For those with greater ICT skills then many an interesting and engaging elearning material can be created and there is a vast amount of teaching and learning material available on the web for the discerning teacher.

However, as with most teachers, I wish to create my own materials, specifically for my students to meet their needs. My primer objective is to create good quality content that meets specific learning objectives. I have neither the time nor the knowledge to build engaging elearning material.

There is however an array of software tools that can be used to create elearning materials, many of which I regularly use, but the one that I use on a regular basis is Lodestar.

Lodestar claims to be the world’s easiest elearning authoring tool, a statement I can whole heartedly support! It allows me to get on and make interesting and engaging elearning materials without having to worry about what’s going on under the bonnet!

Very quickly I can create an engaging Flash file that can include images, video and audio clips, text and question pages. Using a variety of templates I can create for my student’s quizzes, information pages, flash cards, slideshows etc quickly. These can stand as individual projects or can be linked them together to make whole learning packs. Either way they can then be easily exported to the web or a learning platform. It is this ease of production that makes Lodestar such an appealing tool to the busy online teacher!

www.lodestarlearning.com

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Preparing materials to be used for teaching online or to support the learning of students is a time consuming business. A great deal of time is spent researching the subject at hand and gathering all the necessary material to make learning interesting and engaging.

Once you have the material the question is ‘How do you present it to the students?’

• A Word document?
• Powerpoint presentation?
• Class Server document

These are valid ways of presenting material to students, but when you, as a student, are being presented with such work day in and day out then after a while even the most interesting Powerpoint can become unintentionally dull.

ConnectEd supports students from Keystage 3 to the end of Keystage 4. Those students can only be referred to ConnectEd through Cambridgeshire EOTAS Referral Policy.

office@connectedonline.co.uk