Blended Learning Weeks 4 & 5

Where to start? Well, with a planning hat on. Key message is to use technology solution in the area that you want most improvement, not just shoe horn it in for the sake of it….

Week 4

Curriculum planning, learner needs, teacher pedagogy (need to get myself one of those), assessment and feedback. What is the best fit and where will I use technology to its best advantage? Who are my learners and what are the learning outcomes I need/want them to achieve? These are questions I need to ask, even if I am just doing a parachute session for study skills! I had never heard of the ADDIE or DADDIE framework for creating courses and had been using OTARA without realising (as part of the scheme of learning we need to use to map our teaching sessions) In some ways I know more than I think and in other far less! Or maybe it’s just terminology? I did feel that I am putting a  lot of the tips into action already with using Twitter, Linkedin and other platforms in my teaching sessions but I am sometimes unclear as to the how and why I do it – other than I know that it works 🙂

Week 5 – and the last

The main message that has stayed with me from this week has been enabling learners to have a “belief in their own capacity to achieve”. They should be at the heart of everything we do and that blended learning can give the flexibility to enable those most at risk of exclusion to participate. It takes a department-wide agreed change to embed a blended learning approach – but there are small steps you can take for your individual courses and to suit your learners. Managing your own time as a tutor is just as important and must be included in your planning – how and when do you expect to be contacted and by what time must you reply?

This course really helped to me to see that the steps we have taken here towards blended learning have definitely been in the right direction. The ideas and questions posted by participants have been very helpful in vocalising the issues we have had, as well as highlighting things we never considered. The sharing of teaching ideas and resources has been excellent and we have kept a list open on shared Google Doc for staff here all doing the course to share and amend.

Foundation Degree Tweet-up!

Monday 18th February – Set your Twitter accounts to Stun!

Learners on the Library Foundation Degree courses in Grwp Llandrillo Menai and Glyndwr University are linking up for the whole week through Twitter – sharing, advising, supporting and ultimately helping each group explore the possibilities of Social Media for collaboration and professional development.

Using the hashtag #FDLIB Glyndwr learners will be completing their ‘Group Work in a Week’ project to develop a marketing campaign for World Book Night. You can also follow contributions from @LlandrilloLib and @glynlib

This is hopefully the first of many Tweet-ups Library Foundation Degree course learners can take part in to link across the region and work collaboratively to see the benefits of Social Media for study, work and life! We’ll be keeping track of the conversation here and on Storify, so if you can’t access Twitter during work you can still contribute.

Good luck out there!

Managing Your Digital Footprint – from toddlers to teens

This morning Ofcom released their latest report – Children and Adults Media use and attitudes report 2012.
 
Did you know that – 
 

Over a third of 3-4 years olds are helped to go online using a desktop PC, laptop or netbook and 6% go online via a tablet computer!

Children who use the internet mostly alone comprise one in seven internet users aged 5-7 (14%), one in four aged 8-11 (24%) and over half of those aged 12-15 (55%)

While most children would tell someone if they encountered something inappropriate, a minority were unsure or would not tell anyone

Lack of confidence in using the internet is an issue for a number of parents, and the risks of grooming, cyber-bullying or access to inappropriate content are not always front-of-mind for many parents. 
 
The ESafety pages on Moodle developed and curated by the Library and Learning Technology team, will help to support tutors and learners with :
 
– Esafety/Digital Footprint Class resources (videos, discussion points, quizzes, handouts and crib sheets)
– Esafety handouts with top tips
– Sources to find support 
– Information for parents
– Esafety resources created by learners with disabilities and learning difficulties
– Esafety resources created by referred/excluded learners
– Safer online shopping information
– Spotting fakes and fraud online
– Basic media literacy awareness
 
We also add content regularly to our favourite E-Safety webpages list – http://delicious.com/llandrillo_library/esafety .
 
To arrange departmental staff development training on delivering Esafety, Digital Footprint or Social Media sessions, please contact the LLTS team directly.
 

Want your learners to be more independent? – Information Literacy Doing Overtime

At the RSC North West ‘Want your learners to be more independent?’ event I felt I had my eyes well and truly opened to the benefits of, and dare I say it, the necessity of embedding information literacy skills into learning provision – whatever form that provision that may take.

