This is part of a regular series of articles exploring some of the terms used in e-learning. We’ll do our best to break down the jargon and explain what things are from a basic perspective. Google Apps are a suite of shareable, online communication and collaboration applications which students have access to as part of their university email, GoogleMail.…
There’s an increasing amount of web browsers (software programmes that allow you to view web sites) available to use. The most popular browser has been Internet Explorer for many years, but there are other browsers that are growing in popularity, particularly due to the growth of mobile devices which have their own browsers. Firefox and Chrome are two browsers…
This is part of a regular series of articles exploring some of the terms used in e-learning (view other articles in the series). We’ll do our best to break down the jargon and explain what things are from a basic perspective. Podcasts are a way of creating a series of audio files or other multimedia. If videos are used they are often called…
The recent upgrade to Blackboard has introduced a change to the blog and wiki tools that have been available inside Blackboard sites for the past few years. The old blog and wiki tools were provided by a company called Campus Pack. They have served us well for the past years. However they are not part of the…
This is part of a regular series of articles exploring some of the terms used in e-learning (view other articles in the series). We’ll do our best to break down the jargon and explain what things are from a basic perspective. Social networking in the online world builds upon concepts of social networking in the face-to-face world, maintaining relationships and…
As part of the Blackboard upgrade on 8 July, we will be moving to a new RSS feed tool in Blackboard. RSS feeds are ways of pulling information from regularly changing websites such as news sites, blogs or scholarly journals automatically into your Blackboard site. Read more about RSS feeds in an earlier blog article. Our current…
This is part of a regular series of articles exploring some of the terms used in e-learning (view other articles in the series). We’ll do our best to break down the jargon and explain what things are from a basic perspective. You may have heard of Skype but not really know what it was. Skype is an online service that…
This is part of a regular series of articles exploring some of the terms used in e-learning (view other articles in the series). We’ll do our best to break down the jargon and explain what things are from a basic perspective. Example QR code You’re no doubt familiar with simple barcodes which are a series of lines, of varying thickness, used to represent…
This is part of a regular series of articles exploring some of the terms used in e-learning (view other articles in the series). We’ll do our best to break down the jargon and explain what things are from a basic perspective. First we’ll start by looking at what a tag is. Tags are typically words which are used to classify…
This is part of a regular series of articles exploring some of the terms used in e-learning (view other articles in the series). We’ll do our best to break down the jargon and explain what things are from a basic perspective. We’ll take a look at e-portfolios today. Interest in using e-portfolios in education stems from the 1990s when cheap…