One of the fundamental affordances of web technology is the ability to connect with content at a time and in a place convenient to us and there are a wealth of online opportunities to learn more about how technology can support learning and teaching. Here’s an introduction to some of our favourites and some ideas for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) in incorporating Educational Technology into teaching practice. Conferences/Events Many of the events that the team attend are relevant for all involved in learning and teaching. Some to note over the coming year are; BETT which looks at Educational Technology across schools, FE and HE, JISC’s Digifest15, the annual conference of the Association for Learning Technology and OER15 which focusses on Open Education. Courses There are also a huge range of self paced opportunities for professional development in the form of free and open courses, a great deal of which are listed over on the Open Culture website. ALT hosts an Open Course in Technology Enhanced Learning each year for anyone working in or with an interest in Educational Technology. Connected Courses aims to join together open educators the world over and help them develop themselves and their teaching. Additionally, A big forking course looks at rhizomatic approaches towards learning, making use of P2PU’s ability to build a course in a box that others may reuse and remix as they see fit. Twitter  Deserving of it’s own heading, the international  educational community is huge on Twitter and it has widely been adopted as a tool for teaching and learning. Follow us @ET_Falmouth for regular updates from the team and if you are new to Twitter, get in touch to chat about it’s use in Education. Twitter lists are a handy way to manage your Educational Networks, you could create one with just Falmouth colleagues in for example, or with various educational news Twitter accounts. Another useful feature of Twitter is the hashtag, a way of tagging tweets that enable others to search for them. Often used for conferences and module codes in education, here are some that the team engage with: #LTHEchat - Learning Technology in Higher Ed. UK Weekly chat on a Weds eve. 8-9pm. #ALTC - Conference hashtag for ALT, used to signpost items of interest to other conference participants. #EdTech - Catch all hashtag for anything relating to Educational Technology. #edtechchat Weekly chat, hosted by US educators on Mondays 1-2am GMT #HEAenhancement hashtag for  the Higher Education Academy’s enhancement series of events #BYOD4L an open course in mobile device usage in learning and teaching, reconvening for 2015 on 12th Jan. Other online resources (blogs, sites) Using a news aggregator like Feedly, helps create as a one stop source for news via blogs or any site that has an RSS feed. Your first visit  should be to  Falmouth’s Educational Technology Team site and associated Blog and Projects site. If there’s something relating to Educational Technology that isn’t already here and  that you’ve seen somewhere else, we more than likely have an opinion on it, so come and chat to us. Sussex University’s TEL team blog is another great place to pick up tips and the following web resources all provide insights into working in learning and teaching developments with technology:   Hack Education Inside Higher Ed. Times Higher Ed. JISC Research In Learning Technology  Think Out Loud Club Google Apps for Education These links aren’t an exhaustive list and we will be adding a calendar of events to the ET site soon, so you can put dates in the diary. We’d welcome any feedback on other events and resources that people find useful, so email, tweet or drop in to the cottage for a cuppa whenever is convenient.

As a team we’re often asked to attend sessions and give an overview of Educational Technology and how it can be used to support teaching within higher education. Instead of diving straight in with gadgets and apps a good introduction to ed tech is to look at the learners themselves and their experiences. Students coming from FE and other educational pathways bring with them their own expectations of digital technologies; these need to be recognised if our institutions are to fully support the students who come to study at University level.   Jisc is currently working on a project which focuses in this area; The Digital Student Project commenced in October 2013 and aims to explore and develop students digital journey through FE, HE and beyond. The project is due to be completed at the end of this year, although there are already some published outputs available, including a literature review and two reports; "Students’ expectations and experiences of the digital environment" and "Incoming expectations of the digital environment formed at school".  Compiled by Helen Beetham, David White and Joanna Wild the report "Students’ expectations and experiences of the digital environment" is one resource we’ve highlighted in introductory staff sessions. Taking into consideration expectations of connectivity, technical support and resource availability is something we encourage of teaching staff and so to have a national project addressing these themes is encouraging for future educational policy making.  Further information about the Digital Student Project including upcoming FE consultation events can be found via the Jisc Website, Twitter (#digitalstudent) or the project blog. 

