Moodle and Slideshare, how to make them friends

I recieved a comment to my posting about Loving Moodle so far from Jonathan Boutelle, CTO of Slideshare. He requested that I elaborate on how I was able to get Slideshare working with Moodle, since Moodle by default will not allow embed and object tags.

First let me say how excited I am that the CTO of Slideshare read my blog. I am a HUGE fan of Slideshare, even though I only recently learned of the service and began using it. Before Slideshare, I used to open my presentations that were initially created in MS PowerPoint in OpenOffice Impress. I would then use the Export as Movie command in OO, and that would create a .swf file that I could then post for students to view. I had to code my own embed tags and play around with sizes, etc. Slideshare has taken care of all of that for me. Thank you, Slideshare. Posting this entry is the least I can do.

Read the rest of this entry »

Students Pay a Price (Literally) for Cell Phone Ban

Yesterday, I had the real pleasure of spending some time in a 9th English classroom again, this time with a group of students from an under achieving, 3,000 pupil high school in midtown Manhattan. Ostensibly, I was there as a tag team with Alan November talking to city technology liasons and support teachers about the changes and challenges we’re facing, so while Alan spoke, I visited kids and vice versa. (I UStreamed the last 20 minutes or so of a Q & A that we did at the end of the day. Not great in terms of audio an video, but some good Alan rants.)

Read the rest of this entry »