Forum LAMS Newsletter: Newsletter 85, 21st Apr, 10

By: James Dalziel

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Preview sequences from the LAMS Community - no account needed

For each sequence shared through the LAMS Community, there is a Preview button that allows users to immediately see a Learner view of the sequence. We've recently added new functionality that allows any sequence uploaded to the "Public Sequences" area to be viewed without needing an account on the LAMS Community.

In other words, you can send anyone the URL for a sequence in the Public Sequences area, and they can view the details and Preview it straight away - no login required first. We hope this and some other upcoming features will make it even easier to share good teaching ideas to places other than the LAMS Community, such as Cloudworks or any blog or other public website! More details soon.

To see this feature in action with a great sequence about learning Chinese (which makes excellent use of the Video Record tool), see "Chinese Language - Celebrating Spring Festival" by Christine McDonald at
http://lamscommunity.org/lamscentral/sequence?seq_id=1010657


European Conference update

Thanks to all who submitted proposals for the 2010 European LAMS and Learning Design conference in Oxford, UK on July 15th - you should hear back from us soon - and it looks to be another great program. For details on the conference, see
http://lams2010.lamsfoundation.org/

We haven't planned a separate Pedagogic Planners meeting this year, but I expect we'll have time to discuss this area during the CETIS DesignBash on July 16th following the conference - this timing will have the benefit of allowing participants to see others' work in this area at the conference the day before as a basis for further discussion.


Mac installer for LAMS

For those with the technical skills to install and run a LAMS server on your laptop, we've had an install for PCs for sometime, but I'm delighted to announce that we've also created an installer for Macs. The LAMS Mac installer works for Intel Mac OS X versions 10.4 (Tiger), 10.5 (Leopard) and 10.6 (Snow Leopard) - full details at http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/lamsdocs/Mac+OS+X+Installer+Help

NB: I wouldn't recommend this for non-tech folk - better to just use a demonstration account from http://demo.lamscommunity.org/ But for those who know what they are doing, it's great to have your own local LAMS server, especially for demos when you don't have an internet connection.


Automatic Translation of LAMS Documentation website

We've added a new feature to the LAMS Documentation websites called Google Translate - this allows you to get an automatic translation of any page immediately - you just go to the drop down menu on the top right of any page, choose an alternative language from the list, and you get back the translation immediately. Thanks Google!

As you can guess, the translation won't be perfect as it's automatically done by a machine, but it's often good enough to get an understanding of the page.

We'll keep providing space for human translations of the websites (current available in Japanese, Spanish and Greek), but for other languages or untranslated pages, this will hopefully provide some assistance.


LAMS Community Statistics as of April 21st, 2010

Latest stats from the LAMS Community - including our new 30th language (Spanish - Mexican):

Users: 5753
Number of Sequences: 595
Sequences downloaded: 11659 times
Sequences Previewed: 5716 times
Forum Postings: 5714
Translations to: 30 languages
Number of translators: 108

Posted by James Dalziel