Annelieske's Journal
Workshops & networks
PD for working with PDAs startup workshop, 26 April, 2006
This project is managed by Ann Odgers of the WA Department of Education and Training and provides each college with a small sum of money to develop skills in using PDAs for content delivery and assessment.
The most significant thing I learnt from this workshop was about the existence of Visual CE. This is a relational database for mobile devices that allows you to create forms for collection of data, which can then be loaded to the desktop/laptop and shared with databases such as Access, Oracle, SQL.
Robert Svanberg and Jane Looker at Great Southern have been using this database to create data collection forms such as observation checklists for use in the workplace. It seems to meet our needs for pilot programs in semester 2, 2006 for Rhoda, Rajiv, John and Wayne. Robert Svanberg will teach us how to use the software.
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Marcus Ragus, TAFETAS, 28 April 2006 - held at Fleet Street
Participants were from Challenger, WestOne, West Coast, AFTRS, and ICT Training Development Solutions. Lecturers were from a range of disciplines: Horticulture, Hospitality, Maritime, Aquaculture, and IT. Directors, Kerry Donovan and Kingsley Waterhouse attended for part of the day, as did Julie Manning, Program Manager Visage.
Topics included applications of PDAs, current and past PDA projects from Australia and overseas, cameras and other accessories, sources of information and research, wireless, Bluetooth and GPS, QTI m-plyer, logistical issues such as loading resources onto class sets of PDAs. Many of the accessories don't work successfully with Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0, for example Margi, Pocket Slides for PowerPoint.
We had an Elluminate web conference with Stephen Brain, Adam Maxwell and Daniel Dacey about developing resources for PDAs and other mobile resources.
We finished with a discussion about the MTP team's projects and how they could achieve their desired outcomes.
Converting toolboxes for handhelds seems unlikely to happen, particularly those with more complex graphics and flesh files. WestOne will only do this conversion if there is enough demand, which is currently unlikely. However, Daryl and Daniel, who are instructional designers at WestOne, recognise the need to develop future resources that can be readily converted for use on mobile devices.
Everyone finished the day with increased knowledge and understanding of PDAs and their applications in training and assessment. There was a lot of goodwill and willingness to share information and resources.
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Marcus Ragus, TAFETAS, 26 May 2006 - held at Fleet Street
Marcus showed us how to develop simple resources using PowerPoint and FrontPage. These resources are easy to produce and well-within the ability of many lecturers.
We then had a lot of angst (and fun!) transferring the resources we'd produced to our PDAs. PowerPoint seems to work well with Mobile 5.0 although Marcus thinks that it may not have all of the features that made Pocket Slides so successful. Pocket Slides does not work effectively with Mobile 5.0. Daniel managed to get shockwave to work on his PDA.
Yvette Drager: "Thank you so much for inviting me to the wonderful PD last Friday. As usual Marcus was spot on with content. I spent a very frustrating, enraging and infuriating day coming to grips with sections of the technology that I had not used before (and loved every second of it)."
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Robert Svanberg, Visual CE Workshop, July 28 2006 - Beaconsfield
Robert Svanberg and Jane Looker from Great Southern TAFE, have been successfully using Visual CE in the Great Southern for activities such as workplace assessment and patient assessment (Silver Chain) so he has lots to teach us. Some of us will have done some work with the software before the workshop and there is considerable expertise in the group, so we should achieve lots in the 4 hours of the workshop.
Attendees: Sue Waters, Annelieske Noteboom, Michael Snadden, Elisabeth Elsmann, Frances McLean, Wade Lapp, Wayne Miller, Florence Miller, Julie Manning, Andrea Quintal.
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Midland PDA Network
This is an informal network of people interested in using handhelds, that meets fortnightly at Midland TAFE. Sue, Michael and Rhoda have attended these meetings at various times.
Next Meeting: Friday, 23 June 2006, 3-4:30 pm.
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PDA Project Network
Ann Odgers, the LearnScope and PDA Project Manager, will facilitate a PDA network through EdNA groups. Click on PDA Project network to read about the individual project activities.
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Resources and learning environments
Visual CE
Robert Svanberg and Jane Looker at Great Southern have been using this database to create data collection forms such as observation checklists for use in the workplace. It seems to meet our needs for pilot programs in semester 2, 2006 for Rhoda, Rajiv, John and Wayne. I will ask Robert to come to Fleet Street to teach us how to use the software and share his ideas about applying it for workplace assessment.
20 June 2006
The Visual CE has arrived - 4 personal licences and 1 enterprise licence. And I am negotiating with Robert to do the PD.
Interface with ASRI
Wade Lapp and Colin MacDonald from ICT Training Solutions have been funded from the WADET PD project to work with project teams to develop the interface with ASRI. Although they endorse Visual CE as a viable option for capturing and storing data, they are also investigating a system-wide licence for mobile SQL software. We will meet with Wade and Colin at our next project meeting to discuss what our needs are for recording data on PDAs.
8 June 2006
Michael, Carrie and Annelieske met with Maryse Louis from ICT Training Delivery Solutions to brief her about Michael's Skills' Recognition project, in which he is mapping the activities in a task to elements which may be across several units of competence. His aim is to develop tools to record the data and then map the outcomes to all relevant elements. This could be done with a PDA and a database, for example Visual CE as the front-end on the PDA and MS Access. The ultimate aim is to then automatically send the results to ASRI. Carrie would like to recommend to the MDs that they consider funding a project to develop the interface between the data collection database and ASRI.
15 June 2006
We met with Wade Lapp and talked about how we can drop data collected through checklists directly to ASRI. My understanding is that the data would have to be at element or unit level. I'm not sure that it will work for performance criteria level. The checklists may also be very basic. This is something that needs further work.
Wade's concept is that the College should have licences for Mobile SQL, and that the front-end for data collection should then be Mobile CE (which costs $$). The Mobile SQL database then interfaces with ASRI. The advantage with Visual CE may be that the application development is done on the desktop and the application synched to the mobile device. I don't know enough about Visual CE to really understand it's benefits over Mobile CE and am relying on Robert Svanberg's and Jane Looker's experience with using it in the Great Southern, I think for Silver Chain patient assessment records.
Sue would also like to have attendance records linked directly to ASRI.
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Personal Learning Environments (PLE)
Marcus Ragus and a colleague have developed a system whereby resources such as Colin’s Maritime WebCT course, can be developed for PDAs, burnt onto memory cards and distributed to students. This will be perfect for Colin’s project. It may also be suitable for John & Wayne.
As a base figure the cards will cost $40 AUD for a 256MB card with default pages. To package the card which includes design (Flash or html)of up to 20 pages (ie, Front covers, index, etc) will be charged at $800 per day, (a day will cover up to 20 pages.)
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QTI m-player (a 2005 New Practices project)
This system has three parts: the conversion of existing documents to QTI format for playing on mobile devices; the capture of data eg observation checklists; downloading the data to a records management system such as ASRI. QTI has potential but the third part doesn’t exist and the software (REDOIT) for first part has to be bought from Germany at a cost of approximately $800 for a single licence.
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