Trick and Tips

• Wiki-version - A Growing List of Free Learning Tutorial Sites

• Learning 2.0 Programme
  This blog has been set-up as part of PLCMCs Learning 2.0 project to encourage staff to experiment and learn about the new and emerging technologies that are reshaping the context of information on the Internet today.
• An Introduction to Social Learning(Jane Hart)
  Provides you with a practical approach to getting started with using social media for both formal and informal learning - either in the form of best-of-breed stand-alone tools or in an integrated suite of social media tools.
  
• ELearning T4T (WikiEducator)
  eLearning Training for Teachers is a project node for the collaborative development of "just-in-time" tutorials to help educators implement eLearning successfully.
• WebTools4u2use
  The purpose of this website is to provide a place for K-12 school library media specialists to learn a little more about web tools that can be used to improve and enhance school library media programs and services, to see examples of how they can be used, and to share success stories and creative ideas about how to use and integrate them. Hundreds of free and inexpensive web tools are available for school library media specialists to use that can make us more productive, valued, and, perhaps, more competitive.
• Pauls E-Learning Resources
  This E-learning resources website is developed and maintained by Paul Andrews (Learning Technologist). On this site you will find his favourite links to free on-line services that allow you to provide your students with enhanced learning opportunities which you can then embed into, or link from, your school/college/universitys website, course blog or VLE/MLE.
• iLearn technology (Kelly Tenkely)
  Is an edublog dedicated to giving teachers practical tips for integrating technology into the classroom.
  
• Resource Kit for Creative Communities (e-Learning)
  In this resource kit, community organisations can find helpful online guidance, ideas and tools for developing and facilitating e-learning in communities and regions. The kit includes suggestions and options on the why and how of e-learning. Youll find guidance on low cost tools and technologies, as well as ideas and stories to help you get started.
• Teacher Training Videos (Russell Stannard)
  These videos were created for teachers to help them to incorporate technology into their teaching. Just click and a video will open and take you through how to use that technology. These videos are for any teachers or lecturers, indeed for anyone interested in learning how to use the technologies.
  
• WonderHowTo
  Hand-selects and curates the best instructional videos from over 1,700 websites. It is your one-stop shop to browse, search, or network your way through the world of free video tutorials.
• EduTube
  Is a educational video search platform with an main aim to organize the best educational video content on the Internet. All content on EduTube is moderated and only relevant, educational content is permitted.
  
• Multimedia Training Videos
  A series of free learning videos (by Russell Stannard and Savraj Matharu) that explore Flash, Director and Photoshop.
• ItrainOnline Multimedia Training Kit
  Is a growing collection of "workshop kits" for face-to-face training. The materials use a standard set of templates, and offer building blocks for trainers to build their own courses.
  
• Teachers TV
  is a digital channel for everyone who works in schools. Their programmes cover every subject in the curriculum, all key stages and every professional role – from teaching assistant to headteacher. You can watch us on digital cable and satellite and programmes are also available anytime, on-demand and for free on this website.
• TeacherTube
  Its main goal is to provides an online community for sharing instructional videos. Here you will find more than 54,000 videos covering all sorts of subjects.
  
• ALISON
  Free Interactive Workplace Skills Courseware including Touch Typing Skills, European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL), British Computer Society (BCS) Unit E, Financial Literacy and e-Citizen
• The Moodle Academy
  Is designed to be a drop in centre for you to reinforce your Moodle skills. While we are thinking Moodle, we might want to check out Using Moodle 2nd Edition, which is the second edtion of the OReilly book "Using Moodle" by Jason Cole and Helen Foster.
• Moodle Tutorials
  Ops, cant get Moodle out of my head! Check out this collection of 2 Minute Moodles - an attempt to simplify and show how to use a range of Moodle features. The tutorials try not to assume too much previous knowledge and are presented for the pragmatical and not necessarily tech-savy users (Moodle purists please excuse).
• Drupal in Education Open book (hosted by e-Learning Institute)
  An open resource started by Bryan Ollendyke at the e-Learning Institute to talk about Drupals place in education. Has a great CMS matrix comparing different CMS technologies that can all be used for education / e-learning. It is a living resource and has contributions from several PSU Drupalers though its open to contribution from any / everyone. Good if you are interested in getting into Drupal for Education.
• Google Apps Training
  The Google Apps interactive tutorial provides clear audio and text directions and practice exercises for using six Google products; email, calendar, talk, docs, sites, and start page.
• Go-2-School
  A great resource for learning Google SketchUp and Google Earth.
• W3Schools
  Here you will find all the Web-building tutorials you need, from basic HTML and XHTML to advanced XML, SQL, Database, Multimedia and WAP.
  
• Edumax
  Edumax is an online learning website that provides free lessons on topics from personal development to computer programming.
• TechTutorials
  A directory containing thousands of free tutorials for IT professionals, hobbyists, and home users.
• 14 hours of Free E-Learning Strategy Tutorials
  Bryan Chapman, Chief Learning Strategist at Chapman Alliance does regular webinars on e-learning strategies. He posts these for free use from his website. They are a little bit hidden. You have to scroll down the page to find them. NOTE: Because many of the webinars are vendor sponsored, you may have to add your information before watching them, but they are absolutely free.
  

Contributors:

• Clayton Wright
• Mitch Weisburgh
• Bryan Chapman
  
• Zaid Ali Alsagoff
  

Today well start learning about text widgets in Android.

A widget is any UI component in Android - a button, a text field, a slider, etc. You have a set of pre-built widgets to create your application with.

Today we will start learning about text widgets. There are two classes responsible for displaying text: TextView and EditText. The TextView class simply displays text on screen, without giving the user the ability to edit the text. If you want the text to be editable, use EditText.

Both of these classes inherit many properties and methods from the View class, and it should also be noted that EditText is a subclass of TextView.

In this tutorial well start learning about the first class I mentioned - TextView.

Its a simple but at the same time one of the most used widgets in Android applications. It is also used in other widgets for displaying text data, and quite a few widgets are actually extensions of this class. So, anything with text in it is related to TextView class one way or another.

You should keep that in mind, because TextView class has a few unique attributes and methods that are also available in any classes that extend TextView.

Properties for this class can be defined in XML layout file, or programmatically in a Java class.

For example, if you want to apply a text value to a TextView object, you can use that using the android:text XML attribute, or using the setText() method in Java. Usually the attribute and method names are similar (android:textColor and setTextColor();), but not always (android:textColorHighlight and setHighlightColor();).

Ive already wrote about ids in Android, they can be defined using the android:id attribute and generally look like this:


And to refer to this object later, the plus symbol is emitted:


The text values can be defined using an id, which refer to separate objects in res/values/strings.xml file.

For example, if you set the text value of a TextView like this:


It would refer to this part in the strings.xml file and use that value:


To set the value similarly in Java:


The Java syntax might look strange to you if youve never dealt with it before. Here is what the same code would look like in AS3 syntax (note: not working code):


The strings.xml should be used most of the time to declare text values, instead of hardcoding the values directly into the attribute. This is done mainly because of the ability to add new languages.

Thats all for today. Well continue next time.

Thanks for reading!

In this video from lynda.com, author Deke Mclelland shows you how to draw a heart in Illustrator.


Deke has more Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator video tutorials in an excellent series called Dekes Techniques. You can check them all out with this free 7-day trial pass.

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