Udemy – Academy of You

I’ve posted previously about accessing lectures from prestigious universities via the Academic Earth site. Today I found Udemy – Academy of You. This too is a site that has videos of courses from several well know universities, including Stanford, UCLA, and Yale. With a whole range of subjects covered. At a glance, there doesn’t seem to be as many available here as on Academic Earth, but the significant thing is that anyone can register and create courses on Udemy, in “less than 5 minutes” is the claim.

You can use video and presentations, and there is the option for tutors and students to interact live using chatrooms and whiteboards. There is also integration with video hosting sites and Slideshare the presentation hosting site to make things easier if you already have content online you want to use.

Tutors can charge a fee for their courses and Udemy charges for this.

This video explains:

To me this is an interesting and exciting concept.

Beatbullying & CyberMentoring

It’s the start of anti-bullying week. It’s important that children feel safe both on- and off-line and the BeatBullying campaign sets out to ‘Shape attitudes and change behaviour’ relating to how children act towards one another. Complementing BeatBullying is the Cybermentors.

Taken from the CyberMentors site:

CyberMentors is here to support all young people affected by bullying.  If you’re being bullied, or perhaps there’s something else that’s bothering you and making you feel rubbish, and you’re not sure what to do or who to talk to, then CyberMentors is where you can go for help.  It doesn’t matter how big or small you think the problem is, or whether you’re being targeted online or offline, CyberMentors are here to listen and support you.

If you want to talk about a problem you’ve got with bullying (whether you’re being bullied, whether you’ve seen it and don’t know what to do, or whether you’re actually bullying someone else and want to stop), just drop a CyberMentor a message, or ask to chat to them online.   You can find their profiles on the left.

CyberMentors are young people who have been trained in their schools, and are supported by senior CyberMentors at college or university, whilst trained counsellors are also on hand if necessary.

Any child having problems with bullying can contact a mentor via the Cybermentor site to chat about their concerns.

A link to my previous post about Internet Safety.

 

Integrated Presentation

So you’re doing a presentation and you think that it’d be useful to make the content available afterwards. Well you can put the slides online. Job done. But does that give attendees at the presentation enough? What about people who come upon it in the future?

Well we’ve got technology available now that allows us to record more. (In fact we’ve had that capability for a long time; pre-digital and pre-web, it was just harder to do for most people.) But now it’s easy to do. Surely having your dialogue will make the content of that presentation a whole lot more useful, immediately and into the future. Therefore when you get up to speak record it with some kind of digital recorder; be that an mp3 player with a mic, a phone, an ipod, whatever gives a decent quality recording. Now you can tie the two together. The easiest way is at Slideshare. There you can host your slides and add your mp3 file (with position markers) to re-marry the slides with the audio commentary.

But we can go further. Set up a video camcorder somewhere nearby or have a colleague in the audience with one. By the end you’ve got a video record of the presentation. Now you can put that up on a video hosting site, YouTube being the best known, but there are others which might suit your needs better. That’s okay as it goes, but what about the slides. We’ll there are free online facilities that enable you to put the video and slides together, a good example being VCASMO.

Your video plays alongside your slides, which is rather useful for a demonstration.

Of course, there are other presentation alternatives, some of which I’ve previously written about here. And another one I need to do some work on being Prezi.