http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/170617714   I think we have every right to have concerns about the literacy skills of our boys in our schools. But, how much better are the ‘girls’, or is it a matter of how we choose to use feedback and elicit compliance in learning? Certainly, there are many wonderful strategies for differentiation within our […]

The announcement tool within Blackboard is a great way to get important messages out to students. Not only will the announcement appear in the specific Blackboard area, but it will be delivered straight to student's mobile devices (presuming they have the Mobile Learn app installed), and you can even make sure students receive the message as an email as well.Well at one point last year, I had to send the same announcement to about 20 different Bb areas. It was a painful process as I had to go into each different area, paste the message in, tick the relevant boxes and send. So when I came across Qwickly, a third party plugin, I was a bit overjoyed. After a bit of persuasion, our computer services department have installed it as part of our summer upgrade!Watch the video below to see how easy it is. Please excuse the use of 'VITAL' - that's what we call Bb at Liv...Peter@ReedyreedlesThe Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

7 Facebook settings you should think about reviewing. Friend Lists: Do your Facebook laundry Instead of having one long list of friends, it might be a good idea to create separate lists for your type of friends. For example Family, Work Colleagues, Close Friends, Hen Night Girls, Holiday Friends, Clubs and Hobbies. This way you can […]

The Aboriginal population is the fastest growing population in Canada, it is essential to not just accommodate any FNMI students in our classrooms, but to also help the classroom, school culture and community to be aware of rituals, ceremonies, traditions, and knowledge. This is what literacy is all about. How can we create meaning when […]

I, and many other people have been critical about MOOCs because they're not quite the innovative disruption that the media have made them out to be - just the same, decade old online learning.But, what does good online learning & teaching look like?The now classic models and frameworks have been about for years - Laurillard's Conversational framework and Salmon's 5 stage model for e-mentoring. They're very useful resources when developing and facilitating online courses, but...What is the gold standard for taught, online courses?What things do we need to consider?What does such a course actually look like?I've seen many people really promoting opportunities such as #phonar and #rhizo - I didn't really engage with those, but I wonder if those models could be suitable to implement for say, our completely online PG courses?Peter@ReedyreedlesThe Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

Leadership & management in education is receiving bad press recently, the latest related to under performing schools, but clearly the increased number of learning providers in the FE & Skills sector ‘requiring improvement’ may also have something to do with senior managers either not best equipped to ‘manage’ but have ‘got the job’ anyway. Or […]

      Common Reading Difficulties among Students I have created a Thinglink that outlines some of the Common Reading Difficulties among students. I have also included iPad apps that can help specifically support several of the strategies. The main goal of this interactive diagram, is to help teachers and parents to have a basic […]

Jack of All Trades, CC BY flickr photo by peacayThis is another post fitting within the theme of 'What is a Learning Technologist'.I've been thinking for a while about the role of the LT, and how my own skill set and knowledge base have developed over the 10 years or so that I've worked in HE. And whilst I completely understand Martin Weller's problem of having an elevator pitch for what it is we actually do, I think this post will muddy the waters even further :-)The role of the learning technologist comes in all shapes and sizes. The job title tends to vary quite a lot, as can the pay scales and the specific work we tend to get involved in. Learning technologists can be employed for specific purposes e.g. working on an OER project, an ePortfolio implementation project, or perhaps even staff development. From what I've seen, these more specific roles tend to be on fixed term contracts, whereas the permanent roles tend to be the broader roles (but of course there may be exceptions).So what do we do?Well in my experience, the learning technologist tend to be a central figure in many developments - the lynchpin or the quarterback (depending on your metaphorical preference). When I work with course teams in developing curricula, I'm the one who is linking in with the different departments, encouraging involvement from library colleagues or media development specialists.I also tend to think of myself as a jack of all trades (but in a positive way, obviously). Without this attempting to be a CV, I think I have quite a good and knowledge of current and emerging aspects of HE in respect to technology enhanced learning. I've had experience in OER projects, institutional change projects, redeveloping assessment & feedback processes in faculty, managed and administrated VLEs, developed and delivered staff development programmes, developed and facilitated online courses (traditional and open), engaged in primary research (individually and collaboratively), published, so on and so forth. I'm not somehow special that I've done these things. These are typical tasks that learning technologists do every day. We know about stuff because that's what we do. We find a balance between trying to innovate with new things alongside evidence-based practice.So don't be thinking 'Jack of all trades, master of none' is either a bad thing, or even necessarily true![edit - David Hopkins has extended this discussion with another thought provoking post - head over to read more]PPeter@Reedyreedles$nbsp;The Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

Thank you to Rick Revelle, the author of his new book: I Am Algonquin: a book about the Algonquin First Nations for young adults. In this guest post, Rick shares with us about his new book, and his hopes for integrating First Nations Literacy into our schools.  Ever since I was a young boy I […]

A colleague of mine, Andrew Barker (@andcarebarker) recently asked me to write an editorial piece for the UKSG eNews Newsletter, albeit with a tight deadline (thanks Andrew) :-).So of course I obliged, and decided to write something about the impact of technology on the libraries of tomorrow. It is me writing, so of course it's no utopian prophecy.I start with making the point how difficult it is to predict the future using MOOCs as an example, but the article also considers spaces, as well as the way we understand our students today i.e. Visitors/Residents and how that might impact on libraries and their staff. So I guess it's not solely about technology, but the issues of contemporary education. I think...Anyways, you should be able to access the full article via the UKSG eNews page here.Peter@ReedyreedlesThe Reed Diaries by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License