Had an interesting chat with Grant Malcolm from the UWA WebOffice yesterday who inadvertently reminded me that developing resources is one thing (and most of the work) while syndicating it is another (and can be considerabley easier).
So to that end I have edited the UWA STUDYSmarter webpage this morning by replacing text with a voki and a Flickr slideshow powered by Pictobrowser so that it now looks like this:
Pictobrowser is nice and user-friendly and it really couldn’t be easier to get your Flickr photos into your website – most handily you can choose which sets, tags or groups of photos you want to embed (useful if you have a very varied site and a more specific website – no need to have your holiday snaps cycling through your work website)
I used vokis in my final project during the E-learning course run earlier this year by Mark Pegrum** and am about to upload my own to the side-bar of this blog. Many good points to vokis:
Very easy to use as long as you don’t spend all day deciding on hair colour
You can make them look like real people (you, someone famous, your VC) or like no one at all!
Students are more willing to tape their voices than appear in video
Can upload geo-specific photos for the backgrounds
Interactivity is simple – students can SMS you questions and you can convert their message to audio and get the voki to speak it out loud on the web (and then answer it of course!)
My set of vokis are stored on the Study Smarter website and they include an Italian speaking student plus advice on studying part-time and as a mature age student.
