TurnItIn Pilot Update

At HRC, we have been slowly introducing Turnitin to enable staff to check for Plagiarism in student work, and to give students an insight into how they can improve the quality of their written work.

We, the E-Learning team have been working with lecturers who are currently testing TurnItIn on their Moodle courses.  One of the lecturers we have been working with is Keith Howlett in Public Services.

Keith wanted to use TurnItIn with his second year students for them to submit one of their assessments. We met up with Keith and discussed what the requirements were for the Turnitin assessment to work for him. What was decided was that we would set up a TurnItIn activity with two parts and a time limit of 2 weeks for the students to submit their work. In the setting up process, we showed Keith how to use TurnItIn and how the student experience would be.

After the two week submission period, we caught up with Keith to find out how it went with his students using Turnitin. One of the first things he said to us was “I like it, I think it’s great, but my student don’t!”. When asked why the students didn’t like it, Keith explained that it had been a shock to the system for the learners to see how much work is plagiarised. It could have also been to do with the learners being used to the existing submission system on Moodle (them being second year students).

We asked Keith if he would use it again he said: “I’m going to use it from the start of the year in September as part of the standard submission process and so that new students will automatically start to use it. If you’re interested in joining the TurnItIn pilot, please contact elearning@hrc.ac.uk

e-Learning Technologists Adam & Dom take on the L3 Award in Education and Training!

HRC’s e-Learning technologists, Adam and Dominic have just started the ‘Level 3 Award in Education and Training’, at HRC.

Formerly known as PTLLS or Preparing to Teach in the Lifelong Learning Sector, this course will allow us to improve our teaching & training skills as well as help us build up our knowledge of pedagogy in general.
Both of these factors will be very useful stepping stones to aid us in providing the best possible support for staff at HRC!

If you have any e-learning ideas, issues or questions, please fire them away to elearning@hrc.ac.uk!

Show and Tell – CPD Day Feb 12th 2015

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!

The move from Moodle 1.9 to 2.6 will give us access to new features and improvements. In this video, Sam Kennedy (e-Learning Coordinator) and Adam Udall (Junior e-Learning Technologist) describe what to look forward to!

To view the presentation without the video, please download it by clicking here.

Examples of How to Use the iPads to Support Learning

Today we will be sharing some examples of how iPads can be used in the classroom to encourage interaction and support teaching and learning.

For the following examples we owe a big thank you to Terri Long in Children, Care and Education.

“I have been using ‘Showme’ in class, this allows students to carry out independent research into a topic, and then create an interactive slide show they can then share with their peers. Learners have enjoyed the interactive aspects of this App, particularly in how they are able to use the voice record facilities along with the drawing app to create visual representations of the ideas they have discovered.

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.

iPads and Lightspeed at HRC.

Over the last few months, the Junior e-Learning Technologists have been sinking an insane amount of hours into researching how best to bring in – and protect – HRC-bought Apple devices such as iPads and iPods. This was spurred on by a few departments around the college asking about the possibility of receiving iPads for either educational or business purposes.

Whilst purchasing the products in bulk is not too much of an issue, the main problem has been trying to find a way of monitoring and updating the devices without negative obstructions interrupting any usage. It would be almost impossible to take back every iPad in the college each time an application had to be installed: There needed to be a way for both data and software to reach college-owned Apple products, no matter where they were…