Press "Enter" to skip to content

TEL Sonya Posts

Moodle Munch: Feb. 2021

Published 16th February 2021


The February Moodle Munch recording. How do they get these up so fast!?

This month’s Moodle Munch had sessions on Universal Design for Learning and use of Office 365 within Moodle.

First up, Suzanne Stone and Ann Marie Farrell from DCU discussed how they went about creating a toolkit for creating Moodle course sites that were built with UDL considerations in mind. They were joined by an academic colleague who shared their reflections on using the toolkit. They had gone from using Moodle as a file store designed to meet their needs as a teacher, to one which put students’ needs first. This included, for example, redesigning content that previously would have been a PowerPoint upload, to an online interactive learning activity using the ‘Book’ tool in Moodle. That ‘using Moodle as a file store’ comment is a very familiar problem!

As an aside, and I’m not quite sure where this came from, someone posted a link in the chat to LibreTexts, an online resource for open source textbooks. It’s very American, but that’s understandable when the US has a huge problem with massively expensive textbooks students are expected to purchase on top of their already huge university fees. I’ve had a wee quick nose through their philosophy section and it seems pretty good. Bookmarked and shared.

Back on topic, the second session today was from Edel Gavan of MSLETB who talked about their Office 365 Moodle integration. Their Teams integration looks better than ours, as it can create a Team for each Moodle course which means that students get Teams meetings added to their Outlook calendars automatically, and they can easily create recurring appointments for, for example, weekly classes. To be fair, I think our systems could do that, but there are features we don’t have enabled by our IT. Edel also showed a ‘Block’ of Microsoft tools in Moodle which has been made available via a plugin to add those. One technical point of note regarding those was that each Microsoft service needs to be configured separately.

Leave a Comment

Teaching, Learning and Assessment in a Digital World

Published 3rd February 2021

100 years of learning theories showing the learner as the active agent
The learner must be the active agent in the learning process

This was Bob Harrison’s inaugural lecture as a Visiting Professor at the University of Wolverhampton. Bob has been in education for over 50 years, and I have known his name in Ed Tech circles for a long time.

His talk was on the dangers of over-emphasising the power of technology as a solution to the problem of online and distance education, and the need to continually relearn the lessons that successful learning, no matter whatever physical distances may be involved, needs to be driven by the learner as the active agent in the learning process, supported by well-designed content delivered by caring and competent teachers. And if I’ve mangled Bob’s thesis in this summary, you can read it more eloquently in his own words in this article, Why there is nothing remote about online learning, published last year. And for an example of how you can’t magically improve online learning just by throwing money and technology at the issue, Wired’s article on the ‘LA iPad debacle’ is a good read.

I thoroughly enjoyed Bob’s lecture, and his dismantling of technological solutionism, neoliberalism in education, and his barely checked scorn for the Department for Education and their fixation on remote teaching.

The screenshot which I grabbed to illustrate this post shows a continuation of the theme of learners as the active agents of learning in the most influential learning theories spanning the past century.

Leave a Comment

CELT Team Away Day and Insights

Published 2nd February 2021

Insights into CELT
Insights Into CELT: Shocker, we’re all introverts

Has there ever been such a phrase as to warm and inspire the hearts of man* as ‘virtual team away day’? Thanks Covid, the gift that keeps on giving.

In the morning we planned our plans for world domination, which all went according to plan. After lunch we had a presentation on Insights Discovery which we had all been asked to complete the week before. Last time around it was a Belbin exercise, because the boss didn’t like Insights, but we have a new boss now who doesn’t like Belbin, and who swears by Insights. So we did Insights. I find them all much of a muchness, and don’t put a lot of stock into them. But then I’m a reflective person with a strong internal locus of identity, so I feel like I know myself very well, and there was nothing in my Insights profile that was shocking, or indeed which had changed much since the last time I did one. Other people in the team did get a lot from it though, they found it interesting at least. I guess it was nice to see all the team profiles together, and though I’ve said ‘we’re all introverts’, we do have a new member of the team who came out all fiery red.

* And women. And enbies. I see you, in all your valid glory.

Leave a Comment

Digital Equality Awareness and Impact on Practice

Published 19th January 2021

Seven Elements of Digital Literacy
The seven elements of digital literacies, according to Jisc

Maybe it’s the humanities background biasing me here, but all the best training I attend always seems to be deeply interdisciplinary by nature. Sure, the core of this session was about digital equality and things like the different between digital literacy and digital competence, but it really grabbed me when we got into discussion on the nature of poverty, and why and how gender and racial biases get baked into artificial intelligence algorithms.

The ‘Seven Elements of Digital Literacy’ diagram above is taken from Jisc’s Developing Digital Literacies guide, and breaks down digital literacy into media literacy, communications and collaboration, career and identity management, ICT literacy, learning skills, digital scholarship, and information literacy.

