfair2010.wikispaces.com/Interactive+Whiteboards,+Math,+and+21st+Century+Skills. Also consider approaching Kharhan, Eddie, Sahrol or any of our other Master of education - educational technology students (University of Brunei). These people have demonstrated an excellent understanding of how to use these technologies to advance student learning.
Digital Learning This digital learning site is full of high quality information and downloadable resources that teachers from different subject areas will find valuable. There is an excellent ebook available which provides a good overview of the types of technologies that are being used in classrooms and why they are so popular: http://www.guide2digitallearning.com/
EduGeek is a site that reports about cutting edge educational technologies. It is a well organised site that contains sections for different subject areas. http://www.edugeek.net/index.html
e-Learning Tools for teachers and students
Links to sites that teachers may be useful for teachers to consider. You may either click on the links here or else just scroll down through this page. Links found here eventually end up in the "Ed tech tools" or "Favourite Links" pages.
Calibre CCleaner Chem4Word Course Lab Dropbox EverNote Freemind Jing Mahara Moodle Skim
Tool of the week: 11 April 2011 top
Skim http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/. Free, Mac
Skim is a tool for annotating PDF files on a Mac - no other operating systems supported as far as I can tell. It has many useful features that are not available in the Mac OS Preview program.
Tool of the week: 30 March 2011 top
Jing http://www.techsmith.com/jing/. Free, PC, Mac
Jing is a really useful utility for those times when you want to annotate a screenshot. It can do other things, but that is what I find it really useful for. If you are in a hurry to create a screencast then this is also a really good tool to use. The free version is good enough!
Tool of the week: 10 March 2011 top
Prezi http://www.prezi.com. Free, PC, Mac
Prezi is a presentation design tool that can be used to provide students with information they would not normally get in a typical presentaton. Presentations are easy to create. Every Prezi that I ever created had people in the audience asking how I did it rather than ask about the content of my talk he3. Prezis may be created online and then downloaded to your computer to be used offline. There are lots of tutorials about Prezi at Youtube.
Tool of the week: 20 Jan 2011 top
CCleaner http://www.piriform.com. Free, PC
CCleaner is a powerful and easy to use tool for helping you to manage files on your PC. If may be used to: delete unwanted temporary files, remove unused registry links, uninstall packages and edit the list of programs that start up when you first turn on your computer. It has many other features and is well worth the download.
Tool of the week: 10 Jan 2011 top
Calibre http://calibre-ebook.com/ Free, PC, Mac, download
Calibre is an e-book management application. It is a very good tool for reading documents that use the open source e-book format called ePub. It is also very useful for converting documents from one format into another. For example, you might consider converting your Word or PDF files into ePub format so that they can read read them on by your favourite e-book reader. There are a few other ebook readers around now but this one seems to still have the respect of critics as it provides a comprehensive set of tools to go with it. Once you have read content in an e-Book you will be keen to convert your PDFs to this format!
Tool of the week: 07 Jan 2011 top
EverNote http://www.evernote.com/ Free, PC, Mac, Phone, download
EverNote is an application for recording notes, storing pictures, pdfs and video. Saved files are stored on the Internet and are therefore available from anywhere with a connection. Files can be made public so that others can see them as well. To install the software on your own computer just go to the EverNote website and choose the type of download that you would like. I think this tool is useful for school children when they are looking for resources for a project. For more information about EverNote try going to http://www.blog.evernote.com You will find there an interesting interview with a young student who has been using EverNote to complete her project work.
Moodle. http://www.moodle.org Free, PC and Mac, download
A learning management system (LMS), virtual learning environment (VLE), or course management system (CMS). It is used to support the running of online courses. Moodle is perhaps the most popular LMS in use worldwide today. It is a free (open source) package that is installed on a web server. It is designed to support the running of online courses. Courses can include content produced by e-learning authorware tools (SCORM compliant learning objects) to compliment existing teaching activity modules built into Moodle. There is a very large and active community of many millions of users and an active community of developers continually improving this excellent LMS. Moodle is a single package that seems to do most things well. This is good because students do not need to have many different accounts for different applications - all they need is in one place. This is especially useful for teachers interested in monitoring student progress - each students digital footprint is readily accessible in one location.
