Year 1 Study Day 5 October.

Welcome to the course! 

This blog is on open access, so that it can be consulted by yourselves (who also of course have access to BREO) but also by mentors and colleagues who don't. The website itself also holds paperwork and forms which you may wish to download, and information for mentors--who might like to look at it before their training session at the Year 2 Study Day on 9 November.

We hope that you enjoyed the first Study Day and found it useful--we shall post a summary of the evaluation results shortly.


Mark Tinney has promised to post details of the sites he visited--what follows is taken from his write-up of his session in March, so it's not totally up-to-date, but we'll up-date when further information becomes available. Of course, he did his session four times, and they varied slightly. The video will appear on the VLE and also here shortly.

Mark wrote:

"Here is a list of the websites we looked at, each with a little description:

• We began the session by playing a game called Hungry Bat, which is available at this address http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Lightnin/1659457

• Ted.com – I have talked about TED several times at these events, in part because it is that good.  The site is full of great talks from experts in several fields and even better they also post some of the best and most inspiring videos from across the web.  As if the site needed to get even better, it has.  TED has added ed.TED: this is a portion of the site that allows you to create learning materials from any TED talk or YouTube video.  Students can create a free account and you can track their results.

• PollEverywhere.com – This is another website I have mentioned in several sessions, it is awesome and allows you to create quiz or poll questions that learners can respond to via text, or a unique web address you can create through the site, they can even respond via twitter.

• QRStuff.com – This is the website I use to create QR codes, you know those funny –looking codes that you can scan with your phone and then pull up a website or a body of text of virtually any bit of information you want learners to have.

• Sporcle.com - This is a quiz website, completely free and full of loads of brilliant prebuilt content and you can build your own.  This is great for just a bit of fun as well as some serious learning.

• Showbie.com – we didn’t get to look at this one, but it is certainly worth a look.  This is a website with an apple app that allows teachers to set up classes and set assignments.  The learners can submit their assignments online and the lecturer can download them, mark them digitally and post them back up for the learner to see, but the way feedback can be done is what really makes it.  Teachers can even leave audio feedback for learners.  Assessment, in my mind is only as useful as the feedback that comes out of it and this makes it easy for teachers to give really powerful feedback easily.

Thank you for your time and warm welcome on Saturday, I hope you found the session useful.  The key is to try something new, and see if it works.  Not everything will work with every group, but I think if we allow learners to complete assessment tasks that allow them to be creative and have some fun along the way, the impact will be significant."