Whether you’re wading through papers, fully immersed in writing or going through one of those ‘processing’ phases, tools to support research are always welcome … aren’t they? Well actually, a lot of the time I’ve found that no, they’re not welcome, at least not right now. Often they are the wrong tool at the wrong time or it’s far too in depth for what I need or it feels like the learning curve would be too steep etc etc. You have to look though, because occasionally a gem comes along and below I’ve shared a couple of tools that I’ve found straight forward, easy to use and above all incredibly helpful! Google Keep https://keep.google.com/ This has completely replaced my notebook for those random thoughts or must read texts that come up day to day. With the ability to keep notes, to do lists that you can check off, leave voice memos, add images, all on the go from your phone / tablet / laptop or desktop (basically anything you can access the net from) I have instantly been more organised with my note gathering. Notes and checklists can be colour coded and the search facility means even if you chuck loads in there you can find what you’re after - text that appears in images is included within the search. And, if you’re brain is full (or you’re just plain forgetful) you can set reminders based on time or location to any of your notes. If you live in fear of losing your notebook then fear no more! Google Keep is saved in ‘the cloud’ and unlike a notebook, you can share & collaborate with others on your notes. From taking pictures of the cover of books/journals to sharing notes re: upcoming conferences (with a reminder set for submission dates) I’m finding Google Keep increasingly useful. ResearchGate https://www.researchgate.net Research can sometimes feel like a lonely pursuit yet just scratch at the surface of one of the ‘social’ networks for researchers and you can find others who are as equally enthusiastic as you about your research topic, articles so current they haven’t reached publication yet and ask questions to others in your field. ResearchGate enables you to do all of this (and more). Whilst it can feel tedious setting up yet another account on a social network (LinkedIn - yep, Academia.edu - yep, Twitter - yep, Facebook - ugh, yep) it does seem as though ResearchGate will actually aid your research with searchable publications and questions posed that get answered by the community. I was completely converted after coming across a couple of articles, due to be published soon, by authors that I have been ‘following’. LaTex http://latex-project.org/intro.html So, you may have seen journals or conferences stating a preference for submissions in LaTex format and wondered what on earth it means, or perhaps you got as far as glancing at it and have been put off by the look of articles in LaTex format. However, don’t be scared! It actually saves loads of time formatting documents in Word (or other text-processing software) and means the people receiving your work will be able to convert it into exactly the format they’re after. Often you are provided with a LaTex template by the conference / journal which means all you have to do is enter your text.

Last week with help from The Compass we set out to gather some feedback from students on the apps they would most recommend to others to aid study at University.Recent statistics reveal that educational apps are the second most downloaded category in Apple’s app store, but what constitutes as an educational app? Often apps that aren’t typically seen as educational can be assistive in University study, so using the speak-board on Penryn campus helped us gain further insight into the apps our students found useful and would recommend to others. Referencing apps were the most recommended of all the apps posted on the board, RefME in particular received praise; the free app syncs to your RefME account and allows you to scan resources using your phone or device to create citations, reference lists and bibliographies. EasyBib was also noted as a good app with the pretty much the same functionality as RefME, however this doesn’t support Harvard referencing.Video based apps were also those featuring high on recommendations, especially those which involved an element of learning; You Tube and Ted Talks were seen as good apps for watching content on the go, SciShow, VSauce, Crash Course were specific You Tube channels which were put forward as being particularly educational and interesting to watch. Khan Academy was also mentioned, this app features a host of educational materials available for free. Needing some music to help with studying? Spotify is a music streaming service which puts millions of tracks at your finger tips. 8tracks was another recommended app which featured on our feedback board, described as the peoples playlister, users are able to create mixtapes of 8 tracks or more to share with the online community. Of all the types of apps posted to help with studying, organisational tools were by far the most recommended. Document organisation tools such as Evernote and Google Drive were suggested, also note taking and list apps: Todolist, Keep Notes (which featured in our recent Tools to Support Research post) and Reminders. There are an abundance of these tools available for phone and tablet, it’s easy to see why they’re popular especially when it comes to University study. HabitRPG came highly recommended from a few individuals, the ‘gamified’ to do list app aims to 'make habit building fun’ by rewarding points when you complete day-to-day tasks. The University of the West of England also features in our list of recommended apps with SAM, a tool to help understand and manage anxiety. It’s free and allows you to visualise your anxiety profile and connect to with a wider community who use the app. For those wanting to make apps for your device Aris was one tool mentioned last week, one student has used the platform to create a campus tour for fellow classmates, built as user-friendly and open source it has all the resources to get you started. To accompany the feedback received from students we are holding an apps event for staff to come and share tools they find useful as part of their teaching at University (12:00, 11th February, Peter Lanyon, Seminar 7, Penryn Campus). Thanks to all who took part in the speak-board, if you’d like any more information about any of the apps mentioned or you’d like to talk about using apps as part of Learning and Teaching at Falmouth University please get in touch - etsupport@falmouth.ac.ukHere’s the full list of recommended apps from the speak-board: Referencing:RefMEEasyBib Video: You TubeTed TalksKhan Academy Music: Spotify 8TracksLuminOrganisation: EvernoteGoogle Scan to Drive Google Drive Dragon Dictation Calendar & Reminders Todolist HabitRPG Google Keep Notes PreziThetrainlineFlashlightImagesSnapseed Social FacebookWordpressWellbeing SAM App Make your own appAris Games University apps: iExeter app Games/Other:Looney Tunes, Flappy Bird, Tetris, Candy Crush and Insta 3D

