Second Year Study Day, 10 November, evaluation

(Note that the final option for Question 4, about the Q&A session has been lost in the conversion; it reads "Not relevant to your practice".)

Tech. session; 10 November Study Day

Welcome to Mark's wind-up of the day!

Congeekulations if you arrived directly from scanning the QR image!

If you were reduced to typing in a URL to get here, then go to:

• Here for an iPhone, Android or Windows app. 

• Here for Blackberry

to get a QR reader app. (No obligation, of course. It's just a useful facility for all kinds of things. All our stuff is accessible from www.bedspce.org.uk the old-fashioned way.)

Go to www.tinyurl.com/awayday12 to complete a short survey which will be discussed in this afternoon's presentation

Please add to your paper evaluation of the day on Twitter @bedspace1.

Thanks. Enjoy.

---

Update from Mark: 12 November

Useful Websites

Flipping the Classroom

• http://www.khanacademy.org/
• http://Teded.com
• http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/teaching/resources/tools/xerte-online-toolkits.aspx

Screencast tools – Screenr, Presentme, Camstudio

Cool Stuff

• http://www.stumbleupon.com/
• http://www.gapminder.org/
• http://www.ted.com
• http://www.benettonplay.com/toybox.php
• http://www.qrstuff.com

Presentation Tools

• http://www.slideshare.net
• http://www.prezi.com

Assessment tools

• http://polleverywhere.com
• http://Playbrighter.com

Online Storage and collaboration

• http://gmail.com
• http://dropbox.com or http://www.box.com/
• http://titanpad.com

A list of Apps to consider and install:


This is a working list so if you have any to add please share.

Apple	Android
RED LASER – reads bar and QR codes.	QR CODE READER
Put things off	Assignment planner free
Imovie – paid app, but great movie editor.	Magisto – Magical Video editor
Ianki flashcards - – Gapped recall app that allows you to create flash cards on a system that learns what you know and what you don’t.	MemoDroid – Gapped recall app that allows you to create flash cards on a system that learns what you know and what you don’t.
Google Drive or Gdrive – 5gb of free online storage and allows you to create and edit Microsoft word, excel and PowerPoint files.	Google Drive – 5gb of free online storage and allows you to create and edit Microsoft word, excel and PowerPoint files.
TED – Great talks from remarkable people free to the world.	TED – Great talks from remarkable people free to the world.
HD elements The Elements (£4.99) – awesome worth every penny.	Elements – periodic table and/or periodic droid
Imathematics	Mathematics
A Level maths core 1 -	Dropbox – 2gb of free online storage.
Morfo booth	Lookout mobile – virus security and theft tracking.
Evernote – allows users to create to-do-lists, take notes and record voice reminders.	Evernote – allows users to create to-do-lists, take notes and record voice reminders.
Dropbox – 2gb of free online storage.	Color Note – a note taking app that allows users to take notes and edit them on the go.  Offers a sticky note environment, a calendar and to-do-list options.
Google Maps	Google Maps
Educreations interactive Whiteboard – interactive recordable whiteboard.	Sync  Space – whileboard app – used to create drawings and documents.
Mobile Podcaster – (£1.49) – podcast creator. Iblug is free, but new so unrated.	Audioboo – a free web tool where users can record their audio clips and share them with others.
Idea flight – allows you to send presentations to other users logged in on their ipads.	Tape a talk – allows users to record voice notes, voice memos and several other audio formats.  You can even record when the display is off.
ITunes U	AndroidMedia – a video editing app for Android that allows its users to create and edit their videos on the go.
Revision App – The Ultimate revision app.	Minus – allows its users to upload and share files between their Android devices and their computers. 50GB
Khan Academy – Mobil access to the Khan academy and all the educational videos available from Khan academy.org.	WiFi file transfer – allows users to transfer files from an Android device to any other device on the same WiFi network.
Edmodo – this is a VLE website which you can set up for your learners.	AnyDo – allows users to create to-do lists by speaking into their device.
Mindjet - allows users to create awesome mind maps and diagrams.	Mindjet – allows users to create awesome mind maps and diagrams.
Qwiki – great app that talks through Wikipedia articles in two minute videos.	One Note – enables users to take notes very easily and on the go. Windows live ID required.

 
And the Survey results are here. 

Evaluation for Year 1 Study Day: 6 October 2012

Here is the summary material from the evaluation questionnaires (102 returned).

I think Sue Cowley set a new record: 96% of you rated her session as "very stimulating".

