Towards the end of last year, Kieran McDonald and I were awarded a Teaching Enhancement Fund from ACES to investigate how Art & Design’s new studio spaces in the Head Post Office could be augmented through the incorporation of technology. Following discussion with students and staff, we integrated Bluetooth beacons into a Graphic Design studio…
This is part of a series of articles exploring some of the terms and tools used in e-learning (view other articles in the series). We’ll do our best to break down the jargon and explain what things are from a basic perspective. Blackboard Collaborate is a ‘Webinar’ tool that allows live presentations to be made to…
A new, more streamlined version of PebblePad has been launched at SHU from today. The new version has a much clearer interface and can be used as easily on tablet and smartphones as on a PC. Any assets and resources that you have created in the old version have been automatically updated to use the…
As part of a working group investigating how the upcoming changes to Disabled Student Allowance will affect the university and our students, an overview document has been produced to outline the current methods of recording lectures (and other types of teaching session) available to staff at SHU. While the document was produced for the working group,…
A guest post by Roberta E Taylor on the Assessment Journey Programme (AJP) blog has just been published and describes her experience of replacing a 4000 word essay-based assessment with a short screencast. Roberta describes the background to the assessment, the approach taken to introduce students to screencasting concepts and techniques and the creative skills that…
Jisc’s Summer of Student Innovation programme awards money and mentoring opportunities to students with either an idea about how technology could improve study or general student life, or a completed product that they would like to pilot within an educational setting. The participants work in small teams to implement their proposed project and, in addition to…
Google has just added a new feature to Google Docs that should make it much easier to create ebooks for use on tablets, phones, Kindle-style devices, PCs and laptops. Google has added the option to export documents in the ePub format, which is the international standard for ebooks and so is supported by most software and…
Each year, the New Media Consortium (NMC) works with a panel of academics and technologists to identify developing trends in technology-supported pedagogy that are likely to have significant impact on learning and teaching over the next five years, challenges to technology adoption and trends accelerating technology adoption. The 2016 Higher Education edition was published online last week,…
The 2015 edition of the Open University’s annual Innovating Pedagogy report has recently been published. Once again, the report offers overviews of a variety of new and emerging teaching approaches and pedagogies, along with information on technologies that are being use to support them. As usual, the report includes 10 pedagogies, their potential impact, and…
Last year, in the run up to the Christmas break, Regent’s University London ran a free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) focused on mobile apps that can help support teaching and learning on tablets and smartphones. On each day of the ’12 Apps of Christmas’ MOOC, an app was introduced, along with some ideas for how…