Weds 11th February saw the first of our AppsAnon events faciliating discussion around apps we use day to day. This event was part of a joint provision initiative from our Staff Development team for Falmouth, Exeter and FXPlus staff aimed at sharing practice and developing our community.Participants put a post-it note with the title of an app they use in a jar, which we drew from at random. The author talked for a couple of minutes about the app; how they found it, why they used it, what they liked and any limitations. That person then gets to pick the next post-it from the jar.Here are the movers and the shakers for 11th Feb:Vivino -  Crowd sourced wine reccomendations. The app lets you scan the barcode of a bottle of wine and submit your own or look at reviews posted by others. You can also follow friends to compare tasting notes like a true wine snob. iOS/AndroidAdobe reader - Quick access to reading resources. Adobe reader allows you to take a photo of a document and convert to pdf. Reader also works with Microsoft formats and lets you bookmark web resources. Useful for organising and accessing docs on Falmouth’s Learning Space.Qu - New Anonymous Question/Answer App in the fashion of Yo messenger and Tindr, you can swipeto answer or dismiss a question. The app offers stats on amount of people answering and views etc. This app might have potential use for entry/exit ticket measures of understanding in the teaching environment in a similar way to Responseware and Exitticket iOS only at present Twitter - Brilliant and huge educational community on Twitter, the app is widely used within education and they have recently introduced group messaging, video upload and analytics about your tweets. On the flipside, promoted content in your feed soon beomes annoying and their recent updates have brought requests for deeper access to phone settings. There are interesting alternatives like sublevel.net now entering the market iOS/Android

On the 11th February NMC officially released the 2015 Higher Education edition of the Horizon Report. Commissioned by the New Media Consortium (NMC) in collaboration with the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), this annual publication is widely referred to in the field of learning technology and education as a leading source for depicting potential future trends. This year’s publication marks the 12th anniversary of the Higher Education edition of the report; other published editions as part of the Horizon series include the K-12 edition and the Museum edition.The report itself is broken down into three main sections; key trends, significant challenges and important developments. Each of these areas are further categorised as part of the report, for example trends can be either short-term, mid-term or long-term.As a comprehensive document it would be very hard to cover every aspect of the report in one blog post so for benefit of keeping it shortish we’ve selected a few topics from each category.Key Trends:Advancing Cultures of Change and Innovation: Basing approaches taken to innovation in education on agile startups, where technology acts as a catalyst for change, has been suggested in this years long term trends. This method highlights the need to adapt in an era of rapid technical development, something not all Universities are comfortable with. There is a definite need for policy change in this area; digital technologies that students use in their day to day should be seen as a catalyst.Increasing Use of Blended Learning: The development of new tools that can be used for education will enhance the options that are available for use in online learning and increase use as a result. Traditional face-to-face courses are complemented with online learning as students require more accessible means to access learning content away from classroom interactions. Increased use of blended learning solutions requires concrete guidelines which has implications for policy and leadership.Significant Challenges:Improving Digital Literacy: The ability to understand digital tools and information is seen as a significant challenge in this years report, not least because there seems to be a lack of consensus as to what constitutes as ‘digital literacy’ across many colleges and universities. Suggested as being an iterative process to accommodate for range of tools and evolving methods of use, this challenge has been defined as solvable.Rewarding Teaching: With research so high on the agenda in Universities implementation of effective pedagogies for teaching are lacking. The REF has put greater pressure on teachers to be publishing research, meaning a reliance on part time teachers to cover taught sessions. This "Wicked Challenge" (Those that are complex to even define, much less address) suggests methods of teaching and quality of instruction need to be at the forefront. Important Developments: Bring Your Own Device: A widely used term, BYOD refers to when people bring their own equipment to their learning or work environment. Links between productivity and personal device usage have been documented, not least because users are already accustomed to working with their own laptop, phone or tablet. Personalised content and individual settings can be assigned to each device, again making them easier to use for study or work. Sufficient infrastructure and policies should be in place to support people who wish to use their own devices at University. Flexible workspaces that allow for personal devices to aid study should also be taken into consideration.Flipped Classroom: The flipped classroom is a model of learning whereby the time spent in a class environment is dedicated to more active cognitive learning, time away from the class is spent learning through podcasts, videos and associated materials. This method shifts the ownership of learning from the instructors to the students and has proved popular in HE. The flipped classroom can be implemented at various scales and has a reported adoption time of one year or less according to the horizon report.How these topics evolve over the coming year will be interesting to observe, especially from the perspective of policy and leadership in these areas. Further topics from the report were debated in an earlier post this year for those wishing to look at some additional key trends. The Horizon report is published annually and individuals are recommended to get involved using the projects wiki page - http://horizon.wiki.nmc.org/