Moodle has a large range of modules that can be included in lessons, including, for instance, a module that allows for online testing of students. Additionally, many independent applications include a Moodle integration feature so that students can seamlessly move between applications. For example, the Mahara e-Portfolio system integrates with Moodle. I have used Moodle for many years, see no downside to using it. Moodle is a platform that facilitates a paradigm shift towards e-learning rather than the more content distribution oriented blended learning that is so prevalent in educational institutions today.
Tool of the week: 13 Dec 2010 top
Course Lab. http://www.courselab.com Free, PC only, download
An e-Learning resource development tool. Course Lab is a full featured authoring tool. It is used to make interactive lessons for learners. Teachers may choose to create lessons that run from a CD, from a website or from within a learning management system.
Pros: Not too difficult to use, although there is a small learning curve. Great features for student interaction, including annimation, video, audio and feedback when students attempt quizzes. Lessons can be designed so that content made available will be based on performance in quizzes. Conceptually easy for teachers to sequence content. Rapid development of a lesson.
Cons: The user guide is intimidating at nearly 200 pages! It is possible to generate lessons that use graphics, audio and images that may not be read by all computers. One common problem that has arisen is that animations in lessons may not run until flashplayer security settings have been configured correctly (Need to do this 30 times in a school ICT lab he3). Getting published material to run on a computer may involve installing some freely availble plugins. Lessons appear best when presented in Internet Explorer. Some other browsers do not appear to work very well with this software
Tool of the week: 12 Dec 2010 top
Freemind. http://sourceforge.net/projects/freemind/Free, open source, download, Apple or PC
Freemind is a concept/mind mapping productivity tool. This is an excellent productivity tool. I have found it especially useful as a planning tool that produces diagrams that can be loaded into presentation software.
Pros: It is easy to install and use. Accessible software that with a nearly flat learning curve.
Cons: There are other packages that have different features. For my money cMapTools is solid competition with more features. However, for ease of use (and likely adoption by staff and students) I still go with freemind :-)
Tool of the week: 11 Dec 2010 top
Mahara. http://mahara.org. Free, open source, needs to be installed on a web server.
Mahara is e-Portfolio software. It works as a place where students can build up a portfolio of their work over an extended period of time. Mahara is widely used in secondary schools and higher education institutions worldwide.
Pros: Simply excellent e-Portfolio management system with lots of collaborative e-learning features. (1) Well supported development processes ensuring continued development over the years to come. (2) Students can download their e-portfolios when they finish a course. (3) Students may have a single portfolio for multiple courses. (4) Teachers get to see artifacts that indicate how students developed over an extended period of time. (5) Students may have an e-Portfolio indefintely - long after the current course is finished.
Cons: Installation and administration of a site requires some knowledge and time.
Tool of the week: 8 Dec 2010 top
DropBox. http://www.dropbox.com Free download that runs on Mac or PC (I run on both at the same time).
Dropbox is a storage and synchronization tool. This tool will keep the same files updated on different computers in real time. It is really useful if you want to continue working on a document without the need to copy the file to a pendrive (or email it to yourself).
Pros: (1) Extremely useful tool for people that use different machines but the same files. If you are writing a document on a work machine, then your home machine is automatically updated with the latest version. (2) Synchronisation of files on different computers is is very fast. (3) Files in your "dropbox" are available online at the dropbox website. Therefore, files are being automatically backed up offsite and online as you work. (4) You may share files in your dropbox with other people - University students find this feature really useful when they are doing groupwork.
Cons: (1) Need Internet access to update dropboxes on different machines (2) When you delete a file from one machine the copies on other machines are also deleted. Therefore there is the need to be careful! (3) DropBox folder size is limited (unless you start buying extra storage). Visit http://www.makeuseof.com/pages/ to download a free manual that will show you how to use dropbox.
Michael Moroney
Last update 16 May2012
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