IT for Education

It's been a busy month or two, but my e-learning site (and this blog) are nearing completion. Typically, I keep seeing things I'd like to tweak, but I have to get the report finished so I'm drawing a line in the sand where it is now, and calling it done. What do I think of the result? First things first, here's a link to the site for reference . You'll notice a [blog] link at the top of most pages - these link to some hidden posts in this blog giving some extra details on individual pages, so the blog proper is just about more global themes, process etc. I'm reasonably pleased with the result as a whole, but at the same time I'm acutely aware of some issues that I wish weren't there, mostly caused by platform limitations and time restrictions. What it does well I think, is illustrate the concept and principles I was aiming for, even if it does contain a lot of what I feel are placeholder elements. On the plus side I've managed to implement a v...

Blended learning as a term covers quite a wide range of possible interpretations. Integrating digital technology could be as basic as bringing up a web page in a lesson, or as integrated as every learner having a centrally managed iPad leading them through the syllabus. The more I've thought about this personally, the more I wonder if we even need to differentiate blended learning from other methods. This is not because there is no worth in the approach, but I wonder why we need to slap a label on it, when all we are really doing is moving with the times. We still teach in the classroom, we still give tasks to learners for outside class times. It's just the medium that has changed. When classrooms started having whiteboards and digital projectors installed to aid teaching did we give it a fancy name, or did we just see it as the progress of technology giving us additional tools to integrate into our lessons? A colleague of mine who was previously a school teacher when it ha...

Browsing through my e-learning site, you may notice that, aside from the first lesson page - there are no embedded videos. I had the option to record some video tutorials for my site, but I chose not to. There's actually four reason for this: It takes time Recording videos it time consuming. To record a tutorial I would need to prepare all my materials - effectively another lesson's worth of prep - then rehearse the session, record it (as many takes as I needed) then edit it together. I really detest typical YouTube tutorial videos that spend five minutes begging for subscribers then doing the tutorial in one take, regardless of how far it goes off the rails. I have a bit of pride in my work, and would need to put the time in to do it properly. Maybe if I teach this module again I could record the lecture and upload that, but that leads onto the second point: I want students to attend There is always a risk with VLEs that students will skip classes as all the materi...

One of the things being pushed quite heavily for our projects is the use of gadgets, aka web widgets, which are self-contained mini apps you can embed into web pages. Until widgets came along the only ways to add third-party content to your site was to directly install all the files onto your server and set it up manually, or use something called an iframe, which comes with a bunch of restrictions. Now it's possible to 'install' an app on your site just by copying a tiny piece of code into your markup and everything else is taken care of for you. All sorts of widgets exist, from clocks and calendars, to stock market tickers and social media plug-ins. Widgets offer a way for non-techies to add relatively complex functionality to their pages and let you integrate a bunch of services for very little effort. They're pretty neat. Here's a list of some popular ones , and here's a longer list . The thing you'll notice is they are all quite 'mainstr...

I've put a fair amount of thought into my approach to blended learning with regard to tailoring my existing materials for my e-learning site. Part of the reason I chose the subject I did was because my lesson prep was already intended for sharing online via the university's Moodle VLE. While the materials were already VLE-friendly, the VLE in question served the module more as a repository, hosting notes and documents. It wasn't necessarily suitable for a fully blended learning module, so there would still need to be some adaptation to make it fit better. This begs the question: what actually is my approach going to be? What sort of synergies am I hoping to gain from adopting the blended approach for this module? What advantages will I gain by hosting content in an e-learning site with regards to this specific subject? According to JISC (LTSN, 2003), a VLE's main elements are: mapping of the curriculum into elements (or ‘chunks’) that can be assessed and recorde...

Just a quick note to talk about VLE-design methodologies. We were provided a link to a development framework for e-learning design called SIMPLE ( Systematic Instructional Methodology for Personal Learning Environments - a forced acronym if I've ever seen one). It provides a structure to the planning, development and testing of e-learning environments that is intended to make it easier for educators to deal with technical implementation and techies to develop the educational side. It has four stages, each of which is further split into non-linear concepts: Requirements analysis Course curricula Course design Course assessment Requirements specification Design Environment selection Tool selection Human-Computer Interaction Design/source instructional materials Development & Implementation Build Test & fix Deploy Operation Evaluation User satisfaction Facilitator evaluation Review Revise If you've ever done any software development, or...