Feedback In this series, the Educational Technology team will be providing an insight into existing practice using technology for learning and teaching at Falmouth University and also at projects being undertaken within the wider HE sector.Our first installment looks at the process of Feedback.Feedback is a process that aids learning based on a dialogue about an assessed activity, this could be through a face to face tutorial, email, commenting on a google doc, could be a one off or a continued discussion and could be between lecturing staff and students or amongst peers. The NUS charter on Assessment & Feedback calls for a choice of feedback methods for students and that it is timely. Use of learning technologies can support this.We’ve discovered some great examples of use of technology in the feedback process at Falmouth; from peer assessment activity in the VLE, through use of iPads and bespoke computer programming to speed up the process and use of video to aid lesson observation in the PGCHE. The Educational Technology team also piloted the use of Turnitin’s Grademark facility with some courses at Falmouth University and received positive feedback from staff and students about it’s use.This presentation from JISCs assessment and feedback project showcases a couple of approaches towards using technology to support the feedback process and details some of the issues faced and lessons learned. Of particular interest is the suggestion that values and approaches towards dialogic feedback and reflection should be introduced to students early on in HE to aid understanding of the process.A study undertaken at the University of Liverpool to replace text with audio feedback found that it was successful in meeting student expectation and led to more detailed feedback and timely response. Apps like audacity, soundcloud, audioboo and kaizena for google docs support the use of audio as feedback. The University of Sussex are currently undertaking a three year project to encourage adoption of online submission and feedback methods and are also making use of Grademark. Their site informs staff and students about the process.In addition, rapid feedback methods like exiticket and polleverywhere facilitate an overview of student understanding and promote use of mobile devices for learning and tools like Twitter and todaysmeet can be used in similar fashion as a backchannel. For further information read a description of exit ticket methodology and some examples. A timely #LTHEchat took place in January around the language of feedback and conversation arose around feedback in formative and summative assessment and use of feedforward to help students understand how they might do better in future assessment.These are just a few initiatives and conversations around feedback in higher education, please feel free to send us a link to your own project and Falmouth Staff are welcome to contact the team about any of these examples they might like to apply to learning and teaching in their own areas.

