Monday 29 October 2007

Change my blog

I have moved my blog to:

http://remcoploeg.spaces.live.com/

If you want to have the feed:
http://remcoploeg.spaces.live.com/feed.rss

Thursday 30 August 2007

Great SharePoint resources for Education

Microsoft has created a great document for SharePoint (MOSS 2007) with great resources for this product.

The premise behind the attached SharePoint Resource Guide is that almost everything in the booklet is the result of an education customer asking for more information

Check here for the document.

Wednesday 29 August 2007

Great help for your students and teacher with Office 2007

Great posting from the UK Team:

Even amongst those colleges who are moving to Office 2007 this summer, one common fear is whether students/staff will be able to quickly transition to the new Fluent interface in Office 2007. If you want more help, then I've just come across these brilliant add-ins for Office 2007. Basically, it adds a new menu bar to your tab called "Getting Started".

This is the tab for Word 2007, but there's also ones for Excel and PowerPoint 2007. And it adds on an interactive guide to find commands, links to online training, video demonstrations for overviews and getting started, and even links to the online discussion forums. If you're installing this summer, then perhaps this is another thing you can do to help your staff and students to get started quickly on the first day of term...

Download the new tabs using the links below:

Word 2007 Add-in: Get Started Tab

Excel 2007 Add-in: Get Started Tab


PowerPoint 2007 Add-in: Get Started Tab

Tuesday 28 August 2007

Nice new search engine - Tafiti


Tafiti, which means “do research” in Swahili, is an experimental search front-end from Microsoft, designed to help people use the Web for research projects that span multiple search queries and sessions by helping visualize, store, and share research results. Tafiti uses both Microsoft Silverlight and Live Search to explore the intersection of richer experiences on the Web and the increasing specialization of search.

So, check it out: http://www.tafiti.com/

European skills document

Finally a document about the future european skills!

There has been a lack of information on future skill needs in Europe for a long time. Requests for information have been repeatedly coming to Cedefop and other European organisations.
The European labour market is becoming a reality on the European Union (EU) policy agenda and the free movement of labour gives hope that increased mobility across European countries will help to reduce unemployment. At the same time, occupations, skills, competences and qualifications, which will be required on the European labour market in future, have not been identified. The need to anticipate skills and occupational needs were defined as a priority in the Maastricht communiqué (1), in the European Council’s integrated guidelines for employment
for 2005-08 (2) (guidelines Nos 19, 20 and 24), and in the Social partners’ framework of actions for the lifelong development of competencies and qualifications (3).To find ways of obtaining information on future skill needs in Europe – even a joint European action – has become a main concern.

To check the full document, click here.

Elgg - social platform

Elgg is an open source social platform based around choice, flexibility and openness: a system that firmly places individuals at the centre of their activities.

Your users have the freedom to incorporate all their favorite tools within one environment and showcase their content with as many or as few people as they choose, all within a social networking site that you control.

I played with the environment, it looks very nice, but misses some interactive features that students wants. The portfolio element is not that advanced. (see this post of helen barrett)

The platform is developed for LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) which encompasses weblogging, file storage, RSS aggregation, personal profiles, FOAF functionality and more.

For more information about this product, check their website

Monday 27 August 2007

Great and free authoring tool - Courselab

This weekend I played with a great and free authoring tool called Courselab. It's a nice environment to work in, it works very simple and looks like powerpoint. It's compatible with the following LMS systems:

- IBM Learning Space
- IBM Lotus Workplace Collaborative Learning
- Oracle iLearning
- WebSoft WebTutor and WebTutor Lite
- SAP eLearning Solution
- Microsoft SharePoint Learning Kit
- Moodle
- ATutor
- Ilias

Courselab already supports the following standards:

- AICC (http://www.aicc.org/)
- SCORM 1.2 (http://www.adlnet.org/)
- SCORM 1.3 (SCORM 2004) (http://www.adlnet.org/)

For a full featurelist please follow this link.