And 86% of those who responded (which was roughly 80% of you, on best estimates) said you would be going away with "lots" of ideas to use, which goes up to 99% if you count those answering "some" as well.

And thanks for the kind remarks about the enthusiasm of the staff--but the success of the day was as much down to you, as participants. We hope this sets the tone for a great course community!

Sd 1 evaluation 061012 from James Atherton

Study Day, 6 October: technology to support learning and teaching.

Many thanks to Mark for a fantastic session, as ever!

We did this last year, too, with a slightly different--more PC-focused--selection of resources. You can read the write-up of that session here. I won't repeat that material; this time he was concentrating more on apps for mobile devices. Instead of students' smartphones and tablets being distractions and problems, he set out to show how they can be enlisted actively to promote learning.

Here is Mark's handout.

Resources to enhance teaching

He first introduced QR bar-codes, and their scanners: for Android, and for Apple. He showed how there is no big deal about generating them; a site such as www.qrstuff.com/ enables you to do that in seconds, and then embed them in handouts and presentations to direct students to an enormous rage of external online resources.

In particular, the codes he gave you took you to Polls Everywhere, where you can build polls for your students, and get instant feedback on their ideas, either via multiple choice or free-text answers. (Free, for maximum of 40 responses). Very useful for getting feedback on students' understanding of an idea.

Sporcle is another quiz tool. It already hosts more than 300,000 tests/games/quizzes but also allows you to develop your own. Mark showed how it can be used to support factual (rote) learning, and how its reporting screen can help you keep track of students' homework in that area.

He introduced us to Gapminder, an extraordinary achievement in the visualisation of data which makes statistics come alive, showing vividly as an example the impact of Mao's great famine on life expectancy in China in 1959.

...and to support your own learning on the course.

How to stop your dog eating your work... Mark suggested Dropbox, mentioned last year. It's still the most flexible "cloud-based" storage and backup solution, and the free version has ample capacity for course- and work-based storage. Microsoft has a similar utility in SkyDrive. Other solutions are also available.

Google Drive goes one stage further. It provides not only file storage in the cloud, but also cloud-based versions of the core office applications; you can do word-processing, and use spreadsheet and presentation packages, for free, and store your output on secure servers. It's also good for sharing documents with your students (so you can comment on assignment drafts, for example) and for creating wikis (collaborative projects on which several people can work, such as a presentation from your Interest Group).

Apart from storing your own work, you will need some way of keeping track of all the stuff you have read in the course of the course. There are many resource manager packages out there, ranging from basic bookmark lists to complex archiving systems--we referred to a couple last year. We (i.e. Mark and I, independently) have provisionally concluded that of all the free options, Evernote is probably the best suited to your needs, not least because of the range of platforms on which it runs.

Do get in touch with your other suggestions!

Particularly rich week on FE in TES

We do recommend the Times Educational Supplement--sign up for their notification email each week. This week has particularly rich pickings. And there are plenty of resources available, too

News
FE advice and news

Lack of trained staff in FE
Dearth may delay introduction of English Baccalaureate Certificates.

Throw us more than a bone, urges AoC chief
New initiatives could affect struggling colleges' core budgets.

Students can log on to say whether or not they click
Ofsted's Learner View website could even trigger inspections.

FE pay scales
Where does this lecturer stand – he's working 40 hours a week but only being paid for 20.

'When can I teach in a school?'
Advice for this trainee on exactly what qualifications they need to teach in schools, as well as in FE colleges.

Help with Functional Skills
Practitioners recommend schemes of work, lesson plans and resources to help teach functional skills.

Becoming a teacher in adult literacy
Advice on the qualifications needed to teach adult literacy.

Typical day to day activities of an FE teacher
Insight into what it's really like to work in FE.

Pay and conditions in further education
Advice on working conditions and salary expectations.

Qualifications needed to work in FE
Help is at hand to navigate your way though the maze of PTTLS, CTLLS and DTLLS.

FE resource collections

Construction and the built environment
Resources covering carpentry, electrical and plumbing maintenance and building skills.

Health, social and child care resources
Communication skills, equality and diversity and childcare are all tackled in this resource collection.

Engineering and mechanics
Motor vehicle, aircraft and health and safety teaching resources suitable for BTEC, ABC and other vocational engineering courses.

Hair and beauty
Hair, beauty and nutrition teaching resources galore.

(Year 1) In case you want to play with Pecha Kucha in advance of the Study Day...

You can download a skeleton Pecha Kucha file from here. It's an almost blank PowerPoint file, configured for 20 slides @ 20 seconds each, set up to advance automatically, and with a simple animated timer to use for rehearsal purposes.

