More Celebrations and Good News for the LTLS Team! We are Winners!

 

Our principle social media collaborators!  From left to right – Keely Flather:  Senior Learning Technologies and Library Services Coordinator, Jane Tomlinson: Head of Learning Technologies and Library Services and Sally Marchant: Learning Technologies Coordinator

Following on from our recent success in acquiring the Google G Suite for Educators Level 1 qualification, we had more good news last week!

Jisc recently ran a competition to find the top ten Social Media Superstars in FE for 2018. In their own words they were “On the look-out for the most social media-savvy folk in Further Education” looking for the most innovative ways of using social media in teaching and learning.  Jisc wanted to know which social media platforms we were using, how we reached our students, whether the use of social media has improved our teaching practice at Petroc, whether it had helped our service overcome particular challenges and whether it facilitated communication.  

The final line-up was chosen by a panel of FE and social media experts, including Jisc’s head of FE and Skills, Paul McKean; Jisc’s digital content manager, Richard Tatnall; TES columnist, FE teacher founder of UKFEchat, Sarah Simons, and FE Week journalist Sam King.

Our entry was driven by Keely Flather:  Senior Learning Technologies and Library Services Coordinator.  Here is what we said:

“The Learning Technologies and Library Services Team uses a combination of WordPress, Twitter and Facebook to communicate across three campuses and beyond. As demand on time has increased, the team found it hard to maintain the same level of face-to-face support and saw how social media could help.

The platforms act as a shop window for the team to display learning technologies and library services to all.  Daily tweets have an eclectic style, including the odd GIF and personal news, so the account stays friendly and interesting. Specific hashtags promote various LTLS projects and initiatives. For example, #PetrocReads5 is promoting a reading challenge through a live Twitter feed on the library services Moodle page and there’s been a big uptake among staff and students alike. #PetrocGoogle5 promotes online Google training as part of the college’s rollout of Chromebooks and Google G Suite (Wakelet), and #PetrocLTA is a starting point for discussing learning, teaching and assessment.

The active promotion of Twitter has encouraged lecturers to create their own curriculum-based Twitter accounts and embed them within their Moodle course pages”

And the Judges were impressed!  Here is what they said:

“The team has used social media as a way of continuing to support students at the library, countering the lack of time available for face-to-face contact. They use social media to its fullest advantage, not only in terms of in-college promotion but to the wider public.

The team’s understanding of the importance of tone in online communication is an impressive and rarely discussed nuance. Their welcoming online ‘persona’ transforms the outward direction of marketing information into an inclusive and ongoing conversation.”

As winners we will receive a visit from Jisc’s Digi Lab complete with virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), an Emotiv Insight EEG brain reader and a robot!

You can read the full story and see a list of all ten winners on the JISC website.

https://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/jiscs-top-ten-further-education-social-media-superstars-of-2018-16-apr-2018

Find us on Twitter, Facebook and WordPress!

Sally Marchant

Learning Technologies Coordinator

 

We are G Suite for Education Educators!

Over the last few months, The Learning Technologies team at Petroc has been introducing The G Suite for Education to staff and students.  Bespoke online training materials have been created by the team and face to face training has been delivered to teaching staff to support this innovative new approach to teaching and learning.

In order to best support staff and students in using the Google Suite Education apps, four members of the Learning Technologies team have been working towards and recently successfully acquired the Google Certified Educator Level 1 qualification. The four members:  Keely Flather (Senior Learning Technologies and Library Services Coordinator), Sarah Vincent, Sally Marchant and Sue Dingle sat a 3 hour exam which tested their knowledge in all the core Google Apps: Calendar, Classroom, Contacts, Drive, Docs, Forms, Groups, Sheets, Sites, Slides and Talk/Hangouts.

The introduction of The G Suite for Education is an important step forwards for Petroc. All staff and students now have Google Education accounts, and a large percentage of teaching staff has been given Chromebooks which will enable them to take advantage of the many benefits of a Google Account. The G Suite Core Service apps are designed to increase the possibilities for effective, online collaboration and streamlined academic tasks.  The cloud-based technology helps to create an environment where it is easy to share and collaborate on ideas and work together.

We are an enthusiastic team, willing to take on new challenges and constantly working hard to bring new, innovative and interesting ideas to teaching and learning.   We are looking forwards to seeing the use of this technology grow and develop at Petroc.

Sally Marchant

Learning Technologies Coordinator

Future Teacher 3.0

Being part of the Learning Technologies team at Petroc means spending our time investigating, exploring, testing and using new technologies with the aim to  support lecturers incorporate these tools into learning, teaching and assessment. We are constantly collaborating with colleagues in other FE colleges, either on Twitter, face to face at conferences, via MOOC’s or taking part in webinars.

Currently myself, Jane and Sally  are taking part in a monthly Future Teacher 3.0. webinar series which is part of Future Teacher Talks 2017 UK. 

“The general aim of the webinars is to provide a platform for exploring, discussing and sharing effective practice and to provide free tools and resources to support you and your colleagues including the opportunity to participate and contribute to the wider project which is also completely free and will provide opportunities for more formal participation.”

