HBU – January Meeting. (Now With Photos!)

Ahead of the next ‘HBU – Beyond The Classroom’ session, the e-Learning Technologists attended a Hair and Beauty departmental meeting on the 9th of January. It was Adam’s first introduction to Yvonne’s team, which allowed him to further prepare for his February session. The meeting itself revolved around various HBU staff members speaking about their recent developments and experiments relating to e-Learning. There were three distinct sections, and a final message from the e-Learning Team to wrap things up.

The first segment was about the creation and application of QR codes.Tutor Gill had attended a training session with another HRC teacher a few months prior, during which she discovered how great QR technology could be. She originally drafted up a PowerPoint game where questions would be built from black icons, and answers would be in purple – but there were complications, so a simpler handout quiz utilising QR codes was demonstrated instead. Gill has said she is intending to refine and test her original idea so that her learners can still experience it. The staff present at the meeting were so interested in these ideas that a large amount of them immediately pulled out their smartphones and downloaded QR reader applications! Overall, the presentation was a success.

Following on from that, there was a brief slideshow about psychology, language and the student mind – though this wasn’t explicitly related to e-Learning. The final contribution focused on the tool Prezi. Staff were asked to make an account and play around with the system to try and get used to it. You can see a previous article about Prezi (written by Sam) here. Trying the site out was a good experience, but it was partly ruined by the fact that Prezi’s creation tool tried to trick people into downloading a Google Chrome extension – despite the fact everybody was working in Internet Explorer! Thankfully, the e-Learning Team were on hand to help navigate confused tutors through the mess and provide layout advice when asked. This concluded the HBU team’s contributions.

To close, we spoke briefly to the Hair and Beauty tutors about the future of the ‘HBU – Beyond The Classroom’ project. Adam was shown to be in charge of the final session, and the method for collecting student feedback at the end of the project was described. The e-Learning Team thanked the department for their time and hospitality and then returned to the office to plan out ‘HBU – Beyond The Classroom 4’.