Subject chosen, who exactly is my e-learning site going to be aimed at? I won't leave you hanging, it's degree-level students, specifically BSc. I've been teaching that demographic for nigh on 12 years so I'm hardly going to suddenly change it. What does that choice mean for my site? They'll be at least 18, most commonly early-20s and potentially of any adult age I'm not dealing with children, basically, but beyond that I can't guarantee anything. I can expect a certain level of maturity, but not always, and everybody should be capable of using a full-featured web browser & other software. Beyond that, Knowles' assumptions apply, so in theory they should be willing to learn (debatable...) and self-driven (Knowles, 1990). It will probably be male dominated It's no secret the computer sciences attract way more males , but speaking from personal experience maybe one in 10 I've taught web design to have been female. They typically (but n...

For my e-learning environment I went on a bit of a journey deciding what the subject matter is going to be. My original idea (and why I plumped for the module) tied in with a 10-week course I wrote for a previous assignment. This course was an introduction to post-processing in the film/TV industry and had a very strong blended approach to the syllabus. My concept was to implement some of the more unique elements in what was (in my humble opinion) quite a novel approach. However, to properly do what I wanted would require access to several proper VLE development tools, perhaps even some app development. It was getting to the point where it would become more of a development exercise than something focusing on the strengths of e-learning. As it turns out I couldn't do it anyway, as we have to use a specific tool to build our sites and it really wasn't up to the job - more on that in a later post. Instead, I started looking through my teaching materials from some ten years of...

Our standardised development platform to make our e-learning sites is Google Sites, a platform I hadn't used until now. It's a template-based site builder that has some real good things going for it (it's free for a start), but I've found myself bumping up against its capabilities almost from the get-go. The problems I'm having are, to be fair, typical of me when I try to use supplied environments such as this one. I have this habit of pushing technology to wring it of all its features, sometimes just to see if I can, other times because I stubbornly refuse to accept a platform is not meant for this sort of thing . In the case of Google Sites, I've found it to be restrictive, both in features and implementation, and not really suited to what I want to achieve. To Google's credit, I don't think their platform is really meant to host anything more than basic sites with a bit of added functionality. It works well with Google's other offerings natura...

In the previous post we looked at the advantages and disadvantages of the traditional vs. e-learning approaches to teaching. Here, we'll combine them into the concept of blended learning to see how well they can work together. Hopefully it's obvious that blending two established methods allows us to draw on the strengths of each individually, while giving us scope to eliminate the drawbacks of either. It's simple reduction: if a process works better in one method over the other, then use that method; if it doesn't work as well then don't use it. It sounds like an ideal scenario. In practice, the combination introduces some wrinkles all of its own that we need to be aware of.

If we're going to make our e-learning site as effective as possible, we'll need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of both elements of the blended approach . Let's look at each individually, then in the next post we'll consider how they might work together. Traditional teaching We've all experienced traditional classroom based teaching, it is compulsory for every child in the UK between ages 5 and 16 after all (Citizens Advice, 2017). As with most things we're told we must do there's an instinctive urge to dislike it, but what legitimate pros and cons can we come up with?

The surface-level requirement of our e-learning assignment is, quelle surprise , to build an e-learning environment for a particular subject (supporting a traditional course rather than entirely standalone). What we're talking about then are things like good supporting materials, points of contact for support and further information should the students want it, wrapped in a considerate, accessible interface. That's on the surface. Underneath that, what we're really looking at is one central question: how can the Internet advance the traditional teaching and learning process? That's more fundamental than just talking about content alone and requires us to identify where perhaps existing methods are found lacking and can be improved with the application of technology. Fortunately, there's already a term that describes what we need to look at: blended learning .

So we had to choose an elective module to take for my second year of study. Tough call, as I was pretty interested in all the available options, but at the end of it all I am a technologist , one who had previously written a short course that put technology right at the heart of its delivery, so not plumping for the e-learning module would probably be a bit daft. Our assignment is to create our own VLE, by which I assume we are to create a VLE-based course rather than develop our own Moodle (else I'll be brushing up on my PHP!). Accompanying that we need a reflective blog that includes a bit of a write-up on the use of e-learning in education. That gives me a good excuse to kick this blog back into action again!

So the good new is the ICT module for which this blog was my assignment is done and dusted. Results are in, did pretty good thanks for asking, now I need to make a decision over what to do with this here blog. I hadn't posted for a while partly because I wanted a break from it, plus I don't think adding to a work while it's being assessed is all that smart of a move. I don't think I'll be posting again for a little longer at least since I've got a bunch of other stuff piling up, but I'm pretty sure I'll get back to it eventually. The focus will undoubtedly change; without a brief to follow my personal choice of relevant posts is going to differ somewhat, but in what direction I can't say yet. It will definitely keep the technology angle and I'm sure it will be relevant to education still, but I think pure 'ICT' would be a bit restrictive. Since technology is at the core of most parts of what I do I'd like to spread out a bit, encomp...

