Teaching & Learning Conference

Last we week had our Teaching & Learning Conference day here at the College, and as part of that I was asked to deliver a session on eLearning.
As I am sure it is the case for all Colleges it is not often that staff are given
a day to select a presentation / workshop that they would like to attend and so its one of those occasions were if you have a particular message to get across then you do have to pick your approach. In the end I decided to opt for an introduction to eLearning, the terminology, and standards and how the vle fits into the delivery. With regard to content I took the opportunity to demonstrate
Wimba Create, which in itself would act as nice advertisement for my training session. With Wimba Create in mind and the whole area of producing suitable content, the session touched on outlining the concepts of learning objects and the Scorm recommendations, I did find a very useful cartoon style short video clip SCORM Demystified from YouTube for this. Overall the sessions seemed to go very well and there was a lot of interest pursuing the use of Wimba Create as a tool for converting Word docs.


One of the other sessions running on the day was delivered by a colleague and featured the ComicLife app and how it was used as part of our Comenius Virtual World project using Open Simulator. This particular workshop must have been received well because I was approached by two members of staff after requesting an OpenSim Island for the coming year, brilliant. If you are interested our work using OpenSim then you may like to follow our BC OpenSim blog.



During this last week I came across a new report from TEL
(Technology Enhanced Learning) entitled called ‘System Upgrade Realising the
vision for UK education’. With was hooked in by the headline- Teaching and
learning in the 21st century needs to be 'turbo-charged' by educational technology rather than using technologies designed for other purposes’ . The result of over four years work the report looks at twelve principle themes, complete with recommendations for everyone involved in learning – including teachers, policymakers, lecturers and workplace trainers. Right from the opening paragraphs I am certain you will see as I did that this report addresses very pertinent issues, well worth a read this one and please feel free to post your comments.