Welcome to the University of Sussex Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) blog. We’re a new team and in our first post our aim is to introduce you to the services we offer and to give you an idea of how TEL can support you to enhance your teaching and research and your students’ learning through the effective use of technology.

We’re based in Essex House and our support structure is built on a cluster basis with a dedicated liaison Learning Technologist working with Schools in the Arts, Social Sciences and Sciences. We aim to be highly visible so you will see us ‘out and about’ in schools working with staff, getting to know you and your students, and identifying your individual and disciplinary specific learning technology needs.

Technology for Teaching and Learning

The blog will be updated weekly with posts addressing a range of technology related trends, topics and developments across the HE sector. Future posts will:

• offer advice on creating engaging and interactive Study Direct modules
• report on educational technology events organised or attended by the TEL team
• provide reviews of educational apps or tools which are making an impact in HE
• always include links to valuable ideas and resources!

We are enhancement focused and aim to highlight examples of good practice in learning technologies at Sussex, institutions in the UK and globally.

Our objective is to inform and inspire you, and most importantly, give you the confidence to try new technologies in your teaching practice. In this vein, we will soon be running ‘Ten Days of Twitter,’ a learning development course (originally developed by Dr Helen Webster – Anglia Ruskin University)  that will introduce both ‘brand new’ and ‘nearly new’ users to Twitter – a powerful tool for sharing information, finding out news from colleagues, and making new connections.

A-Z List of Apps

We have put together a useful A-Z list of mobile apps for teaching staff at Sussex. There might be apps that you are already familiar with but you are likely to find a new interesting app that you could use in your teaching – or for personal curation, bookmarking or web management. We’ll be posting app reviews to this blog and updating this list in the months ahead so do revisit.

Blog? Be Our Guest

We are open to ideas. We particularly welcome contributions from colleagues across the University so if you’d like to contribute a review on a useful mobile app you’ve discovered, report on a learning technology project in your area or if you would like the team to cover a particular topic please contact us at tel@sussex.ac.uk As an added incentive we’re going to be introducing ‘rewards’ for our guest bloggers – more on that soon!

Please make sure you ‘follow’ us if you would like to be notified each time that we publish a new post. You will find the follow button at the right hand corner of this page. If you’re on Twitter you can also follow us @SussexTEL

Thank you for visiting the new University of Sussex TEL blog. We hope to see you again soon.