CONTENTS

Cover

Contents

3. Mind Maps

4. Digital Class notes

5. Creating Animated Videos and interactive content

6. Making Spoken MP3's and adding speech to videos

7. Turning Prezi and Powerpoint presentations into video's for YouTube (step-by-step instructions)

8. Mobile Flash Cards

MIND MAPS (AS Sociology)

The mind maps above were produced to summarise both the content in the text book, and what was discussed in lesson time.

These were all produced in a program called yEd

yEd is a free to download and use graph editor available for Windows, Unix and Linux, and Mac OS X

Mind Maps can be saved for sharing as PDF and JPG

yEd can be downloaded here:http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yed_about.html

Digital hand-written notes (A2 Physics)

Although teacher's use smart boards a lot in classrooms, and their notes can be saved to share with the pupils for revision, a student's hand written notes to accompany these are often just as useful, if not more useful.

Converting paper notes into digital formats can be difficult, and take a long time eg. Scanning each page, saving it, publishing it etc.

If a student has access to a laptop / netbook and a graphics tablet (or touch-screen tablet pc), these class notes can be taken digitally and instantly shared.

The examples on the left are two pages from a physics lesson using a netbook and graphics tablet.

The software used was Windows Journal, this comes pre-installed on all windows systems and works pretty much the same way as a smart board

once the notes have been taken, all that is needed is to save the notes as a PDF. This is done by printing the document, but selecting a PDF printer instead of a 'normal' printer.PDF printers can be installed for free, the most common is PDFCreator by pdfforge.This can be downloaded here:http://www.pdfforge.org/pdfcreator

Creating Animated Videos / Interactive content

Although creating animated video's and interactive content can be daunting, learning the basics is quite easy.

There are loads of free programs to create animation on the internet such as:

CreaToon – free and simple animation tool.. ideal for beginnershttp://www.creatoon.comAlthough the stuff that needs to be animated has to be drawn in an external graphics program (eg. Paint.NET or ArtWeaver which are also both free) CreaToon is purely to animate what you have drawn.

For more advanced users, or to create interactive content, Adobe Flash is the standard.

Although it can be confusing at first, there are loads of great tutorials to give you an idea of the basics on the internet at places like YouTube.

Adobe Flash can be expensive though...the full software is about £660Although you can subscribe to the Adobe 'creative cloud' from £15 per month (student and teacher price) which gives you access to all the software over the internet.

However, if your college offers courses on web design, it is possible that this software is already available to use through the college.

Making Spoken MP3's and adding speech to videos

Http://www.ivona.com is a website that converts text into speech.

On the ivona website, there is a 'try it yourself' box (pictured on the left).

Here you can type in up to 250 characters, pick a voice and when you press play, your computer will speak the text you wrote.

Some words do need to be spelt how they sound for them to sound right, but it's fun trying out unusual spellings of words and seeing what comes out :)

Recording speech from ivona (or your own with a microphone)

Because the 'voice output' on the ivona website doesn't allow you to save it as an MP3, you need a recording program.

Although Windows comes with an audio recording program, it's basically useless.. so to get a good result.. the best software available (for free) is Audacity

This software can be downloaded from:http://audacity.sourceforge.net

It's control's are really easy to use.. all you need to record is a microphone (for your own voice) or a double ended headphone cable (pictured on the left) with one end in the headphone socket, and the other straight into the microphone socket of a pc.

To save as an MP3, you need to download the LAME MP3 encoder.. this can also be downloaded for free from the plug-ins section of the audacity download page

Turning PREZI and PowerPoint presentationsinto videos for YouTube

Here's a great way to 'spice up' your Prezi or PowerPoint presentation...

Download Windows Live Media Encoder, this is a FREE screen capture program that records a video of what is happening on your screen, a window you have open, or a

specific part of your screen.

Here's how to do it:1. Open your presentation and get it ready to start2. Open Windows Live Media Encoder and select 'Capture Screen'3. Choose what you want to record (for full-screen presentations use entire

screen, otherwise it's best to use region of screen)4. For a specific region of the screen: click the selection icon5. Give the video a name (check directory)6. Select the quality.. for animated presentations use high7. Tick the box asking to 'start capturing when I click finish'8. Click Finish9. The Media encoder will minimise, and you will be recording.10. Play your presentation (make sure you give enough time to read any text)11. When you have finished your presentation.. re-open the media encoder12. Press the 'stop recording' button at the top13. Close the pop-up (it gives you an option to play the file here, but it usually

crashes)14. Close Windows Live Media Encoder15. Open Windows Live Movie Maker (comes with windows versions up to 7.. for

Windows 8 it needs to be downloaded for free from the Microsoft website)16. Open the video you just created.17. Edit the video, Add sound or music, then click 'Publish to YouTube' (you need

a YouTube account for this)18. In the description for the video, remember to include a link to your

presentation (if it is available online) so people can go back over it in their own time

19. Promote and link etc. your video

Mobile Flash Cards

Flash cards are a great way of revising, but they aren't exactly portable!

Having all your flash cards available on your mobile phone means you can quickly revise anywhere you have an internet connection.. on the bus, in the chip shop or even on the loo!

Flash card app's already exist, but they are usually expensive, pre-written for a specific course, or mean you have to put in all the flash cards yourself, and only you can see them.

This system is totally different...

With our online flash cards, a teacher can add cards to a database, and these are then instantly available to everyone on that course with a mobile phone.

Students can also add cards, and these are instantly available to everyone else too!

By having a 'shared set' of flash cards, even if everyone only adds 2 or 3 cards, for a typical class, you would get between 30 and 60 cards

Try the demo out on your mobile here: http://fxcard.zxq.net Use the test subject: Sociology Use the test module: AS Sociology UNIT 1