Critiquing: An Approach to Teaching and Learning

Critiquing is an approach that encourages students to consider their own work by drawing comparisons with the work of their peers. Traditionally, students will submit their work to be critiqued by fellow students and perform their own critique on the work of one or more peers. Through this process the students get feedback on their work from their fellow students and,…

Role-play: An Approach to Teaching and Learning

Role-play is a technique that allows students to explore realistic situations by interacting with other people in a managed way in order to develop experience and trial different strategies in a supported environment. Depending on the intention of the activity, participants might be playing a role similar to their own (or their likely one in the…

CPD Event: Bring Your Own Devices for Learning (BYOD4L)

On the week of 14 – 18 July, SHU is running this open online blended course about using smart phones and tablet PCs to enhance and transform teaching and learning. The course is running concurrently at other universities over the 5 day period and uses social media, video scenarios, and face-to-face peer-enhanced activities . BYOD4L focuses on: Connecting Communicating Curating Collaborating…

Micro-research: An Approach to Teaching and Learning

At its simplest, Micro-research (also known as Inquiry-based Learning) involves getting students to undertake a relatively small research project and report back to their peers. The purpose of the approach is to encourage students to develop a deeper understanding of the material they have been researching while also developing skills that will be useful for other parts of…

Google Apps for Education – Overview

Sheffield Hallam University has provided Google accounts for all students for some time, but has recently introduced them for staff too. This means that staff now have access to several very useful online tools which can be used to encourage collaboration amongst students, collaborating with colleagues, and work from varied locations. The key tools that…

Opportunity to give Blackboard your opinion about virtual collaboration tools

Blackboard are seeking staff and student opinions about virtual collaboration tools. The information collected will help inform future developments made to Blackboard Collaborate. If you have used Blackboard Collaborate in your practice (or have experience of other real-time collaboration tools such as Adobe Connect or Skype) and wish to feed into this process, please complete…

Are you using Google Apps in an innovative way?

We are planning to hold an event on the 7th March 2014 showcasing some of the ways that Google Apps are effectively being used in teaching, along with some practical workshops. Are you using Google Apps in an innovative way?  would you like to present what you have been doing or deliver a workshop on…

What is an Electronic Voting System (EVS)?

This is part of a regular series of articles exploring some of the terms 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. An ‘Electronic Voting System’ (EVS) is a system that allows presenters to ask multiple…

What is a Content Curation Site?

This is part of a regular series of articles exploring some of the terms 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. A ‘Content Curation Site’ is a website that allows users to gather resources from…

Learning Objects blogs and wikis to be disabled

In May 2012 we discontinued the ability to add Learning Objects blogs and wikis to Blackboard sites as part of a two year programme to phase them out. The final step of this programme will be to disable them completely on the system on the evening of 24 July when our license expires. This means that old…