A first look at Turnitin Feedback Studio

Posted on by Pete Sparkes

Introducing “Turnitin Feedback Studio”, a rebrand and major update of the Turnitin software used by staff and students at the University of Sussex for online submission, similarity reports, marking and feedback of text-based assessments.

Watch the video below for a brief overview of the changes to Turnitin that will be forthcoming from the start of August 2017.

Key changes

Whilst the principles and functionality of the software remain much the same, there have been significant developments in the following areas:

  • New look and feel. A more efficient workflow and improved user experience from a new modernised redesign of the software interface.
  • Available on mobile devices. Mark and view feedback across a wide range of tablets and smartphones.
  • A focus on accessibility.  Complies to web accessibility standards with improved access for keyboard-only and screen-reader users.

More information

We will be running brief introductory sessions on Turnitin Feedback Studio around campus throughout July and August (2017). You can book for a training session via the TEL website.

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Posted in Marking and assessment

Equipping students to thrive in the digital era

Posted on by Daniel Axson

Southampton Solent University was the venue for Student futures – equipping students to thrive in the digital era, a recent two-day event organised by the UCISA Digital Capabilities Group

The conference took place in The Spark building, dominated by a fantastic giant red pod, looming over it like something out of War of the Worlds. The pod houses a lecture theatre and has a cafe style area up top. It has to be seen in person, but it’s pretty cool to look at.

The Pod at the Spark

The Pod at the Spark

The purpose of this event was to explore the ways in which we support students to develop their digital capabilities, from a student, staff and institutional perspective.  But what exactly are Digital Capabilities? Well, as I discovered over the two days, depending on who you speak to you may well hear it called something else (e.g. digital literacy). You’re also likely to hear various interpretations of the idea;  for simplicity here is the Jisc definition, although  we’d encourage you to explore this further if you’re interested.

Digital literacies are those capabilities which fit an individual for living, learning and working in a digital society (https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/developing-digital-literacies).

Read more ›

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Posted in digital skills, Events

Active Learning Masterclass

Posted on by George Robinson

The University of Sussex hosted an Active Learning Masterclass on the 6th June (#almsussex), a day of sharing strategies to turn students from passive spectators into active creators. This was a collaboration between Technology Enhanced Learning and Wendy Garnham, funded by the Digital Practice Awards, and featured presentations and workshops from both Sussex staff and external speakers. Read more ›

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Posted in Active learning, Events, Mobile learning

Transforming Seminars with Padlet – Podcast Episode 10

Posted on by Tab Betts

How can we transform seminars using online collaboration? How can students develop digital skills and become active creators of multimedia learning resources?

In this episode, we interview Dr. Wendy Garnham (www.twitter.com/W_Garnham), who is a Teaching Fellow in Psychology and Director of Student Experience for one of the Foundation Year Programmes at the University of Sussex. Our discussion focuses on how Wendy transformed her seminars using Padlet, a free and easy-to-use online notice board which enables students to collaborate in real time to write text, embed multimedia content and post links to websites. We also talk about how Wendy helped to found a community around Active Learning following a Flipped Learning workshop run by the Technology Enhanced Learning team at Sussex.

Links:
Wendy Garnham – www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/10660
Wendy Garnham Twitter – www.twitter.com/W_Garnham
Padlet – www.padlet.com

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Posted in Learning Design, Mobile learning, Podcast, Uncategorized

Take 5 this summer and learn new skills

Posted on by Kitty Horne

This summer Technology Enhanced Learning will be relaunching our hugely popular Take 5 series with some exciting new additions to our offer. Take 5 courses are a series of bitesize self-study online tutorials, open to all staff at the University of Sussex, which offer you the opportunity to discover a range of different learning technology topics and develop your skills in these areas. This summer the topics will include: digital productivity, blogging, LinkedIn and podcasting & screencasting.   Read more ›

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Posted in Mobile learning, Social media, Study Direct, Technology Enhanced Learning

Making meaning with Social Media

Posted on by Antony Coombs
Collage of Book Covers for Social Media Platforms

Images by Jam Zhang: full credits at the bottom of this post

When you hear the phrase ‘social media’, probably the first association that springs into your mind is conversing through short-form messages and shared links or images. You probably also recognise a range of practices, conventions and behaviours, such as collaborative authorship, tagging content to help it be found, a concern with identifying people-of-interest to help mediate one’s own experience and the location of personal artefacts in remote, shared collections. All these have been adopted as normal, expected aspects of just about any application facilitated by internet access, underpinning activity on both public social media such as Twitter and more contained business-targeted services, such as Slack. Read more ›

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Posted in Digital scholarship, Learning Design, Mobile learning, Social media

No time to read it now? Pop it in your Pocket for later!

Posted on by George Robinson

This week we are  introducing a useful  tool for organising and collating interesting articles you find on the web.

Pocket lets you save articles, videos or images you find online in one place. You can then access them from any of your devices at a more convenient time on or offline.

Pocket allows you to:

  • Save interesting articles, videos and images from around the web, then access them later through your pocket account on any of your devices.
  • Read saved articles offline. This can be useful when in areas with no internet connection or if you wish to read articles without the fear of getting distracted online.
  • Share articles using Pocket’s ‘Send to Friend’ feature, this can enable collaborative research on projects and assignments.
  • Find ‘recommended features’  based on articles you have been saving. . So if you’re studying a certain topic this can be a good way to find related articles.
  • Read free of distractions. Saved articles have unnecessary formatting and clutter such as ads, sidebars and comments stripped away, making the article far more readable. This can enable much easier focus on the content itself.
  • Assign custom tags to your saved content allowing you to easily organise and locate articles that deal with a certain topic.
  • Listen to saved articles on a iOS or Android device using the built in Text-to-Speech function. This can be useful for accessibility reasons or listening whilst exercising or on the go.
  • Follow other people on Pocket. This means you will receive articles they have recommended, allowing  you to get curated content from specialists or leaders in a certain field.

Read more ›

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Posted in App review, Mobile learning, Social media

Community, creativity, competencies and cuteness: MUGSE comes to Sussex.

Posted on by Anne Hole

The Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) team at the University of Sussex recently hosted a meeting of the Mahara User Group for Southern England (MUGSE). The sun shone as nearly 30 participants from eleven institutions in the region gathered to share their experiences with the e-portfolio platform and hear about new features in the upcoming release.

You can see some of the tweets from the event in this Wakelet put together by George Robinson (TEL).

The Mahara Community

Read more ›

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Posted in Mahara, Marking and assessment, Open Education

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We are the Educational Enhancement team at the University of Sussex. We publish posts each fortnight about the use of technology to support teaching and learning. Read more about us.

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This work by Educational Enhancement, University of Sussex is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/tel/.