It’s been another busy week. Do you find time in November seems to speed up? I’m sure last week it was still October . . .
I started the week at the Scottish #elesig meeting in St Andrews. Despite the wind and rain it was a great day. The focus of the meeting was on supporting staff development to enhance the learning experience. Keith Smyth gave an excellent keynote in the morning titled “investigating and enhancing the staff experience with e-learning and learning technologies: what do we know and what can we do to move forward?”
Keith really made us all think about how we currently evaluate the use and impact of technology on learning and the need to extend our approaches to research
A need for combining analytics with phenomenographic studies, to capture the what and the why, notes Keith #ELESIG
— Vicki Dale (@vhmdale) November 23, 2015
Other approaches we need to consider #ELESIG pic.twitter.com/R6ZHeyuZDl
— Vicki Dale (@vhmdale) November 23, 2015
I was one of a number of speakers during the day who shared their experiences of supporting staff particularly in developing fully online course. As ever it was re-assuring to hear that we are all facing the same issues of confidence, digital literacy and workload allocation. The afternoon ended with a series of 2 minute presentations which worked really well and gave a great overview of “stuff” from reflective portfolios to byod to simple enhanced video apps.
Vicki Dale has shared this storify of the event (we even trended on twitter at one point) which gives a really good overview of all the goodness that was shared over the day.
Part of my presentation focused on the way we have been using Trello to support learning design. The more we use it with staff, the more I like it. More importantly my colleagues like it too and are really starting to see the value of it to help them plan not only their new fully online modules but their f2f/blended ones too.
It is really helping people to plan and share a visual overview of their modules. I ran two workshops this week where we used it. I had a couple of Cheshire cat grinning moment during them as people started to use it to really unpack, record and share what they need to do. It is such a good example of technology being easy and flexible enough for people to just use and not distract them from what they are trying to do, but actually help them focus. One example of technology FTW.
Although my blog is very important to me, I realise that it’s not exactly the most visited place on the inter-web. I am as the say not doing this for any kind of glory or prize. However it is always nice to get comments and see that some people do read it. I was really touched this week when David Hopkins included me in his nominations for this years edublog awards. So dear reader, do you want to be my campaign manager?