Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Facebook for Educators

I have in past postings made both positive and not so positive remarks regarding the use of Facebook as part of course delivery. In one particular year, I certainly managed to get pretty much wholesale agreement with using the social network for both easy contact and handing out achievement comments’ and graphical badges and general course information. In the following year, a similar attempt led to me being almost completely unfriended, strange? Given all this, I do still continue to see articles and postings where clearly the application has worked well, then the other day I came across a YouTube video ‘The Basics of a Facebook Page for Educators’ If you have not seen this for yourself then I can recommend it as a good starter. The Movie walks you through the layout and tabs, which include:-



  • Discussions, that student can join and post into


  • Standards, that relate to course and using the medium


  • Documents, that teachers can upload for students to access


  • Strategies, on the use of social media and Facebook


  • Polls, these can be setup to gather student feedback


Basically it all looks very much like a Facebook / vle / teachers website solution, and if you are in need of such a facility then this would seem as good as any.



I went on to look around the net for more on this and soon discovered
http://facebookforeducators.org. This really does tell you all about it, and there is a pdf download guide, agian worth a look.

I also came across this rather large sample of (The teachers guide to using Facebook)
Facebook the missing manual from OReilly. This is one of those, have a read before you buy promotions that I seem to be seeing with increasing frequency these days, and I must say the sample pages are extensive, so again you may like to take a look at the link if you get the time.


Finally how about ‘7 Best Practices For Educators Using Facebook’ I always like reading these little summaries of best practice, after all if someone has gone to all the trouble of teasing out the details its certainly going to save the rest of us an equal and unnecessary amount of work.


So am I going to use Facebook, well probably not, because I have Moodle, would I discount Facebook, absolutely not, clearly it can and does work.


Please feel free to comment


Regards Barry

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Moodle training news




















Last week was our official end of term and so classes are now over for the academic year, which opens the way for other activities such as staff training, and this morning I delivered the Introduction and Web 2.0 sessions for our Moodle vle. I of course run sessions most weeks for these and usually attract three of four candidates for each, but this morning sessions were very much full with fourteen for the first and sixteen for the second, almost filling our training room. I think I could a make tentative assumption from this that for many staff the idea of training during term time is still difficult to manage. Overall the whole morning ran very smoothly and candidates have been generous and encouraging with feedback. Of all the aspects in using the vle that we covered today -Forums and Chat seemed to attract the most enthusiasm and time, all very good, and often amusing.


On a common thread, I am getting on with the new course notes for the phase three training and really looking forward to rolling that out in September, which brings me into a very interesting and chance meeting that I had with a colleague who on their own initiative have a new mobile learning project that will get underway in the coming academic year. The thrust behind the proposal is that for some students, finding themselves timetabled into rooms with no computing facilities, wouldn’t it be a good idea to provide some low cost, low spec netbooks and make use of the college WiFi provide access to web resources including Cloud apps. You can certainly see the rationale here, when you have group of students where course delivery has increasingly drawn in the use of the technology in both teaching and learning style, suddenly get themselves dropped back into pre-digital, though not impossible, does take some degree of willing flexibility. And so if all does indeed go according to plan, in the coming year you will be able to provide students timetabled into those rooms with standard Word style electronic hand-outs distributed from the vle, very nice, very smooth, much better than issuing ball point pens; by the way the original patent for these was issued on 30 October 1888, to John Loud. Just a thought though, as MS Word actually dates back to 1984, which makes the technology almost thirty years old itself, is it not time for us to move on once more? A comment that drew a somewhat frowned expression, to which I replied - book into my Moodle phase 3 training program, you will enjoy it.



Please stay in touch for updates, regards Barry

Friday, July 08, 2011

Techno rant but not really




I was at little gathering recently when I overheard a conversation between delegates from a college who had apparently made the case that engagement and achievement would be improved simply by providing students with access to the very latest technologies. So you are going to throw a shed load of money at it, and that basically is it, and this is going to work? I really do wonder sometimes whether the message will ever get through that Silver Bullets only work for the Lone Ranger.


All in all this was reminiscent for me of a presentation that I was attending, possibly presenting at, on one of the many events led by a leading FE and HE support service. The presentation started with an image of an operating theatre circa 1900+, a click of the mouse and we see a picture of an operating theatre 2000+. The question was posed: could a surgeon from 1900 function in a modern operating theatre? Not much in the way of audience participation to that question as I recall, but no doubt everyone was having similar thoughts.





In the next slide we see a classroom circa 1900, teacher at the front of the class with chalk and blackboard, students in orderly rows equipped with chalk and chalkboards. A click of the mouse, and the image was joined by a classroom circa 2000. The question was posed, how much has changed? Well given there would be a very brief explanation of how to remove the cap from a dry wipe pen for the teacher and similarly for ball point pens for students, granted not much seems to have changed at all, unlike the world of clinical surgery it would seem.

But what am I supposed to draw from this? While at the time I was reluctant to be reactionary, especially given my own evangelical disposition with eLearning, let me put it this way. Using what is essentially teaching and learning styles that have clearly changed very little in a century, or so it would seem, we have been able to stand on the Moon, understand the cosmos back to a micro second after the big bang, crack the genome, have all the benefits of consumer micro electronics, super computers, artificial intelligence, anti-biotics, fly in machines at over twice the speed of sound dressed in casual clothes while sipping champagne and eating canapés. Is it being seriously suggested that we have it wrong with teaching and learning? From the preceding list, surely even the most casual observer would conclude, no, but a serious question of course remains, how can engagement and achievement be improved, because of course it can, and should, given all the surrounding technologies and best practice at our disposal.



From my own early experience of running vle’s where chat rooms are silent, forums are empty and class notes that did not work or were not read in class were similarly useless when posted online, I have come to appreciate that the change we need does not lye with the introduction of techno paraphernalia alone, but must be accpompanied with the necessary
collaborative delivery frameworks, content and assessment strategies that allow us to make use of the technology in support of learning.

I think Fire and forget really does belong firmly in the domain of heat seeking missiles not teaching and learning, rant over.



Food for discussion? comments welcome, kind regards Barry




Friday, July 01, 2011

Making Mobile Learning Work


Thinking about and talking to the project team as I am right now regarding the likely and best use of our new iPad’s when the initial project ends. I have started to look around the net and came across this really interesting publication ‘Making Mobile Learning Work’, this is a free pdf from escalate featuring five mobile learning case studies. If you have been a reader of this blog, then you will no doubt recall that I have been posting on the subject of mobile learning going way back, what I immediately liked about this publication was the 12 page introduction by John Traxler, University of Wolverhampton. These early pages clarify and establish extremely well where mobile learning originated, where it can make a difference, for instance with respect to:- contingent , situated, authentic, context and personalised learning. It does make very clear among other things, that we need to establish the difference between material that we may feel is suitable for a vle, and so typically being viewed from a desktop machine and material for a mobile learning resource. I can certainly sympathise with this last point, as a similar shift in perspective exists between class hand-outs and vle eLearning materials, which is precisely why we are heading down the Wimba Create route at the moment, but that’s an on-going story so please stay in touch for that. There is a very pertinent and real point raised here also, that many students these days already own a device i.e. smartphones, Galaxies, iPad’s, tablets etc that is perfectly capable of handling the requirements of mobile learning, and that we consider for many reasons, moving away from the concept of an institutionalised product for the purpose, mmm.

I can without any doubt recommend this as a worthwhile download and read for the daily commute if you have that opportunity, and given the many facts and insights, I suspect like myself to will choose to keep a copy. If you have any comments then please feel free to post.

regards Barry