Protecting Vulnerable Students

We have a highly vulnerable student who has a learning disability and started with us this term. She has become very sophisticated in the use of chat rooms to make contact with strangers and has actually met up with one or two people in the past. We feel we have a duty of care to reduce the chances of her contacting people in this way, whilst we try to build up her awareness and skills in developing relationships. We have the JANET web-filter but it does not intervene in these circumstances. Do you know of any tool that might reduce the need for constant checking and intervention by staff while we work on raising her awareness?

Personal internet safety is a real issue and especially with young and vulnerable learners. Whilst the benefits of the Internet are indisputable, the culture of non-censorship and the ‘primacy of privacy’ protects exploiters at the expense of the vulnerable. One resource that might be of interest is a website specifically designed for people who have learning disabilities. It’s called Common Knowledge www.ckfriends.org.uk/index.html. Offering alternative sites may not help in that it won’t stop her using sites she already uses and you may wish to consider a more traditional filtering programme. There are many filtering programme available. Here is one that is free for personal use: http://www1.k9webprotection.com/

Does anyone know how to configure a PC so that it shows the mouse pointer in screen shots when using the Print Screen function?

There are a number of screen grab tools on the market that are ideal for writing guides. Screenshot Captor is a freeware (donation requested) product which is great for simplifying and speeding up lots of screen capture processes: http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/screenshotcaptor/index.html

Another option is SNAGIT (from TechSmith). The version I’ve got has CamStudio bundled in, which is a user friendly way of recording screen movement into little video clips that records series of movements on screen and you can add a highlight halo to your mouse cursor to make it even more visible. You may find CamStudio useful for either creating short training videos for your website or perhaps creating screen grabs from your videos. A free download of CamStudio can be found (along with a vast array of other free tools for learning and teaching) through the RSCs AccessApps and scrolling down to presentation tools:
http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk/accessapps/compare.php

Do any of the JISC team know about the varied interactive e-voting systems that can be used in lessons to engage with learners?

I have had experience of using these and feel that they have great potential in learning & teaching and also as a means of engaging learners in cross-college evaluation; to say nothing of raising their awareness of "political" processes.

With the new HMIe focus on learner engagement in college quality processes/evaluation and the various equalities legislation duties to engage service users, now seems to be a good time to make use of all technologies available to us!

Watch a 20 minute recording of our RSCtv session on using voting systems for learning & teaching.

A lecturer has interviewed a number of students and recorded her questions and their responses which she now has to note/document in a word document. Would Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition software allow her to process these audio files through the software to translate this audio into text?

We have spoken to Dragon Naturally Speaking suppliers who say that unfortunately Dragon would not be able to transcribe these recordings as it is unable to transcribe for more than one user profile at any one time. Also I think it would struggle with the conversational style of the recording. Dragon works well when the speaker is dictating but struggles with natural conversation that is not in structured sentences. There are some researchers who have used Audio Notetaker as an interface for reviewing audio recordings and making notes from them.

http://www.dyslexic.com/notetaker_demo/Audio-Notetaker-demo.htm

The new version of Audio Notetaker has a specific playback mode for when users are transcribing from the recording. This may help when reviewing audio recordings but it won’t transcribe speech into text.

In my institution, access to JISC collections is no longer possible with FAM – this is a major problem for both lecturers and students who are physically distant from their institution or only teaching/at class one day per week. Is there any other way to access these valuable resources?

This is possibly due to part time students not being issued with individual institutional user IDs. Some organisations find it difficult to administer the issuing of user IDs to part time students. This would allow them to access any of the federated materials from home with their institutional login credentials.

I teach the History of Modern Art and I have a lot of images that I’ve bought in the past on 35mm slides which I want to digitise. Is this OK?

It would be highly unusual for the sale of the slides to be made on any other basis than that the images be used only in their slide format. Any 'alteration' of the images including digitisation would therefore not be allowed under the original agreement.

You could contact the rights holders for permission to digitise the slides for educational use. Information about the rights holders will probably be located with the slides.

I am looking for resources on English language grammar to use with ESOL students. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated

You could try:
OnestopEnglish - http://www.onestopenglish.com/ This website is a teacher's resource site organised and run by Macmillan Education in order to help EFL, ESL and ESOL teachers.