For more on Pecha Kucha, see:

• http://www.pecha-kucha.org/what

 

• http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/challenging-the-presentation-paradigm-in-6-minutes-40-seconds-pecha-kucha/22807

Oh--and welcome to the programme!
 

Petition on revocation of FE Teaching Regulations

The TES editor has set up a petition on the Direct.gov e-petition site to protest about this; you can sign it here.

The consultation survey is here--but it closes on 4 June.

QTLS and teaching in schools: DfE information.

See here.

Useful links

Via Jim Crawley's delicious feed

• www.furthereducationresearch.org/index.htm It's Welsh in origin, but a quick skim reveals some useful, current and critical papers--good stuff to inform up-coming submissions (especially Year 2).
• The Research Centre at City College Norwich; perhaps not as immediately useful, but a good source to bookmark.

Have a good break!

Second Y1 Study Day Evaluation: 24 March 2012

We left the Day feeling that it has been a great success, and the figures from the evaluation questionnaires bear that out;

Study Day Evaluation 24 March 2012

The response to Sue Cowley's session, with a 93% rating of "very stimulating", was extraordinary even for her, even up on last year's paltry 86%!

There were too many write-in comments to incorporate in the PowerPoint digest, but they were also overwhelmingly positive, including for the Interest Groups.

The raw data can be made available on request.

Study Day Evaluation 3 March 2012

Evaluations 030312

It appears that a number of questionnaires may have been mislaid, so this summary is based on only 53 returns, (about 20-25%) and can't really be relied upon. If you happen to have the missing sheets, please let us have them back and their results can be incorporated.

There was only one suggestion for another e-learning resource: Maths for Life, by Malcolm Swan. He has written quite a lot but I couldn't find any distinctively e-learning material from him--perhaps the person who suggested this could provide further details. Thanks.

Interest Group Results from 3 March

Interest group posters_030312

More arising from the tech. session on Saturday

Jim Crawley's Delicious feed (it used to be delicio.us) points towards these resources which may be of interest.

Year 2 final study day, 3 March: from the technology session.

Many thanks to David Andrews and Carol Thompson for this session. They have posted their links and materials on BREO--just a reminder of how to find them:

• Log on to BREO
• Go to the Post-Compulsory Education site.
• Choose Study Days from the list on the left of the screen
• Then Year 2 Study Day--Saturday 3 March.
• Open the 'E' and technology enhanced learning folder.

Other recommendations from within the group were for:

• SMART Exchange; resources to use with a Smart board
• Dipity: create interactive timelines with linked and embedded resources for everything from an historical story to a project plan
• On a larger scale; BookType is the way to create your own text-books, for print or e-book platforms
• Wolfram Alpha; you'll never know what it can do until you try it, and even then you won't...

Do add more in the comments! And see previous material in the same vein here and here (from the corresponding session last year).

BREO update

From Peter W:

 

I have received the email below regarding the problems that BREO has been experiencing (and hence Turnitin). As you can see it is still not fixed and the University is waiting for someone in Amsterdam to sort out the problem.

 

Hopefully it will be sorted before the deadline but if there is a problem please stress to students that they should hand in the hard copies of their work on Friday as normal and that if they are experiencing problems with Turnitin/BREO and can't put it through this week then they will not be penalised.

 

From BREO Support:

 

Yesterday Subject Communities in Blackboard unexpectedly disappeared from your Communities box. Immediately we noticed this problem we contacted our technical support team in Amsterdam and asked them to urgently resolve the problem. We can see that the Communities have not been deleted, rather have become unavailable. Their availability is controlled by a data process and it is a fault with that process that needs to be resolved. We will continue to press the Amsterdam support team (our system is hosted there) for an urgent resolution today and will update you as soon as we have more definitive information.

For immediate information, follow BREO at University of Bedfordshire on Facebook

BREO problem

In case you have come here because you can't access BREO, here's a note from Peter Wolstencroft:

Hello Everyone

 

Some students today have been struggling to access the PCE BREO site. I have chased this problem and received the response below. Please advise students to submit through Turnitin tomorrow if they experience a problem today.

 

If the worst comes to the worst and this is not resolved before the deadline then please accept the hard copy in the first instance.

 

[...]

 

Hello Peter

It seems this was caused by recent changes in the way BREO handles enrolment data, it looks like student enrolment was coming from a data file which is no longer used, so they have been blocked from accessing the site. Now that we've identified the issue we've asked Blackboard to fix it as soon as possible.

Hopefully their access to PCE will be restored by the end of the day.

 

Regards