Anthony Beal and Hilary Thomas (RSC) asked us to start thinking about what our definition of  ‘Critical Thinking’ and ‘Independent Learner’ might actually be. Cue much head scratching and pen waving, but ultimately many similar ideas from a mixed group of tutors/librarians/learning support officers. Critical thinking suggestions included the ability to analyse, compare, contrast and assess information in a more in-depth way. An independent learner has a myriad of traits – motivated, self directed, responsible, reflective, engaged and (crucially) intrinsically motivated by making progress.

The term Information Literacy itself was queried – are teachers/tutors familiar with this term too – does it have meaning outside of the research or information professional’s toolkit? If you walked into a classroom and asked “hands up anyone who’s information literate”, would you be met with blank stares? And not only because you’re a raving stranger that’s just walked into their classroom……..

Deborah Millar and Joanna Neil from Blackburn College gave great insight into the uses and benefits of social media tools including Pintrest, Tumblr and Scoopit and how these sites help to support their learners to study, expore, research and reflect on the regular feedback they can offer as tutors. But their talk also gave us more to think about regarding the role of a tutor/teacher as ‘expert’ and the understanding of true collaboration within a students learning journey. It set us on the path to question our role titles and how that might affect provision (division of support) and also who ‘owns’ knowledge or information within an institution.

This insight paved the way for a talk by  Jane Secker and Emma Coonan, which was a quickfire but insightful overview of ‘A New Curriculum for Information Literacy ‘ (ANCIL) project, which they had both developed during their secondment to the Arcadia Project  -exploring the role of academic libraries in a digital age. While the main focus of the project was Higher Education, there were significant, transferable conclusions and new ways of thinking about Information Literacy that relate to the Public Library and Schools stream of the Welsh Information Literacy project. The Institution Audit Worksheet especially enabled the group to start discussing and investiagting who currently has responsibility for supporting students develop their IL skills in our organisations, broken down by strands including becoming an independent learner or resource discovery. When you really look at learner support provision in this way, it becomes clear quickly that in many cases several departments/staff groups are involved and not everyone collaborates to make it a seamless experience for learners.

I think this training day was the first opportunity I’ve had to really THINK about Information Literacy and make meaningful connections to help categorise or attempt to lasso all the different approaches in order to spread the word and support our advocacy activities. I feel it’s important to re-visit this question with a new WILP project team and also as we are approaching lots of new stakeholders who are encountering this for the first time.

Is it a concept, an ethos, a skillset, a scheme of learning, a framework? Well, yes to all – but also a pathway, a continuum, a cyclical process of learning, exploring and reflecting to enable people to cope with the demands of whatever information context they find themselves in.  Before we get too metaphysical here, I think the point I’m trying to make is that the question should really be “Am I information literate right now?” – do I have the information skills necessary to help me to be insightful and successful for my challenges today? And to make sure we ask ourselves and ask this question of our learners regularly. There are a set of identifiable skills, yes but potentially infinite levels of skill development – there is no ‘end point’.

We need to move away from thinking about Information Literacy as a set of finite, tick box competancies – definable, yes, measurable, yes but continually evolving. However, when we start talking about accreditation, impact and measurement there is a danger of falling into the trap of “right, you’ve done the test. You’re information literate now, put that in your PDP and off you go”. Embedding information literacy into our services and user/learner support should be about enabling a generation of life long learners – is that happening in your organisation?

You can contact the Welsh Information Literacy Project Team at wilp@llandrillo.ac.uk or on Twitter @welsh_info_lit

Safer Internet Day – tomorrow 8th Feb 2011

Safer Internet Day

“Internet, it’s more than just a game – it’s your life”

Learn more about staying safe online, supporting digital life-skills and become web savvy by checking out –

InSafe the Safer Internet Day organisers

Safer Internet Day on Facebook

UK Safer Internet Centre

Race Online 2012

Twitter Safer Internet Safety Day updates and #SID2011

Beat Bullying Cyber-Mentors

 ECrime Wales Space Invaders!

our delicious.com be_safe_online bookmarks

Coleg Llandrillo Staff and students can also use the E-Safety resources crreated by Library staff on Moodle. Log-in and click on ‘cross college resources’ then click on the ‘e-safety’ link.

Autology – Student Prize!

