reflections on using the ILT (VLE) in HE

February 18, 2012reflections,
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Yesterday was the first of two HE Staff Development sessions aimed at supporting tutors in developing their use of ILT in general, and the VLE specifically, to support their students. It was a really interesting session for me in many ways, firstly I was there in a support capacity rather than leading the training and this is rare for me within the college. Reflecting on the session there are a couple of things I want to implement into my courses:

1. use of the ‘latest news’ forum within the VLE. I have only used this for one year for the CELTA course and gave up because feedback from trainees was that they didn’t know when an update was posted as emails were directed to their college student account which they didn’t use. Since then I have always used the course blog to post updates, and the email aspect of posterous has always been a big winner for me.

Yesterday, the (very simple) idea of having students use the forwarding facility from their college email account to their main account was shared with me. genius! This is something I definately want to think about, as if this really is a simple thing to do then I can return to posting updates about the course via the VLE, and leave the blog to be a student sharing space.

2. the use of video to support teaching and learning. We watched a section of the Salmna Khan video, and to be honest my inital reaction was that I would struggle to think about how to incorporate this into my practice as I don’t really do ‘lectures’ that could be recorded. However, this morning I came across this article by Russel Stannard about feedback, and here he talks about using screen capture software to record giving feedback to student assignments.

One of my criticisms of students submitting assignments via the VLE is how labourious it is to provide meaningful written feedback on the document itself. It has to be saved locally, annotated and then re-uploaded to the VLE. Painful! However, I will certainly investigate how I can use screen capture softare such as Jing to provide feedback, especially on the language focus assignment. brilliant!

 

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