Weds 11th February saw the first of our AppsAnon events faciliating discussion around apps we use day to day. This event was part of a joint provision initiative from our Staff Development team for Falmouth, Exeter and FXPlus staff aimed at sharing practice and developing our community.
Participants put a post-it note with the title of an app they use in a jar, which we drew from at random. The author talked for a couple of minutes about the app; how they found it, why they used it, what they liked and any limitations. That person then gets to pick the next post-it from the jar.
Here are the movers and the shakers for 11th Feb:
Vivino – Crowd sourced wine reccomendations. The app lets you scan the barcode of a bottle of wine and submit your own or look at reviews posted by others. You can also follow friends to compare tasting notes like a true wine snob. iOS/Android
Adobe reader – Quick access to reading resources. Adobe reader allows you to take a photo of a document and convert to pdf. Reader also works with Microsoft formats and lets you bookmark web resources. Useful for organising and accessing docs on Falmouth’s Learning Space.
Qu – New Anonymous Question/Answer App in the fashion of Yo messenger and Tindr, you can swipeto answer or dismiss a question. The app offers stats on amount of people answering and views etc. This app might have potential use for entry/exit ticket measures of understanding in the teaching environment in a similar way to Responseware and Exitticket iOS only at present
Twitter – Brilliant and huge educational community on Twitter, the app is widely used within education and they have recently introduced group messaging, video upload and analytics about your tweets. On the flipside, promoted content in your feed soon beomes annoying and their recent updates have brought requests for deeper access to phone settings. There are interesting alternatives like sublevel.net now entering the market iOS/Android
Last week with help from The Compass we set out to gather some feedback from students on the apps they would most recommend to others to aid study at University.
Recent statistics reveal that educational apps are the second most downloaded category in Apple’s app store, but what constitutes as an educational app? Often apps that aren’t typically seen as educational can be assistive in University study, so using the speak-board on Penryn campus helped us gain further insight into the apps our students found useful and would recommend to others.
Referencing apps were the most recommended of all the apps posted on the board, RefME in particular received praise; the free app syncs to your RefME account and allows you to scan resources using your phone or device to create citations, reference lists and bibliographies. EasyBib was also noted as a good app with the pretty much the same functionality as RefME, however this doesn’t support Harvard referencing.
Video based apps were also those featuring high on recommendations, especially those which involved an element of learning; You Tube and Ted Talks were seen as good apps for watching content on the go, SciShow, VSauce, Crash Course were specific You Tube channels which were put forward as being particularly educational and interesting to watch. Khan Academy was also mentioned, this app features a host of educational materials available for free.
Needing some music to help with studying? Spotifyis a music streaming service which puts millions of tracks at your finger tips. 8tracks was another recommended app which featured on our feedback board, described as the peoples playlister, users are able to create mixtapes of 8 tracks or more to share with the online community.
Of all the types of apps posted to help with studying, organisational tools were by far the most recommended. Document organisation tools such as Evernote and Google Drive were suggested, also note taking and list apps: Todolist, Keep Notes (which featured in our recent Tools to Support Research post) and Reminders. There are an abundance of these tools available for phone and tablet, it’s easy to see why they’re popular especially when it comes to University study. HabitRPGcame highly recommended from a few individuals, the ‘gamified’ to do list app aims to ‘make habit building fun’ by rewarding points when you complete day-to-day tasks.
The University of the West of England also features in our list of recommended apps with SAM,a tool to help understand and manage anxiety. It’s free and allows you to visualise your anxiety profile and connect to with a wider community who use the app.
For those wanting to make apps for your device Aris was one tool mentioned last week, one student has used the platform to create a campus tour for fellow classmates, built as user-friendly and open source it has all the resources to get you started.
To accompany the feedback received from students we are holding an apps event for staff to come and share tools they find useful as part of their teaching at University (12:00, 11th February, Peter Lanyon, Seminar 7, Penryn Campus).
