On the most recent CPD day, in order to help share best practice, tips and tricks and to spread awareness of useful new technologies, the College ran a Show and Tell of activities.
First of all, Matt Davis from CET showed off the portfolio system he has developed for carrying out assessments on a building site via an iPad. We had previously sat down briefly with Matt to look at it and we were blown away by how clean and quick to use it was.
We in the e-Learning team did a few show and tells simultaneously. These included:
- Showing off the Turn-It-In Moodle plugin. An anti-plagiarism tool that not only helps teachers catch out any plagiarised work, but also provides students with a useful learning tool as they can see how their work is assessed to be plagiarism or not, teaching them proper referencing, quotations etc.
- We also showed off Padlet. This is essentially an online board where you can place anything; text, photos, videos, even documents. What makes this so great is that you can just send somebody a link and they can add to it as well. This is one of the best examples of collaborative technology we have seen and we would encourage anyone working on a team project to try it out. You can find an example Padlet at the bottom of this blog post.
- We also gave a sneak back of one of our latest projects, Learn Moodle the Blended Way. This is an online course we have developed that teaches you all you need to know about Moodle. This course is intended to be done for 30 minutes to an hour per week for 7 weeks and would enable a beginner to quickly become comfortable with Moodle. The course has been developed to show you and help you understand both the teacher and student perspective of many elements of Moodle, something we feel is very important.
HBU showed off some of their latest developments:
- Tracking in the workplace, a case study of how HBU are carrying out assessments and tracking progress for students that are on placements. They are doing this using Dell Venue 11 Tablets with a 3G connection.
- HBU also presented their Independent Learning Project. A programme they have developed using Moodle to provide independent study activities for their students. These activities included watching videos and then answering quiz questions, as an example.
Kelly Herbert from BUC did an interesting show and tell on ‘Glossaries and Glogsters – the learner as the author’. This session was about using Moodle glossaries, a tool that is often overlooked and misunderstood. By having students contribute key terms and definitions to a glossary, you can build a bank of useful information. This really helps make a Moodle course feel more like a communal learning experience.
Richard Scott and Barbara Smith of Learning Solutions provided a range of demonstrations on Assistive Technologies. These included mind mapping software, calendars, proof-reading aids and visual screen reading aids.
Jo Griffin of Staff Development showed off Animoto, a great free tool that can be used to create quick videos from photographs. View Jo’s BRAVO Animoto here.
Tom Dickie of CLT did a great presentation on how he has been using mobile apps on his sports course to help students track their fitness schedules and to keep on top of their nutritional needs by tracking their diet.
Ian Mathieson, ASTLP and Donna Dance of DEM showed off one of our favourite tools, Socrative. Socrative allows you to ask questions and get instant answers from your students via their smartphones or other mobile devices. Socrative is as simple as tools get when it comes to setting up and it allows you to easily make a session more interactive.
This blog post has just summarized some of these activities. View the Padlet page here to see a full list of the Show and Tell activities, with photos!
HRC e-Learning Blog 