Blended learning pioneers meeting 2

It’s been around 2 months since our first meeting and since then the pioneers have been busy sharing Powtoon and the grid system with their teams.

REVIEWS

At our second meeting we welcomed some new faces to our growing clan and began by reviewing Powtoon and the grid system. If you haven’t seen these yet, take a look at blog post from the first meeting here.

We began by reviewing Powtoon. Several pioneers had explored the online software and the over-riding feedback was that it was clunky and took a while to get your head around how to create movies and presentations. In particular changing the timings of animations and text was found to be tricky.

Despite this some of us did say that using the templates was relatively quick and that the tutorials on the PowToon website were really helpful. As with a lot of new tech, there is a steep learning curve, however with a bit of practice it does get easier and become a little more instinctual. It was noted that if you have the time to invest in learning how to use it students respond really well to the movies.

We then reviewed the grid format and feedback was unanimously good and avoid what one member called “the scrolling screen of doom!” Students like the format better and staff have adapted quickly to the new layout. It was reported that most courses across the college are now using this format. It’s great to see such a positive impact so quickly from our group.

New resources

Our first new resources for this meeting was shared – Pikctochart. An online infographic design tool. An overview of it can be seen below.

Picktochart does a significant amount of free templates and you can design your own from scratch so don’t be tempted to pay for the premium or educators upgrade unless you’re really keen!

Several members of the group have already used picktochart themselves and even had students make infographics using it as part of an assessment. It’s a really nice way to present information in a visual format and looks really professional. There is a more detailed tutorial of how to use it here

 

The second new tool that we examined was using the reports function on moodle. It’s really handy for getting clear evidence of what student’s have accessed on moodle and can not only allow you to monitor individual students, but also to analyse how well your resources and activities are beeing accessed. The video below gives a neat introduction to this.

Pioneers have been asked to share these resources with their teams and to be ready to feedback at our next meeting which will be in January.

Before then the BPC’s first “Learning Festival” will take place on 18th December and will be an opportunity for all staff across the college to take part in a conference on “innovation and research”, “I.T, blended learning and all things wizzy” and “personal health and well being”. Keep your ear to the ground for more information on this coming soon!

Pioneers at BPC – sharing blended learning solutions

Last week saw our blended learning pioneers attend their first meetings of the blended learning group at BPC this academic year.

Representatives from teams across the college watched a short presentation on the format of future meetings before two different blended learning solutions were shared.

All the solutions chosen to share during our future meetings will be selected very carefully with two clear questions in mind – “do this enhance student’s learning?” and “does this make the teacher’s life easier?” Ultimately teaching staff are very busy and are increasingly being asked to do even more with their very precious time. We hope to find blended learning solutions that will save time and produce results for students.

The first solution we examined was using the grid format on moodle. It’s much prettier than the normal topic format and actually is much easier to navigate.   A video on how to install this is below.

There was some discussion on this at both meetings and it was agreed that we can avoid copyright issues by using pictures from google image search and using the “search tools” then “usage rights” and selecting “labelled for reuse”

The second resource that was shared was PowToon, a website that allows to make animated presentations and videos. The first video below explains how you might use it in your teaching. The second video by PowToon.com gives a good overview of what you can do with PowToon and the final video shows an example of how it has been used in lessons already this year to engage students.

All pioneers were asked to go back to their teams and share these solutions in their team meetings. We plan to meet after the October half term to discuss how these resources have been received by staff and students and to share two more new solutions.

Referencing made easy

Whilst at Digifest back in March I bumped into two guys at a stand who told me about their app “RefMe”.

It’s designed to make referencing easy. We all know quite how time consuming and complex referencing can be. Well, using a smart phone with the RefMe app you can save yourself hours of time composing reference lists.

The app even generates in text citation references for you too.

I strongly recommend that you download it and have a play. It’s very simple to use. If referencing from a book or journal you can simply scan the bar code in and a full reference is generated in seconds. It saves this reference to the project that your working on and once you’ve completed the project you can export the reference list to either an email or if you’re working on a computer you can export it to word.

You can also copy and paste URLs into the app and it will generate accurate web references.

What really impressed me is that RefMe has over 6000 different referencing formats to choose from and if your department uses a unique style you can submit it to them via email and they will add it to their database.

More information can be found by clicking here

I only wish this existed when I was studying for my PGCE, it would have saved me so much time.

Happy referencing!
Fran

JISC Digifest 9-10th March 2015

I was lucky enough to attend the annual Digifest a few weeks ago held at the ICC in Birmingham.

The conference was organised by JISC to promote the use of blended learning and technology in further and higher education. It consisted of a series of workshops and presentations on new tech and software along with seminars and panel discussions. More information about Digifest can be found here.

A huge amount of the content was filmed by JISC and is available online, free to view here

If you only watch one part of it, I strongly recommend spending 20 minutes watching the key note by Bob Harrison on the importance of technology in education. You can find it at 7hours and 35 minutes.

In addition to the key note, I attended several workshops and sessions throughout the two days and found some really good practice across the sector that excites me and has given me some ideas for how we can improve our practice here at The Bournemouth and Poole College. I’ll be sharing the best of these ideas/resources over the next few weeks.

If you want to speak to me about anything on the programme from Digifest please get in touch. bovef@bpc.ac.uk
Fran

Welcome.

Welcome to the Blended Learning Blog.

Consider this your one stop shop for all things blended learning. We’ll be sharing the best blended learning resources around, along with keeping you up to date with our projects and any other learning technology news.

This blog is for you, so if there’s something you’d like to see, please let us know by getting in touch. You can email me here – bovef@bpc.ac.uk

You can also find me on twitter here @franbove