Thanks to all who took part in the speak-board, if you’d like any more information about any of the apps mentioned or you’d like to talk about using apps as part of Learning and Teaching at Falmouth University please get in touch – etsupport@falmouth.ac.uk
Here’s the full list of recommended apps from the speak-board:
Whether you’re wading through papers, fully immersed in writing or going through one of those ‘processing’ phases, tools to support research are always welcome … aren’t they?
Well actually, a lot of the time I’ve found that no, they’re not welcome, at least not right now. Often they are the wrong tool at the wrong time or it’s far too in depth for what I need or it feels like the learning curve would be too steep etc etc. You have to look though, because occasionally a gem comes along and below I’ve shared a couple of tools that I’ve found straight forward, easy to use and above all incredibly helpful!
This has completely replaced my notebook for those random thoughts or must read texts that come up day to day. With the ability to keep notes, to do lists that you can check off, leave voice memos, add images, all on the go from your phone / tablet / laptop or desktop (basically anything you can access the net from) I have instantly been more organised with my note gathering.
Notes and checklists can be colour coded and the search facility means even if you chuck loads in there you can find what you’re after – text that appears in images is included within the search. And, if you’re brain is full (or you’re just plain forgetful) you can set reminders based on time or location to any of your notes.
If you live in fear of losing your notebook then fear no more! Google Keep is saved in ‘the cloud’ and unlike a notebook, you can share & collaborate with others on your notes. From taking pictures of the cover of books/journals to sharing notes re: upcoming conferences (with a reminder set for submission dates) I’m finding Google Keep increasingly useful.
Research can sometimes feel like a lonely pursuit yet just scratch at the surface of one of the ‘social’ networks for researchers and you can find others who are as equally enthusiastic as you about your research topic, articles so current they haven’t reached publication yet and ask questions to others in your field. ResearchGate enables you to do all of this (and more). Whilst it can feel tedious setting up yet another account on a social network (LinkedIn – yep, Academia.edu – yep, Twitter – yep, Facebook – ugh, yep) it does seem as though ResearchGate will actually aid your research with searchable publications and questions posed that get answered by the community. I was completely converted after coming across a couple of articles, due to be published soon, by authors that I have been ‘following’.
So, you may have seen journals or conferences stating a preference for submissions in LaTex format and wondered what on earth it means, or perhaps you got as far as glancing at it and have been put off by the look of articles in LaTex format. However, don’t be scared! It actually saves loads of time formatting documents in Word (or other text-processing software) and means the people receiving your work will be able to convert it into exactly the format they’re after. Often you are provided with a LaTex template by the conference / journal which means all you have to do is enter your text.
As a team we’re often asked to attend sessions and give an overview of Educational Technology and how it can be used to support teaching within higher education. Instead of diving straight in with gadgets and apps a good introduction to ed tech is to look at the learners themselves and their experiences. Students coming from FE and other educational pathways bring with them their own expectations of digital technologies; these need to be recognised if our institutions are to fully support the students who come to study at University level.
Compiled by Helen Beetham, David White and Joanna Wild the report “Students’ expectations and experiences of the digital environment” is one resource we’ve highlighted in introductory staff sessions. Taking into consideration expectations of connectivity, technical support and resource availability is something we encourage of teaching staff and so to have a national project addressing these themes is encouraging for future educational policy making.
Further information about the Digital Student Project including upcoming FE consultation events can be found via the Jisc Website, Twitter (#digitalstudent) or the project blog.
One of the fundamental affordances of web technology is the ability to connect with content at a time and in a place convenient to us and there are a wealth of online opportunities to learn more about how technology can support learning and teaching. Here’s an introduction to some of our favourites and some ideas for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) in incorporating Educational Technology into teaching practice.
Conferences/Events
Many of the events that the team attend are relevant for all involved in learning and teaching. Some to note over the coming year are; BETT which looks at Educational Technology across schools, FE and HE, JISC’s Digifest15, the annual conference of the Association for Learning Technology and OER15 which focusses on Open Education.
Courses
There are also a huge range of self paced opportunities for professional development in the form of free and open courses, a great deal of which are listed over on the Open Culture website. ALT hosts an Open Course in Technology Enhanced Learning each year for anyone working in or with an interest in Educational Technology. Connected Courses aims to join together open educators the world over and help them develop themselves and their teaching. Additionally, A big forking course looks at rhizomatic approaches towards learning, making use of P2PU’s ability to build a course in a box that others may reuse and remix as they see fit.
