Periscope: live broadcasting for teaching and learning

Posted on by Sally Burr
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flickr photo by Jim Makos shared under a Creative Commons (BY-ND) license

Have you heard of Periscope, the live broadcasting app described by its creators as ‘the closest thing to teleportation’? 

This new, free app enables easy broadcasting directly from your smartphone – no additional equipment required. You can also view live broadcasts from all over the world.

Try Periscope

Owned by Twitter, Periscope has signed up over 10 million people in the last four months. Read more ›

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Posted in Technology Enhanced Learning

Digital resources for Arts and Humanities

Posted on by Anne Hole
Bodleian Library

flickr photo by Leonieke Aalders shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

Things are changing in Arts and Humanities. Researchers are increasingly working with digital materials and using new tools in traditional research locations. Reading itself has been transformed by digital devices. So how can you make the most of digital tools and resources for teaching and learning in the Arts and Humanities?

Being a digital academic

There is a wide range of ways to use, or get involved with, digital tools and resources. For example Professor Tim Hitchcock (Digital History, HAHP) writes about using Twitter and blogs to make academic practice public and publishes his own blog while Dr. Lynne Murphy (Linguistics, English) has recently received a US grant to help write a book based on her very successful blog ‘Separated by a Common Language’. Read more ›

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Posted in Technology Enhanced Learning

Effective Online Quiz Design

Posted on by David Walker
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flickr photo by Harald Groven shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

In last week’s blog post Pete Sparkes shared some different approaches to help Moodle users rapidly create quizzes for use in course sites, overcoming some of the perceived usability challenges associated with the Quiz activity.

In this article I want to focus on the effectiveness of the questions within the quizzes we create, an aspect of the process that I’m sure anyone who has previously created an online quiz will appreciate is challenging and anything but rapid. Read more ›

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Posted in Study Direct, Technology Enhanced Learning

Rapid quiz creation for Moodle

Posted on by Pete Sparkes
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flickr photo by sea turtle shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

Online quizzes can be used as an effective tool to help assess student knowledge, elicit feedback and add variety in learning. A common criticism of the quiz activity in Moodle is that it can seem cumbersome and time-consuming. Tutors navigate and click through multiple pages, menus and boxes on forms in order to create a single question. However, for those of you that would prefer to simply type your questions into a single document to be imported into a quiz in Moodle, I offer some potential solutions.

In this article, I will review three simple methods designed to speed up quiz question creation in Study Direct.  For readers who are not members of the University of Sussex, Study Direct is the name of our Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) which is built on Moodle (version 1.9). The two terms may be used interchangeably throughout this post. Read more ›

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Posted in Study Direct

Capabilities, Connectivity and Student Experience with Jisc #connectmore

Posted on by Kitty Horne
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Image with thanks to attendee at Jisc conference haymoncollins @haymoncollins

The Connect More event in London represented the last in a series of regional day conferences organised by Jisc concentrating on the themes of ‘Capabilities, Connectivity and Student Experience’, and featuring an exciting ‘Fab Lab’ complete with dancing robots, 3D printing pens, augmented reality apps and virtual reality technology.

Having recently attended the 13th Academic Practice and Technology (APT) conference at the University of Greenwich – ‘Flipping the Institution: Higher Education in the Post-Digital Age’ – I was particularly interested in the sessions which touched upon the flipped learning theme. Read more ›

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Posted in External events, Technology Enhanced Learning

Flipping the Institution: Higher Education in the Post Digital Age

Posted on by Anne Hole
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flickr photo by Scott McLeod shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

The 2015 Academic Practice and Technology conference at the University of Greenwich focused on ‘Flipping the Institution: Higher Education in the Post Digital Age’. There was a huge range of sessions to choose from, so this is just a flavour of what I took away from the day. Read more ›

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Posted in External events, Technology Enhanced Learning

The benefits of lurking in higher education

Posted on by Sally Burr
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flickr photo by CollegeDegrees360 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

Inspired by the journal article Online Discussion Forums in Higher Education: Is ‘Lurking’ Working?, International Journal for Cross-Disciplinary Subjects in Education Mazuro and Rao (2011), we take a look at the benefits of lurking in online learning spaces in HE.

Lurking to some may have negative overtones, but why is this? A lurker is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary simply as ‘someone who reads the messages in a chat room without taking part.’

Whilst this definition indicates a level of passivity in terms of overt engagement, it does not mean that learning cannot, or is not, occurring. Read more ›

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Posted in Study Direct, Technology Enhanced Learning

Camscanner: turn your phone or tablet into a mini-scanner

Posted on by Nicholas Botfield
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flickr photo by Carollainy shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

This blog post will review CamScanner, an app that allows you to turn paper to PDF using only the camera on your mobile device. Scan anything from mathematical equations to your shopping list and then edit, organise and share your files in a variety of different ways.

The CamScanner app allows you to:

  • Take a photo of your paper document and turn it into a PDF (you can also take a photo of many documents and batch them together)
  • Edit lighting and contrast to ensure optimal legibility
  • Use the pen tool to free form annotate on top of the original document or highlight areas of the document using the highlighter
  • Add text notes to the documents
  • Either email your document to other recipients or upload it to DropBox,
  • GoogleDrive, OneDrive or Evernote
  • Share your document with other CamScanner uses to have multiple editors

    • Read more ›

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Posted in App review, Technology Enhanced Learning

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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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Based on a work at https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/tel/.