Tuesday 7 October 2014

Technology and the classroom-- links


Forwarded from Mark Tinney: sources from his session at the Study Day:
 
Flipping the Classroom
http://www.khanacademy.org/
http://ed.ted.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
http://www.powtoon.com
Assessment tools
http://polleverywhere.com                     http://Playbrighter.com   
http://www.Sporcle.com
Online Storage and collaboration
http://gmail.com  (look for google drive)
http://dropbox.com or https://www.box.com/
http://titanpad.com

A list of Apps to consider and install
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.


Also, some of the teachers who work in prisons had asked for some ideas so can you also please post this:

For those who teach in centres without internet access you might want to look at the software available at the link below.  Tarsia Formulator is built for maths but works really well with any test entry.  It is a simple tool which will allow you to create simple or complex question/answer dominoes for revision activities or even for concept mapping.  It is totally free and pretty powerful.
http://download.cnet.com/Formulator-Tarsia/3000-2051_4-10584458.html

Wednesday 24 September 2014

Welcome to the 2014 cohort!

On behalf of Carol and the teaching team, in the college centres as well as the university—a warm welcome to the course. We hope you find it an interesting and profitable experience, and we look forward to meeting you at the first Collaborative Network Event on Saturday, 4 October.

Wednesday 20 November 2013

Has anyone used ThingLink?

I've just come across ThingLink, which looks potentially very interesting. Has anyone out there used it? Do share your experience.

Wednesday 13 November 2013

Study Day Evaluations; 9 November

From Carol:

Here is the feedback from the second year study day.  Overall, this is really positive, particularly as it is a second year event ..... and the verbal feedback we received at the SSCC suggests that they liked the format.

General Comments
  • " Just what I needed some inspiration and something to reinforce I am doing it right!"
  • "Sometimes it needed to be more interactive"
  • "Really enjoyed the workshops, just wished they were longer"
  • "You should make it compulsory not to eat lunch in college groups"
  • "Hot food in the cold weather would be nice" (lots of Leicester College students)
  • "Quality of catering was excellent"
Comments about the first lecture (Victor Allen)
  • "Motivational, very interesting"
  • "Liked him but wanted more links"
  • "Engaging and relevant"
  • "Fantastic"

Comments about the second lecture (Andy Kirkpatrick)
  • "Bizarre" (many)
  • "Inspirational" (many)
  • "Hilarious, cried with laughter"
  • "Couldn't see the point"
  • "A bit risque for me" (two people)
Overall, the feedback about the workshops was really positive and for those of you who like to see a few numbers:
  • 83  evaluations were returned
  • 89% were aware of the content prior to the day (only one student said 'not at all')
  • Victor Allen - 98%  said excellent or good and most comments were positive.
  • Andy Kirkpatrick - reviews a little more mixed but 90% still said good or excellent.
And for the workshops themselves................
  • Dyslexia - 71% said excellent or good.
  • The power of language - 90% said excellent or good.
  • Embedding maths ....89% said excellent or good.
  • and .............. lost in differentiation got 100% score!
  • The slight disappointment was the QTLS workshop which scored 68%.... but then again, this is still important.
A  few comments about the workshops:
  • "Mark is excellent really enjoyed this"
  • "I really wanted to go to this one - can we have a bigger room next time?""I loved this workshop - the two presenters were really well informed"
  • "Thank you, I wanted more!"
  • "What was delivered was excellent"
and the comments about the QTLS session:
  • "Good but maybe better in the centres"
  • "I have read all of the information online"
Overall, the day got a score of 96% excellent or good!  This is probably the best year two result we have had and it makes the effort worthwhile (almost).  Thank you again to everyone who helped things to run smoothly.

Friday 11 October 2013

More from the Study Day...

The video from Mark's session is now available in two parts because of space limitations:

You'll note that I have put it on TeacherTube rather than YouTube, just to introduce that site if you don't know it: there are lots of great resources on the site.

There will shortly be a better-quality version, in one part, on the VLE; I had to drop some of the quality because of limitations of file size on the open site.

Evaluations

From Peter: The headlines:
  1.   We had 115 evaluations returned.
  2.   95% thought that the day was good or excellent
  3.   96% thought Sue Cowley was excellent (2% said she was average......)
  4.   91% thought Mark B's differentiation session was good or excellent (60% said excellent)
  5.   89% thought Mark T's ICT session was good or excellent (64% said excellent)
  6.   73% thought the library session was good or excellent (29% said excellent)
  7.   96% said that they were aware of the content of the study days prior to the event (58% very well informed)
Discussion Groups

Peter has been busy setting up discussion groups based on the requests you made on the Study Day, which  fell into the following groups. 
  1. Behaviour Management 
  2. Child Protection and Dealing With Self Harm 
  3. Creativity in the Classroom 
  4. Designing creative assignments and resources 
  5. The General Moans and Groans about teaching thread
  6. Learners with additional needs 
  7. Religion in the classroom 
  8. Session Planning 
  9. Teaching Art and Design
  10. Teaching criminology
  11. Teaching ESOL 
  12. Teaching Functional Skills 
  13. Teaching Maths 
  14. Teaching outside the mainstream 
  15. Teaching practical subjects 
  16. Teaching Travel and Tourism 
  17.  Using social networking in education 
  18. Course specific issues - a tutor will respond to you as soon as possible.
Of course their success does depend on you! To get to them, log on to BREO and scroll down the left hand panel, past all the individual centres to "Discussion Boards".

Tuesday 8 October 2013

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:
  • 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."

Wednesday 27 March 2013

Year 1; Study Day 2; 23 March evaluation

From Carol...
 
"Thank you all for your help at the study day on Saturday.  It was good to see a reasonable turn out despite the weather conditions and it seems that the students enjoyed the day.  Peter has analysed the evaluations and the following represents a summary of the feedback:
 
56% were well prepared for the Study Day (only 2% said "not at all")
- 90% were very/quite pleased with the topic
- 89% found Kathryn's lecture at least quite interesting
- 97% found Mark's lecture at least quite interesting (84% very interesting!)
- 87% found the interest group briefing very clear
- 71% said the timing of the Interest Groups was about right
- 49% thought the SIG work was quite useful....
- 65% would attend the Study Day if it was optional...

The feedback from the [Student Consultative Committee] was also very positive and I will send this as soon as it is typed up."