Time to take a look at applications and other technology I use in my teaching. MS Office I've discussed it plenty in previous posts , but the Office suite is hands down my most used piece of software. There's PowerPoint of course, Word for making all the handouts, official docs etc, Outlook for most communications and Excel for marking, tracking student progression and so on. With the exception of Outlook I couldn't say they are all used every single day, but it's unusual if Word doesn't get launched at least once.  The Web The Internet is central to most things I do in education. It's a subject I teach, it's a research hub for myself and students, its a source of a wealth of material. My childhood took place just before the rise of the Web so I have this position where I remember what the world was like before (more innocent, I'd say) but still having become part of the Internet generation. Nobody I teach any more remembers a time before the Int...

I'm supposed to be reviewing another education-focused blog for my assignment. My first reaction was less than keen, as in my research so far I've stumbled across several blogs via web searches that have served a specific need I've been hunting for, but I've never hung around long enough to delve into other posts and form a reasonable opinion on them. Was I going to need to speed read a bunch of blogs I may not have liked, just to be able to briefly write about them here? As it happens, I was thinking too narrowly. My fairly blinkered opinion on what constitutes a blog is still quite old-school: independent thought trains from the common man, given a voice on the world stage by the democratisation of technology. In reality, the modern interpretation on what counts as blogging has become fairly loose and also seems to be becoming more prevalent from those that would prefer to be called true journalists. I think there's a fine line personally, one that gets crosse...

I've written at length about presentation apps, office suites, mobile technology and blogs, but haven't really considered all these things within the wider context of technology in education as a whole. They are just components of a vast collection of hardware, software, practices and concepts that have been working their way into all aspects of education for decades now. Perhaps the most beneficial aspect that technology has brought to teaching is the way it has increased access to education . The rise of the web has opened the doors to the world's knowledge, now searchable and readable to anyone with a browser. It's had such a profound impact on every aspect of society it's easy to forget the World Wide Web was only invented in 1989 . This has been a double-edged sword in university teaching. With tutors able to find and use resources from anywhere on the planet it has made preparation and delivery much more effective. However it also means tutors are now comp...

If you believe Apple, we are living in a 'post-PC era' . That is certainly not true though it makes for a great sound-bite to grab some column inches, but still the importance of the desktop computer has definitely diminished in recent years. This has been driven almost entirely by the rise of alternative computing devices, including ultralight laptops, tablets and smartphones. There are many things that can be done on these types of devices that don't require a PC at all, although from personal experience a full computer makes a lot of it much more straightforward. Tablet sales are on the decline , suggesting they are not the all out replacements for the traditional box some would have us believe, though to be fair desktops have seen declining sales for years. Still, smart devices remain incredibly popular and the technological advances through the last half-decade has been nothing short of astonishing. The capabilities of a handheld device with multitudes of sensors a...

I had my first assessment on my course earlier on in the week, a 20 minute micro-teaching session. It went pretty well, but the thing I was really happy about was my slides presentation. Having to avoid anything requiring specific hardware or software meant my available pool of subjects shrank dramatically. After plans for a practical 'nature of sound' session were dashed I settled on one of the few purely theory-based subjects I've taught: semiotics. This is a subject that (for the part I would be using at least) can be taught with just a PowerPoint. My existing slides were almost entirely text free except where unavoidable, and I'd used lots of simple imagery that were meant to serve more as a backdrop to discussion than a focal point. I was aware the learner group would be vastly different to those I'd taught before, with different motives and life-directions to any of my previous students. The 20 minute cap also meant there was not the time to explore any to...

Work was being... well, work today, so I've had to skip this week's lectures. Apparently the topic was to be 'assessment aids', in particular two utilities, Kahoot and Socrative . Let's take a look. Socrative http://www.socrative.com/ Socrative is a live, on-line quiz/feedback platform that lets you create various types of challenge for students, such as multiple choice, true/false or questionnaires. Students' responses are fed back to the tutor immediately. It's a bit like classroom Who Wants to be a Millionaire with you as Chris Tarrant and no money. There are team options, such as a first-past-the-post rockets game and single shot questions. The whole thing works on pretty much every device from PCs to phones, so you can even have large cohorts joining in. If I have any complaints I'd like a bit more theming options to help me use it with various different learner groups and there are some annoying usability decisions (e.g. if you accidentally...