eXe – an eLearning XHTML editor
I know that sounds a bit daunting but it isn’t really. This program is very good news if your school is running on Moodle – a bit like a car running on gas really!
Background
I’ve signed up for an online workshop at wikieducator. I’m at home today recovering from a stinker of a headache and decided to do some more work on my profile and browse through some of the workshop and mastery pages ahead of time.
I came across a link to a tutorial about pedagogical templates where there was mention of eXe. Being a link clicker I followed that link and discovered some new software to play with.
How does this fit in with my use of google docs?
As I’ve posted before I’ve been using google docs – the docs I publish as a webpage and I use the forms tool to create online question forms.
Here’s an example of some homework questions about communication and you will see that #2 and #3 have links to wikipedia articles and to online forms in order to answer the questions. (Semaphore questions; Smoke signal questions)
In these examples you can see that students had to go to the first web page, open a second page to get to the wiki article and a third page to answer the questions. Clumsy. At least clumsy in light of what I discovered eXe can do for me.
Here is the eXe created equivalent document. It took me about 15 minutes to put together (mostly spent figuring out how to embed the google form) and save.
My school doesn’t have Moodle but I do have a dropbox account where I can host pages for others to access. So I exported the eXe file/bundle/package to a web folder and then renamed and moved the web folder to my public/shared folder in my dropbox. It automatically syncs to the cloud. I found the index.html file and got the public link to it and there we go.
For further reading you can check out these links:
August 18th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Well done, Jo. Your progress in the first session should encourage others to give new things a go. It was the eXe experienced of Wayne, Jim and Sandy that guided our MLE content thinking along a path that ended up with WikiEducator. Maybe you are interersted to know more about what we will be doing togther over the next few months.
http://wikieducator.org/Funding_proposals/Reusable_and_portable_content_for_New_Zealand_schools
Paul.
August 18th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Thanks for that Paul – I expect that I won’t even have to sell it to the teachers at school already developing online content (one technology teacher running an online class using moodle; two of us in the year 3&4 area and one year 5&6 teacher as well as our DP).
I think the OER ecosystem proposal is exciting. I hope I can be part of what you’re doing!
August 18th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
Inspirational post Jo!
It’s great to see the innovation and creativity of educators using free software tools
A little interesting history — we founded the eXe project with the view to creating an open source software tool that would be easy for teachers and educators to use.
The WikiEducator site was originally conceived as a space to host free content lessons developed using eXe — from there it has grown into the world’s most productive wiki in the formal education space. We have a little offshore funding and hopefully we will be able to integrate some of eXe’s devices into WikiEducator as well.
Welcome to our family!