Hi Michael,
Sure.
Portfolios
LAMS 1.1 allows you to export everything that you have done and seen while doing a sequence. As a student (in the learners interface), you are able to click on the sequences and export all the interactions, answers, contributions, etc that you've done while you were doing the sequence. The feature is called Export Portfolio as it exports a zipped file that contains all HTML files of all you've done.
In addition, Teachers can do the same from the monitor interfaces and instead of export just what a student has done, it exports *everything* that *all* students have done in a sequence. So the teacher has a record file with everything that happened within a running sequence (or a class).
Lesson/design printouts
One heavily requested features from teachers is the ability of printing a sequence detailing what the students are meant to do in each activity while they go thru the sequence.
It similar to the export portfolio, but this is a printout that you do *before* you run the sequence so you can give a copy to your teaching assistance or tutors to help them assist the students when they need to, or just to explain them "the plan" of the sequence.
Specialized/bundled activities
As you know in LAMS 1.0.x, we have activites like Chat&Scribe, Q&A + Notebook, Resources and Forum, etc. In LAMS 1.1, we have created special activities that work as containers for other activities.
One of example of these container actitivies is parallel activities, which allows you to create a new activity based on a combination of activities that you want.
For example, in LAMS 1.0.x you can use Resource and Forum... when a student gets to that activity, it can see the screen split in two frames where the top frame has a Share Resources activity and the bottom a Forum activity.
But maybe instead of a Forum activity for the bottom, you might want to use a Chat instead, or some other tool of your choice because that suits a better pedagogical need for you.
LAMS 1.1's "Parallel activity" container allows you to choose what type of activities you want to show running in paralel.
Also, we have a "Sequenced activities" container where you can bundle activities that you want to play in sequence, but to be presented as if they would only be one activity.
Now, I have to say that we won't have an interface to create this parallel and sequence activities as you wish on LAMS 1.1, but that will come in LAMS 1.2. Unfortunatelly, we ran out of time.
Nevertheless though, all the composed activities in LAMS 1.0.x (like Resources and Forum, Chat& Scribe, etc) those are all using our new parallel or sequenced activity containers.
LAMS 1.2 will have a nice interface to create parallel or sequenced activities directly in Authoring.
"No more locked sequences"
One of the really annoying things of LAMS 1.1 is that when you author a sequence and then assigned it to a class, you cannot longer change it in Authoring unless you create a copy of it. That's because once you assign the sequence to a class (group of students/people), then the sequence is considered "locked".
Why is this?... well, there are technical and educational reasons for this. From the educational side (and people can point out others if I miss any), you want to ensure consistency for all the students as they go thru a sequence. So if the first 5 students in the class have seen a question (say you have put a Q&A as the first activity) and after that you decided to change the question, then their answers could not longer be valid or in context. Also, the other students that will come after won't have the same experience as the first 5 fellows. Therefore the collaborating aspect that LAMS brings gets tarnished a bit.
Technically, imagine you want to get rid of an activity that people alredy have done in a design... that will make create a nightmare of inconsitent data all across.
Therefore, the whole locking stuff.
Now, LAMS 1.1 fixes all this by copying the content and design completely when you assign it to a class. That is, LAMS creates a complete copy of your design and content to run it with a class... leaving your original design alone. Therefore, you can go about modifying your original design as you wish without affecting the running copy.
Now, knowing you Michael, I know you are thinking... "but what if I do want to change the running copy of the design!"
Well, LAMS 1.2 will help you do that. You will be able to change the content *and* the design as long as no student has reached the part of the design you wish to change. If a student has reached that activity that you wanted to change, you can't. This will be done thru the Monitor interface.
I hope this answers the questions... please let me know otherwise.
Thanks,
Ernie
Posted by Ernie Ghiglione
So please don't hesitate to participate even if you are not a tech-head.