Finding the best tech at #Bett2016

Posted on by Nicole Ingerson
sheep2

Bett countryside

Several of the TEL team visited BETT 2016 last week. For the uninitiated BETT is the British Educational Training and Technology Show.

With more than 600 learning technology suppliers covering 5 different education sectors we knew it was going to be a busy day. Our game plan was to try and get round as many of the stalls as possible to scout for new and exciting possibilities.

After powering up with large coffees we hit the floor of the Excel Exhibition Centre. It was to be 6 hours until we would next see natural day light.  Read more ›

Tagged with:
Posted in Technology Enhanced Learning

Scholarship ‘swimming in a sea of the digital’

Posted on by David Walker
Liverpool

Image copyright David Walker 2016 CC-BY-NC

In a world so infused with digital technologies how must our approaches to scholarship evolve to extend reach and impact?  What do you need to do beyond publication to ensure your audience listen and your publications are read?  How do we drive engagement with educational research, in particular research in technology enhanced learning (TEL)?  These questions formed an undercurrent of the recent Pedagogic Research Conference at the University of Liverpool where issues around digital scholarship formed a central theme.  Read more ›

Tagged with: ,
Posted in Digital scholarship

Learning analytics, social scholarship and flipping assessment

Posted on by Kitty Horne

Capture

Happy New Year to all our readers!  Last autumn saw the start of the 2015/16 Technology Enhanced Learning seminar series, featuring three engaging sessions from four great speakers:

  • Martin Hawksey (Chief Innovation, Community and Technology Officer for the Association for Learning Technology),
  • Margaret Adamson (Head of Learning Technology & IT Skills Development at the University of St Andrews),
  • Denise Turner (Lecturer in Social Work and Social Care at the University of Sussex),
  • Tansy Jessop (Head of Learning and Teaching at the University of Winchester). 

Read more ›

Tagged with:
Posted in Technology Enhanced Learning

Free Ebook: TEL’s greatest ‘hits’ 2015

Posted on by Sally Burr
Download PDF or EPUB copy to keep!

Download a PDF or EPUB copy to keep

The end of the year is upon us and we would like to thank all of our readers with a free Ebook featuring TEL’s top posts of 2015.

2015 has been a great year for the TEL blog. Despite being a relatively ‘new’ blog launched just in May, 2014, this year has seen achievements such as:

We hope you find this a valuable resource and that it persuades you to subscribe to our blog (top right-hand side) to receive weekly posts as soon as they are published.

Thank you to everyone at Sussex and beyond who have supported Technology Enhanced Learning in the last year. We look forward to innovating with you in 2016.

You can download the Ebook as a PDF or EPUB.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Tagged with: ,
Posted in Technology Enhanced Learning

Can technology help to develop ‘future ready’ learners?

Posted on by Sally Burr
PP

Shane Sutherland introducing the Future Ready Symposium

Last week I travelled to Birmingham for the ‘Future Ready Symposium’. The event was hosted to explore the role of technology in helping to develop the ‘future ready’ learner. 

The Symposium coincided with Jisc’s publication of the ‘Technology for Employability’ report by Dr Peter Chatterton and Geoff Rebbeck QTLS. Read the full report here or the fast read here. Read more ›

Tagged with: , ,
Posted in Technology Enhanced Learning

Note-making and annotating with an iPad – which apps do I need?

Posted on by Anne Hole
Note pic

flickr photo by S@Z shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

When academics and students start using an iPad some of the first things they want to be able to do are make notes (in lectures, at conferences or in meetings) and annotate pdf documents.

There are many apps available to accomplish these tasks so we have been comparing some of them to help new iPad users to decide which to try.

Make notes or organise notes?

First, it is important to think about what you want or need to be able to do. For example, do you only want to make notes, or do you want an app that will let you organise your notes as well? Will you be keeping the notes on your device or do you want to sync them so that they are available with a web browser or other mobile device(s)? Additional questions to consider include:

  • Is it enough to have typed notes or do you want to handwrite notes and add freehand diagrams?
  • Do you want to add other media (images, sound recordings, video, web pages etc.) to your notes?
  • Do you want to use the same app for making notes and annotating documents or are you prepared to use different tools?

    • Read more ›

Tagged with: ,
Posted in App review, Technology Enhanced Learning

Student Reps Training Online: Behind the Brief

Posted on by Pete Sparkes

What lies behind a learning technology project?  What are the steps involved in taking a project from initial idea through to delivery?  In this post Pete Sparkes’ shares some insights to his role as a Learning Technologist by taking us through his involvement in a recent initiative designed to further enhance mechanisms to support student engagement here at the University of Sussex.

The Brief

The brief for this project was to produce a bite-sized, fully online course to be delivered to 200+ newly appointed student representatives. It was anticipated that moving from face-to-face workshops to a fully online solution would encourage participation by allowing reps to work at their own pace to complete training, and as a result deliver a stronger student rep programme.

For this collaborative project I provided input on instructional design, advice on the use of appropriate technology and the structuring of course materials. Colleagues from the Student Rep team in the University of Sussex Students Union (USSU) and University’s Academic Development and Quality Enhancement Office provided a brief, acted as  subject matter experts, and reviewed and tested the course prior to its official launch. Read more ›

Tagged with:
Posted in Study Direct, Technology Enhanced Learning

MakerSpace in Mobile Technologies Week

Posted on by Sally Burr

Pics MS

You may have spotted that this week is Mobile Technologies Week! We are halfway through Mobile Technologies week and today, Ant Groves, Learning and Teaching Librarian from the Library, talks about the wonderful ‘MakerClub’.

Over to Ant……

The second day of Sussex Mobile/Technologies Week began with an inspiring set of talks from last year’s TEL Innovation Scheme winners, where the importance of tinkering and taking a playful approach to learning was mentioned on several occasions. Read more ›

Tagged with:
Posted in Open Education, Technology Enhanced Learning

About our blog

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.

Subscribe to the Blog

Enter your email address to receive notifications of new posts by email.

Archive

Creative Commons License
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/.