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!