image by opensource.comHow Open Source supports EducationThe Open Source movement grew out of the frustrations users have in proprietary hardware and software; technologies that enable barriers to use and models of development that alienate the user. Eric Raymond uses the metaphor of the Cathedral and the Bazaar to talk about these opposing models of software development. In the Cathedral model there is top down control on the design and the implementation of the project (an analogy to the building of cathedrals in the middle ages). The project is unveiled once built, whereas the bazaar model is much more informal, messy, open and relies on community participation. Open Education and Open Educational Resources share a similar ethos with Open Source with a focus on sharing and accessibility to learning.A brief history of Bloom’s taxonomy for learningIn 1956, Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist developed a taxonomy of Educational Objectives, proposing that  that learning fits into one of three psychological domains; Cognitive, Affective and Psychomotor and that learning objectives can be designed around these. Fast-forward to 2001 and student of Bloom Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl, revised the taxonomy to include the use of verbs rather than nouns for the categories within the cognitive domain and rearranging it as a progression from ‘lower order thinking skills’’ to ‘higher order thinking skills’:So this…                                              Becomes:Creating a Digital taxonomyOn the Edorigami Wiki, Andrew Churches documents an update to Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy that accounts for the "new behaviours, actions and learning opportunities emerging as technology advances and becomes more ubiquitous". This revision provides further granularity and suggests a taxonomy based upon the opportunities that technology provides:The Tools Within the educational institution, we are often prescribed proprietary solutions to work with, such as Adobe’s Creative Suite and Microsoft Office, but there are a range of free and open source alternatives that help develop transferable skills and promote sharing and collaborating. So with this and Bloom’s in mind, here’s a freely available collaborative list of tools that support a taxonomy of learning and teaching verbs. Feel free to use, add to, comment upon and vote for your favourites.

ScrivenerI never quite appreciated the phrase ‘lengthy document’ until I started trying to draft part of my thesis. I’ve always felt pretty confident with academic writing and structuring but suddenly I was no longer looking at putting together a long essay or dissertation but an 80,000 word beast! Scrivener has allowed me to bring some sort of organisation into the chaos. My usual tact was to use multiple Google docs however just one section of my thesis seemed too long to contain in one document and I needed to be able to flit about, reorganise and edit as needed.Scrivener allows you to break your document into chunks, drag them around, put them back together and break them apart again. You can move between your notes, research papers and the document you’re writing with ease, with all on display if required using the quick reference panes. You can create outlines of your entire project which you can move around as well as labelling and tracking parts of your work. There is also a live word count for the document you’re working on, you can see the word count for your draft as a whole and you can set targets for a sessions work or a particular section.When you reach the point that you want to export your work into one document the options available are sure to cover your needs! Now usually I wouldn’t recommend a tool that costs however I’ve included this for two reasons! (Other than the fact it’s awesome). 1) You can have a 30 day trial - which is 30 days of use not 30 days from when you first download. This could be enough for you depending on how much you have done so far and what you want to use Scrivener for. 2) I only intended to go for the trial and have found it so useful I’ll be purchasing … anything that can keep me sane whilst composing this thesis is worth it!Draw.ioSo this has been around for a while now but still really good for quick, easy diagramming. No need to register / log-in and your diagrams can be saved to your machine, Google drive, OneDrive or Dropbox. The diagrams / images you create can be exported. There are a large number of graphics / shapes to choose from in order to build your diagram / flow chart or whatever it is you need and all for free!MendeleyAfter trying many different reference management tools I keep returning to Mendeley. It syncs well between all my devices - essential seeing as I flit between my PC, Mac, iPad and android phone. It’s easy to drag my documents in allowing me to view them quickly if I need to and I can annotate or highlight them as needed. I find my references are really easy to organise, search, sort into folders and attach notes to. Although I haven’t utilised the networking and social side to Mendeley yet it does allow you to search for other articles, join public groups in various subject areas and build your own online presence. Personally I don’t currently want this from my reference management software however I may go and play one day! My only disappointment currently is only being able to have three people in a group to collaborate and work on papers. To be fair this isn’t a situation I find myself in often but it felt like an unnecessary restriction if you wanted to use this for group reference management.

February marked the publication of the digital skills report from the House of Lords; Make or Break: The UK’s Digital Future.  Presented as a call to action for the next government the report aimed "to consider and report on information and communications technology, competitiveness and skills in the United Kingdom".Education featured highly within the report and there was concern that the UK will be left behind in this digital era, something that has been echoed by others in the past; Google CEO Eric Schmidt has previously stated that the UK hadn’t embraced its ‘computer heritage’ to the detriment of economic growth. As the digital skills demanded for industry increases it’s only natural that the education sector comes under scrutiny; "Universities should ensure that all graduates are digitally competent." Jisc’s current Building Digital Capability project helps to address these issues by promoting effective use of digital technologies in education, at the recent Digifest event delegates in sessions were asked to reflect on digital capabilities within their institutions. The variations on how individual universities are responding to these issues were surprising, and shows we still have a lot more to accomplish in this area.       As a learning technology team we’re always keen to develop and support institutional initiatives around digital capabilities. Should you wish to find out more or see how we can assist please get in touch.