Twitter
Deserving of it’s own heading, the international educational community is huge on Twitter and it has widely been adopted as a tool for teaching and learning. Follow us @ET_Falmouth for regular updates from the team and if you are new to Twitter, get in touch to chat about it’s use in Education. Twitter lists are a handy way to manage your Educational Networks, you could create one with just Falmouth colleagues in for example, or with various educational news Twitter accounts.
Another useful feature of Twitter is the hashtag, a way of tagging tweets that enable others to search for them. Often used for conferences and module codes in education, here are some that the team engage with:
#LTHEchat – Learning Technology in Higher Ed. UK Weekly chat on a Weds eve. 8-9pm.
#ALTC – Conference hashtag for ALT, used to signpost items of interest to other conference participants.
#EdTech – Catch all hashtag for anything relating to Educational Technology.
#edtechchat Weekly chat, hosted by US educators on Mondays 1-2am GMT
#BYOD4L an open course in mobile device usage in learning and teaching, reconvening for 2015 on 12th Jan.
Other online resources (blogs, sites)
Using a news aggregator like Feedly, helps create as a one stop source for news via blogs or any site that has an RSS feed. Your first visit should be to Falmouth’s Educational Technology Team site and associated Blog and Projects site. If there’s something relating to Educational Technology that isn’t already here and that you’ve seen somewhere else, we more than likely have an opinion on it, so come and chat to us. Sussex University’s TEL team blog is another great place to pick up tips and the following web resources all provide insights into working in learning and teaching developments with technology:
These links aren’t an exhaustive list and we will be adding a calendar of events to the ET site soon, so you can put dates in the diary. We’d welcome any feedback on other events and resources that people find useful, so email, tweet or drop in to the cottage for a cuppa whenever is convenient.
The Association of Learning Technology held their first annual Winter conference last month at the University of Edinburgh. The event focused on Creative CPD in Learning Technology, an area we’re passionate about in our team. Professional development can incorporate creative approaches so it was great to see ALT hold an event around this subject.
ALT’s peer-based accreditation scheme CMALT was featured as one such approach to aid professional development. eLearning consultant David Hopkins has recently completed the CMALT qualification and gave a talk at the conference along with staff from UCL and Reading College.
Talks were streamed on the day and can be accessed using the links below.
Season’s greetings one and all. As the Ed. tech team finish the washing up and recycle the wrapping paper (providing we’ve all been good this year), we take a little time out to reflect upon last year and predict what’s on the way for Educational Technology in 2015.
In 2014, we predictedtechnology would enable collaborative activity in the learning environment, that mobile device usage would increase as access to resources became easier and that data gathering and social media management would be key considerations for the University. We think we can be fairly confident that our crystal ball of learning technology is in good working order. Our projects and general support activity over 2014 would attest to our predictions and have seen these themes cropping up in conversation and strategy over the year.
For 2015, we’re backing up our crystal ball gazing with some wider conversation and looking at what the New Media Consortium consider key trends within Ed. Tech. for Higher Educationover the next few years. As with the Christmas Turkey/Vegetarian Option, we’ve taken our choice cuts and linked to a few places online, where the thinking and the talking is already happening.
Fast Trends: Driving Ed Tech adoption in Higher Ed for the next one to two years
The Evolution of Online Learning Such a huge topic that we can’t really do it justice in one article. But increasing access to technology, huge investment into Ed Tech Startups and study into fields such as game mechanics in learning are changing the way in which we access learning material. In HE, conversation around the role and nature of the traditional, centralised Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) model has been bubbling away for a while (see this panel from ALT in 2009), but surfaced again this year in Audrey Watter’s talk, “Beyond the VLE” and Sheilla MacNeill who talks about first hand experience of living with the VLE dictator in HE. Higher Education presents all sorts of constraints in terms of management of data and interconnectivity between systems, so the VLE may be here to stay for a while longer, but maybe we start to think about it more as a starting point, curating learning material and signposting and guiding learners to and through it.
