The latest

The Earthworks team met again yesterday evening.




The section has just purchased 4 portable DVD players to use with students, particularly at remote locations. Team member Greg had put the machinery pre-start checks movies onto DVD with professional looking titles and a great menu. Everyone was really excited to see their work on the DVD players the students will use.
The players also worked through a TV and data projector and can be used as mp3 players. Learners will be able to view the pre-start check movie for the machine then go out and walk around the machine while listening to the audio about the prestart check and do it.

Viewing their work to date this way members became more aware of some of the problems needing attention or improvements which could be made. These included improving the script to avoid repetiton (like "Check the ..." on many slides), getting a better balance between music and voice-over volume, better use of words on the screen and using slide animation to focus attention and place in context - but not too much. John gave some good advice here from his experience in media production. It's on a podcast at http://www.pinrpod.podomatic.com/ . He's spending a lot of time on the script for his movie.

The team will do a presentation on their project to the PINR Full Faculty Forum on 27 September at Dubbo. We'll meet again the evening before to finalise the presentation and, if time permits, do a basic intro to creating interactive Power Point presentations. Doing a presentation for others is a great way for the team members to confirm and review their own learning from the project.

I'll be presenting on the project to the Western Region ICT Conference in Dubbo the following week. It's a great opportunity as ICT have not shown a lot of interest in the past in how the ICT systems they support are used for learner outcomes.

I'm have a hard time trying to post to podomatic and blogger today - our systems keeps blocking - grrrr - very frustrating.