The discussion point for the first webinar  was ‘Online Learning! what works?’, this allowed us to look at the methods, impact and technology used for online learning.

The second webinar was all about ‘The flipped classroom’ this started off with a flipped activity which we had to complete before the webinar,  those who completed the activity were rewarded with a mention!

Being rewarded for completing the activity in time!!!

This session covered practice, research, tools and strategy. It was interesting to hear from colleagues in other FE colleges discuss their experiences of using flipped learning, which was positive and sometimes negative, especially where there had been problems embedding it into the curriculum.

The next webinar is  ‘Knowing what they know- getting feedback from students’ if you are interested in taking part in this free program of webinars, the link to the website is here Future Teacher Talks

Keely.

 

It maybe the holidays, but we are still busy!

Yes, it is the Easter Break but this doesn’t mean that everything stops, we just seem to be eating more chocolate than normal! 

The Library is open from 10-1 every day and our learners have been making the most of the space and the computers. We have also been on hand to offer help and advice to lecturing staff, in particular, tidying up and redesigning a Moodle page to make it current and easier for learners to access revision material.

Sue and Sally have been working with CIS and IT to update some Moodle plugins, this caused a bit of head scratching at first, but with the extra chocolate supplies everything is now working as it should.

I have been working on creating a ‘Blended Learning Toolkit’. Part of a new project, the toolkit is being offered to staff who attend a series of planned sessions with the Learning Technologies team, working together, we will identify tools that will create new Blended Learning opportunities . So far the toolkit includes an iPad, Microphone, Webcam, Headphones and Voicerecorder plus instuctions on how to use the tools and recommended apps for teaching, learning and assessment. If you want to know more, or be part of this project please email library@petroc.ac.uk

Keely.

Jane and Keely’s ‘Technology Shuffleday’ in Chippenham!

On Wednesday 15^th March, Jane and I headed up to the newly opened Wiltshire College, Chippenham Campus. The reason for the visit was to participate in their ‘Technology Shuffle Day’.

We were invited to take part following an informal lunchtime chat at a BLC SouthWest meeting. Jane Davidson, Head of Learning Resources at Wiltshire College, described how they were running a staff development day, starting off with all staff being given a 15 minute bitesize demo of technology being used at Wiltshire College, to allow staff to choose  3  full workshops they wanted to attend in the afternoon.

This somehow led to myself and Jane being signed up to run two workshops on TedEd lessons, a resource which we had promoted here at Petroc but was not being used at Wiltshire College.

Despite the fact that we were unable to give a 15 minute bitesize overview of the TedEd lessons in the morning, we were pleased to have 12 lecturers sign up for our afternoon sessions.

TedEd lessons can be used as an assessment tool, an interactive activity, flipped learning or a method for peer assessment.

The session we ran was very hands on, everyone who attended left having created and completed their first TedEd lesson, they also got to share their lesson with everyone else in the group via Padlet. All of the resources and help they needed was accessed via the Padlet, set up for the days training, this included a TedEd lesson, a poster and a video guide on how to create their own TedEd.

The sessions were very lively,  the participants were  enthusastic and the feedback was great…“Absolutely brilliant. I am not a technophobe but am so ICT incompetent it’s unbelievable that I managed to create a lesson – I am going to work on this tonight & actually use it in my teaching tomorrow. Thank you so much!”

If you would like to know more about using TedEd in your classroom, please watch Jane’s video showing how easy it is to set up a lesson and come and speak to the Petroc Learning Technologies team.

10 Days of Twitter #YSJ10DoT

I came across this free online course whilst researching other Technology Enhanced Learning Blogs created by TEL teams based in both FE and HE institutions.  This comes courtesy of York St John University TEL Team Blog:  https://blog.yorksj.ac.uk/moodle/10-days-of-twitter/

I thought it was a good starting point for people who are not quite sure about the use of Twitter, why you would want to use it and how you can use it.

I know that from the work that I do here in the LTLS team, how important Twitter is for networking and research, and that’s it not all used by people taking photos of their breakfast.  Twitter is basically a micro-blog, and that is its advantage.   Users have to cut straight to the point to get information across.  I use Twitter daily to discover what people are saying right now about topics that I’m interested in professionally.

If you want to discover more about how to use Twitter, try this out courtesy of York St John University.  You just need to register with an e-mail address and follow the discussions and tweets using the hashtag #YSJ10DoT

https://blog.yorksj.ac.uk/moodle/10-days-of-twitter/

The use of Digital Technologies in Carpentry and Joinery

Great examples of how digital technology can be relevant to all subjects and disciplines!

Twitter is for idiots, right?

Starting out on the road to using Twitter can be a daunting prospect:  people posting pictures of their breakfasts, complaining about bias of the BBC regards the EU Referendum and generally a lot of hot air.  But Twitter can play an important part in your teaching and learning, working as a collaborative tool for online communication, shrinking the world geographically and  benefiting from an extremely powerful search engine using the hashtag formula.  It can also be a valuable tool for your own CPD.

Need more proof?  Watch this Prezi presentation