Rethinking Learning Spaces Technological development is also enabling us to rethink the physical as well as the online learning environment. Browser based applications like Google Apps (and their offline work mode) and Adobe’s experimentation in this direction mean that learners aren’t tied to desktops in dingy locations or relying on sketchy wi-fi provision. Google talk of Democratizing IT administration, in that a lot of the enterprise wide management of IT could be devolved to the learning and teaching community. This might allow for changes in space usage through things like DIY lecture capture using campus Hangouts On Air/Youtube. In terms of physical space, in her post on this year’s Ed Media Conference Amy Sampson talks about creative learning space in Finnish education and the ET team will be connecting with Cornish villages in pubs, village halls through the University of The Village Project.
Mid-Range Trends: Driving Ed Tech adoption in Higher Ed for the next three to five years
Increasing Focus on Open Educational Resources Accessible and freely available resources to aid learning, teaching and research . OER puts the web to work in the way that it was intended, encouraging redistribution and redevelopment/remixing of content. Whilst adoption hasn’t hit the mainstream, OER is becoming central to policy and strategy within education, as the Open/OER movement in Scotland and Wales testifies. In England, Leicester City Council are promoting OER through a range of resources and guides for schools
Long-Range Trends: Driving Ed Tech adoption in Higher Ed for five or more years
Agile Approaches to Change Change is the only constant, as someone might have said. HE is in a continuous state of flux as it responds to funding changes and external pressures from other educational providers and non-traditional models of learning. Process and procedure is often dogged, outmoded and not easily adaptable to change, but agile methodologies adopted from software development allow for iterative project development that can respond to the VUCA world. Falmouth’s Student Course Information Page project facilitated an agile response to a Student Experience audit and added a layer to the VLE that pulls in relevant course data from the various business systems at the University, avoiding document duplication in the Learning Environment.
Solvable Challenges: Those which we both understand and know how to solve
Adequately Defining and Supporting Digital Literacy One of the key functions of the Ed.Tech team is to nurture and develop literacies in technology; the Why, When, Where of technology use in the learning environment. De Montfort University and Leicester City Council’s partnership in DigiLit Leicester presents an excellent framework and reference of for educators in understanding how we support these new literacies and Mozilla encourages an experiential approach in learning to Teach The Web.
These are just a few examples of Educational Technology developments that are responding to current and upcoming trends, but there is some fantastic work being done across the board in HE. 2015’s Horizon report will arrive in the early new year and previous editions are available online for a little light reading over the festive period.
It’s that time of year again when the Ed Tech team are optimistically looking forward for some some gadgets to magically appear in their stockings this christmas. We’re hoping we’ve made the good list and our festive wishes will be granted, here is what’s topping our lists…
Topping Mark’s list is a wireless speaker, either a JAMBOX or a Ultimate Ears would do nicely. Also on the list is a recently funded Kickstarter project: Thingsee One is sensor packed smart developer device, however we’re still not sure 100% what it does!
Amy’s had her eyes on a KitchenAid mixer for a while, a nice brightly coloured one would be fab or failing that a Pure Evoke DAB radio would be much appreciated.
Steph would like a Chromecast so she can seamless stream from her devices onto her TV, perfect for chilling out on the sofa at Xmas.
Oliver’s been on the look out for a Korg MS20 Synthesizer kit this musical equivalent of Meccano allows you to build you own classic synthesiser from scratch. Definitely something to keep you busy come boxing day.
So all in all Santa a varied selection which would keep the team very happy! We hope staff and students have a great festive season, Merry Xmas, Happy New Year and we’ll see you in January!
The 6th Annual Future of Technology in Education Conference, hosted at University of London provided the ET team with an opportunity to connect with other learning and IT professionals working in Higher Education. Themes centred around Women In Technology, Co-Creation in Learning, Collaboration between ET and IT and Digital Learners.