Autology Award

 Jenna Jefferson a BTEC Science student has received a merit award for her effective use of the Autology online resource, for the month of November 2010. 

She has made excellent use of the over £3000 worth of resources that are available to each student who has access to Autology.

Jenna said ‘She has found the Autology resource very useful for her course work”. Jenna is pictured below receiving her certificate and prize from Library Manager Dr Andrew Eynon.

  Autology is the world’s first ‘Sat Nav for Study, created for students aged 11-18. It is used by students in College and at home, at their own pace, to improve their results – helping with coursework and revision.

Autology combines a unique Online Library, filled with thousands of high-quality resources for students with intelligent, pro-active Research Assistant Tools that help students instantly access all the relevant information they need

Llandrillo Library and Intro Connect students win CyMAL Information Literacy Grant

 Coleg Llandrillo Library staff with the help of the Intro Connect students have won a share in a recent  CyMAL Information Literacy grant award! While the group didn’t win the separate overall student prize, the resources created were well received and their winning entry will help to support other Intro Connect and ILS groups throughout Wales.

The short screencast entitled ‘Think Before You Click’ was created during tutorial sessions with the students and their tutors while discussing e-safety and web awareness. The students shared their ideas for the slides, gave feedback on the draft presentations and recorded their own voice-overs for the final edit. The screencast is part of a wider bi-lingual resource package with powerpoint slides, handouts and a short quiz. These are now also being used on the Llandrillo E-Safety pages for the college.

Information officer Síona Murray said ” the students were a fantastic group to work with, very enthusiastic and full of ideas. We had a great time recording the audio tracks and deciding on the slides. The class tutors were very supportive of the whole project from the start and very generously set aside class time to enable the students to get involved.”

For more information on the project and general e-safety activities for FE, please contact siona.murray@llandrillo.ac.uk or @Llandrillolib on Twitter!

Fact from fiction online – aliens, time travel and pasta

But I saw it on the [insert media channel here] so it must be true!

How to engage with students when sneakily trying to teach them a bit more about information literacy and challenging perceptions? No easy task, but we thought we’d take a different slant so they didn’t just switch off when shown examples of webpages – it’s hard when you’re 16 to not think you know if all and that the oldie (even when they’re not that old!) at the top of the classroom hasn’t a clue.

So – if the Web is their mass media of today, what about before all that technology was developed? Re-discovering old hoaxes and looking at new ones can be a great way to start students thinking about trust, perception and how the technology of the time can affect the masses. It helps to increase their sceptical superpowers and to highlight things to help them decide if a source is reliable, current and relevant.

So we’ve used Three wise monkeys exercise, aliens, pasta and even time travel to get the message across! Any other ideas for hoaxes to use?

Climate Change Champions – Could it be YOU?

Are you concerned about climate change?

Why not become an International Climate Champion and do something about it?

 

Cyfanfyd in partnership with the British Council is looking for outstanding people aged 18-35, living and working in Wales to become International Climate Change Champions for the year 2010/11.

 As an International Climate Change Champion you will have the opportunity to:

•  Carry out a climate change project locally or nationally
• Network with other Champions from around the world, sharing ideas and good practice
• Represent the UK in your region on climate change issues

 Further details and an application form are attached – applications should be sent to climatechampions@cyfanfyd.org.uk by the closing time and date of 5.00 pm on 30th November  2010.

 This is a great opportunity to make a difference – they look forward to hearing from you!

Application Form November 2010 – Word Doc

18 – 35 ICC 2010_Welsh – Role Description (in Welsh) PDF

18 – 35 ICC 2010 – Role Description (in English) PDF

 

New E-Safety resources from Llandrillo Library

This week we uploaded the new E-Safety resources and guides on to Moodle and delivered the first students and staff sessions. Eye opening for all involved !

You can also access the resources here – tell us what you think….

Library staff have been reviewing and collating a wide range of e-safety material available online over the past few months. This has be collected and presented in a new way by breaking the units into 5, 10 and 30 minute sessions. This makes it easier for staff to explore the material themselves in their own time, but also makes it easier to include the training in class time without causing major timetabling problems.

You can also check out the library delicious feed for loads more regularly updated e-safety content. Becoming web-aware, knowing about safer social networking and understanding how to manage your digital footprint are vital life skills that all students (and staff and adults and children) should know about.