There is a also a section on our own subject directory providing links to a number of resources to support his area of the curriculum - http://www.rsc-sw-scotland.ac.uk/mmm_learning_resources/esol.htm

I teach on Higher National Programmes and I’m always looking for new and current websites – have you any advice on where to find them?

http://www.intute.ac.uk/ provides access to high quality Internet based resources, chosen by subject specialists in FE & HE, according to their quality, accuracy and usefulness for supporting teaching and learning.

Case studies and lesson plans to help get ideas are also available on the site and the Intute: Virtual Training Suite provides free Internet tutorials to help you learn how to get the best from the Web for your education and research. If you’re working in the further education sector, the FE pages are a good place to start.

It’s now possible to personalise the way you use Intute and by logging in to the service which enables you to save your searches and arrange to be notified when new resources to support your area of interest are added.

Could you point me in the direction of a website/help/information around offering pre-designed accessible style sheets for websites?

There are a few websites that will provide you with different stylesheets and in particular ones that are deemed to be more accessible.

Firstly have a look at our Scottish RSC Inclusion Blog at http://www.scottish-rscs.org.uk/access/?page_id=6 and scroll down the page to the article entitled ‘Customising Internet Explorer for you and your learners’. This article will take you directly to our resources page which offers a range of resources including how to customise Internet Explorer so that it is accessible and easy-to-use. This resource provides a range of accessible stylesheets which you are free to download and use as required.

Follow this link to find out how to customise the settings to meet a range of visual preferences http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk/colour_background/colour_background.html

If you prefer larger font or high contrast you can choose from a range of stylesheets which can be easily incorporated or attached to your browser. There are a number of stylesheets to choose from, for example, high contrast, large fonts etc.
http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk/customising_explorer/stylesheet.html

You could also link to Zen Garden website which offers a range of style sheets. http://www.csszengarden.com%20/

My students are creating photo albums in PowerPoint. I would rather that my students could view them on a TV and not just on a PC. Can you help?

I do not know any way of saving or converting a PPT file to play on a TV through DVD. As far as I know, a computer would have to be used. However I have a couple of alternative suggestions. Microsoft has a free programme called "Photostory" which allows you to make video from images - you can add titles, captions, music and the software is all wizard driven, really easy to use and great fun. You can only save as a WMV file (Windows media) though which means you would need to convert the file to a different format for TV use. There are lots of free little programmes that could help you with this.

For a more sophisticated output - you could use Windows Movie Maker which comes free with XP and VISTA. This does allow you to output to a DVD provided you have Windows DVD Maker, which is included in Windows Vista Ultimate and Windows Vista Home Premium and you also need a DVD burner.

I came across a fantastic web site - called animoto - that again creates video from images but to a very professional finish in my opinion. The output is in MP4 which has the added advantage of being able to play the short movies on mobile devices which I reckon students would love. I believe educational establishments can register for a free account. http://animoto.com/

All these programmes are really, really easy to use and I know it's probably not really the answer you are looking for but I think either of the 3 presents a good alternative to PowerPoint.

I am a student counsellor and would like to find resources to help me in my work. Could you recommend any online resources that I could use ?

There are some excellent mental health resources which you might be interested in. These links offer multi-media based information, practical support and insights into mental health issues which might be of help to staff or students within your institution who require psycho-social support or who are interested in finding out more about mental health issues.

Living Life to the Full
Developed at the University of Glasgow and available online to be used freely. Based on a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy approach which helps everyone how to tackle and respond to issues/demands which we all meet in our everyday lives. http://www.livinglifetothefull.com/

Glasgow Steps
Again using a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy approach, this site will tell you all about common stress problems and give you some ideas on how best to tackle them. http://www.glasgowsteps.com/

Look OK... Feel Crap?
http://www.lookokfeelcrap.org/
http://www.youtube.com/user/lookokfeelcrap

Student Depression
www.studentdepression.org/

I would stress however that these resources are not designed to replace face to face support within a college or university or referrals to more formal mental health support services if needed. Nevertheless they can provide a first step to helping identify problems or indeed providing resources which may offer people better coping strategies or information about where to source external support.