After registration and welcome, Samantha Swift, Product Manager, McAfee Labs took to the stage to talk about promoting role models to bridge the gender gap between women and men in technology leadership. She noted that the public are more aware of key male figures in technology than they are of female leaders. This may be in part due to our seemingly embedded patriarchal society in the west and it seems like it has taken until now to identify that something needs to change in society to enable the gender gap in leadership to be narrowed. The #FOTE14 hashtag for the event was quickly trending on Twitter and colleagues in Educational Technology noted that there were an increasing amount of women in leadership roles within ET. Perhaps this is due to it being an emergent field with less gender predispositions/stereotypes.
In her speech Sarah highlighted that issues of this kind tend to be pointed at in a reflective manner; if we are serious about changing the roles women play in technology then we should be talking about the future and what needs to be done. Personally I felt that the panel after the session drifted into the kind of discussion Sarah was trying to avoid, with panelists reliving past examples where women weren’t as accepted in technology. While these anecdotes were interesting and reflective they didn’t really address or suggest how in the future we can alleviate current issues experienced by women in technology.
The Women in Technology panel that followed, identified some interesting projects such as WIDGIT (Women in Digital and IT) a female technology forum set up in Liverpool, but didn’t really conclude whether there was a problem with the lack of women in tech roles and if so how we might address this.
Coffee break allowed us to catch up with colleagues from UCL and talk about how our teams operate, our responsibilities and relationships with staff. Learning Spaces and staff engagement were topics of conversation
The second half of the morning consisted of three short presentations around the future of technology in education. The first from Dave Coplin of Microsoft was billed as not being a sales pitch, but effectively was a list of Microsoft acquisitions and their developments. We played Microsoft bingo for a few minutes and the talk culminated in the latest MS swoop, “Minecraft” which offers new opportunities for constructing learning online. A list of alternatives can be found here.
Bethany Koby, founder of tech start up Technology Will Save Us was up next. Aptly titled ‘Will Technology Save Us?’ Bethany’s presentation showcased some of the work her company was undertaking, which included DIY Technology kits for children. The kinesthetic nature of this hands on approach really makes technology accessible for younger people; each kit encourages exploration and play to construct gadgets and truly involves students in the process of learning. During the presentation Bethany was optimistic about the future of education and the part that children play in shaping the digital economy. This session was the only one of the day which featured physical technologies, a refreshing change from the abundance of apps and websites showcased as part of FOTE. Working in an area where creative physical technologies are abundant it was surprising that more initiatives of this kind were not featured as part of FOTE.
Miles Metcalfe talked amongst multiple expletives of Co-Creating the Future and cargo cult IT solutionism. He suggested that one-sized solutions won’t fix problems with communication and that the future of technology lies in the hands of the people that create and produce not those that consume and that we need to work across sectors to facilitate this.
The afternoons speakers featured James Clay and Steve Wheeler. James is the Group Director of Learning Technologies at Activate Learning. His presentation was titled “You underestimate the power of the dark side” and started with an homage to Star Wars which nicely illustrated frustrations commonly felt when working with technology. James continued his presentation with reference to good and evil, dark and light and while I related to many of the situations he described, I did disagree with some of the attributes he described of Learning Technologists. While we can be fans of the shiny, an ability to stay focused is something I personally strive to keep. James also talked of ignorance amongst the dark and the light in understanding the constraints within enterprise IT and the flexibility and forward thinking required in ET. Arguably is it the comprehension of these tired IT processes that prevent these areas working more closely together and driving positive change within education. Nevertheless, we could all agree that collaborative practices and clear communication are essential when working across departments.
“Digital Learning Futures: Mind the Gap!” exclaimed Steve Wheeler in our last talk of the day. Steve talked of understanding learner needs and designing learning content to match. The talk suggested that institutional choice of technology might not facilitate learner needs and that students should be empowered to inform those choices. A more comprehensive write up can be found here.
This update sees the introduction of a resource list block within Learning Space, the block provides links to the resources which have been recommended to assist study in each module and can be found on the right of a module page.
A recent activity button has also been introduced to the right of each module page which allows all to see what recent changes have taken place within a module.
Additionally we’ve made some adjustments with the mobile version of Learning Space which will improve navigation using the side menu.
