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.