Posts tagged ‘digital literacy’

A new academic year, a new course & new skills

I’m teaching on the year one Cert Ed/PGCE for the first time this year, & very excited I am. While parts of the curriculum are fairly new to me having delivered the level 4 PTLLS & undertaken observations before what I am really excited about how I can enthuse new teachers into the benefits of technology & demonstrate how they can embed technology into their own practice – both as teachers and as teacher-as-learner.

Today there have been many firsts. First observation of the year. First time using the new paperwork. First time using Notability to write the observation report. First time to receive the lesson plan from the trainee via Yammer. Read more ►

Digital Distractions or Necessary Networking #corpusMOOC

week 2 progress

week 2 progress

As I previously said, I’m learning that watching video lectures is problematic for me – so this morning I have skimmed through all the transcripts of lectures for week 2, while simultaneously completing the quiz. Not surprisingly, I got 100% on my first attempt! Although, I will admit that some of the questions were tricky and it took some unpicking of the terminology to figure out which could be the correct answer. Read more ►

crime, criminals & keeping your online presence private

crime/criminal

crime/criminal

I have reflected previously that I would embed the topic from PSD into developing the students ICT & digital literacy skills, however as the end of 1/2 term approached I felt that it was becoming increasingly challenging to keep the students engaged for 4 hours on a single topic. So today I have changed tack and had two distinct sessions: 2 hours of PSD and 2 hours of ICT.

Over the past couple of weeks I have also been increasingly aware that the iPad project has been dominating my thoughts and my planning with this group so I was keen to have a more balanced lesson this week. Read more ►

The fog lifts

Attribution: Image: ‘White sunset’ http://www.flickr.com/photos/22705478@N03/6831414535 Found on flickrcc.net

I may actually be starting to get my head around my new 16-18 ESOL group. I definitely spent the first two weeks in a kind of fog where I felt every thought I had led down the dark alley  of cluelessness.

The first week was a pretty traditional ESOL-y first lesson, with getting to know you activities and a college induction and class rules. So far so predictable. Except it wasn’t predictable. I wasn’t at all sure how the lesson would go at all – as it turns out the much over planned college tour using QR Codes and iPods was a Big Flop while the ‘draw a good student/a bad students/a good teacher’ went fairly well. Read more ►

Class iPads – a new challenge

As if I don’t have enough on my hands with a new age group (yes, this year I am teaching 16-18 ESOL. Gulp), and two new curriculum (it’s no ordinary ESOL- if such a thing exists – I’m teaching PSD and IT. Double Gulp) I am going for broke and want to trial using iPads in the classroom.

Being a bit of an iPad fan (s0 much of my professional development revolves around the ease of acccess to my fabulous PLN through my device) I very much see iPads as personal devices. So I have been very reluctant to consider using them in the classroom. Read more ►

Edcanvas, online quizzes & sunshine

The Teacher Ed department at college have agreed to trial running parts of the induction next year as blended learning, particularly around the use of the social media sites Twitter and Yammer.

Starting with the Twitter Induction, I started looking last week at using the Lesson function within Moodle. On my love-hate relationship spectrum with Moodle I was certainly very very close to the ‘hate’ end. I spent what felt like a good chunk of the afternoon structuring the resources and activities within the Lesson but it didn’t fit right and I was really struggling to get it to work. Granted, I have only ever made two Lessons in Moodle before, and that was over a year ago so it was really back to basics. But it was hard. Read more ►

An Introduction to #ocTEL

The Networked Teacher AttributionNoncommercialShare Alike Some rights reserved by courosa

It’s been almost a year since I took part in my first MOOC – the First Steps MOOC, but the memory of being initially completely over-whelmed by the experience is still very clear. But I am up for a challenge, and as I am currently in the process of completing an LSIS funded Research and Development Followship project, where I am looking at what and how HE tutors and students can learn from each other about mobile technology, then this seems like as a good a time as any to join my second MOOC.

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Email updates: LinkedIn

LinkedIn is one of the social media sites that I have an account, spend some time updating my profile and joining groups, but have not really got to grips with. The log in system has always been a bit off putting – I could never remember my password and then the extra security of typing in the ‘code’ never seemed to work for me, so every time I would make a conscious effort to check my account I’d give up at the first hurdle.

I do get regular email updates from the groups I have joined, but over the weeks and months I can’t say that I even bother to read them, they get instantly deleted without so much of a glance. Scanning though my emails today I see one from the HEA digest, saying that I haven’t visited the group recently and to help keep my email tidy they have unsubscribed me from the group’s digest. How very thoughtful of them.

I seem to have a small recollection of similar emails from other groups, which would explain why this is the only update I’m getting. Ho Hum.

Email updates: Diigo Groups

 

I have had a Diigo account since 2010, when Delicious was taken over by Yahoo and there were lots of discussions about the service being closed down. Then, at a RSC-YH event I went to a session on making the most of Diigo and heard about how Diigo Groups can be used to create student accounts to allow collaborative link sharing, and that this can easily be embedded into Moodle. I then started to explore this a little more.

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Email updates: ESOL-Research

ESOL-Research is a discussion forum for researchers and practitioners with an interest in research into teaching and learning ESOL. ESOL-Research is managed by James Simpson at the School of Education, University of Leeds. Action for ESOL campaign Website: http://www.actionforesol.org Twitter: http://twitter.com/ActionforESOL Facebook: Action for ESOL Online petition: http://www.gopetition.com/petition/41552.html

I have been a subscriber to the ESOL-Research Jisc-mail since it was first started, way back in 2006 (how time flies!!). Initially I would get an email update for each individual post, and if I’m honest I was probably a bit hit and miss about which I read and which got automatically deleted. When my email changed in 2008, this was one thing that got missed off the list to update so I was out of the loop (so to speak) for a while.

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