Another great resource from this session I am absolutely going to steal for my own work (by which of course I mean appropriate cite), is the Good Things Foundation, Digital Nation UK 2020 infographic which provides research findings in a striking visual format full of data points showing the digital divide.

Finally, some relevant recommended reading. From the session itself, Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez which I read last year and highly recommend, even if trans and non-binary people are seemingly non-existence, never mind just invisible. And one I threw into the conversation, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing, by Mar Hicks.

Leave a Comment

Moodle Munch: Jan. 2021

Published 12th January 2021


The January Moodle Munch recording

Welcome to 2021, folks! Let’s hope it’s going to be a better year for all.

Today marked the return of Moodle Munch, with two presentations as always. Mark Glynn from Dublin City University began by discussing some tools and techniques they are using to add some gamification to online modules to improve student engagement. First, the use of formative and summative quizzes, but not just quizzes, the pedagogy around their use, emphasising the opt-in nature of the summative component and giving students the ‘freedom to fail’. Mark presented some interesting research showing both strong positive student feedback and improved pass marks on the formative assessment component with the group of students who had engaged with the summative quizzes. As it should be, but it’s nice to see such strong evidence! Mark then showed us the Level Up Plus plugin for Moodle which can be used to add gamification elements to module spaces, such as progress bars and leaderboards.

The second presentation was from Nic Earle at the University of Gloucestershire who demonstrated the custom electronic marking and assessment system they have developed for managing student assessments, and how it integrates with their Moodle and student records system. They switched over to this system in 2017 wholesale, and again Nic was able to show very positive results demonstrating increased use of the VLE (even before the pandemic), and improved NSS scores.

As always, the presentations were recorded and I have embedded the YouTube above this post.

Leave a Comment

Gender Based Violence: Tackling GBV in Strategy

Published 2nd December 2020

A Helping Hand
Everyone needs a helping hand sometimes. Photo by Neil Thomas on Unsplash

I didn’t realise it at the time of booking, but the Gender Based Violence webinar I joined in October was the first of three. I was able to dip into the second session, but only very briefly as it clashed with teaching commitments. This final session focused on how FE and HE institutions can address GBV strategically, with special consideration on what we can do as staff and students are starting to return to campus following the Covid pandemic.

There were good discussions about the different impact on HE and FE institutions, as FE students don’t tend to attend campus as much or live in halls, and therefore don’t have access to the same level of social and institutional support as HE students; that universities and colleges need to realise and fully embrace the fact that they are not bubbles outside of society, but part of society, and that GBV is something that affects our students and staff, on and off campus; and in making the link between GBV and gender inequality, and how so often we place the burden of emotional labour to address problems on the people who are most affected by them and have the least to give. For evidence, one needs look no further than the makeup of the panel of these sessions and of most Athena Swan boards.

With regards to Covid and lockdown, instances of domestic abuse and gender based violence have increased as people are, or can feel trapped in unsafe domestic situations. Making resources and support available online is well and good of course, but the panel noted that these may not be accessible to people under coercive control, who’s internet access and phone use may be monitored covertly or even overtly.

Whew. Writing this, reflecting on this… it’s depressing and I fell powerless. There are some of those online resources here from the University of Strathclyde: GBV Cards, and a suggestion from the panel was to print out a version of this, the ‘Support for You’ page works, and give to staff and put around campus. There is also the complete Equally Safe in HE Toolkit available here: Equally Safe. The focus is on Scottish resources, as this is a project funded by the Scottish Funding Council.

Leave a Comment

Moodle Munch: Dec. 2020

Published 1st December 2020


Recording of the two case studies from today

My second Moodle Munch featured two presentations today, the first from Lisa Callaghan at Dublin City University Library who have used H5P to develop an interactive library skills tool, and the second from Ciara Reilly at the Marino Institute of Education who talked about their use of podcasting.

I really need to get H5P working in our Canvas. The tutorial Lisa has developed in H5P replaces a 2013 version made in Storyline, which itself replaced an earlier HTML / Flash version. However, the benefits of the new H5P version seem to come through the deployment of it using a Moodle plug-in called Subcourse which allows the library to create and manage the content centrally, and to get stats on it, a problem they had with the previous versions. I think it’s this method of pushing out content that’s really interesting. Within Canvas we could use Commons to similar effect, but this doesn’t automatically update the content, instead each course which has imported it from Commons gets a notification that a new version is available, and then the option to update. I got the impression that Subcourse in Moodle fully updates the content fully automatically. There was a useful discussion about the types of content that can be produced in H5P, and how accessible each tool and option is. Someone posted a link to this support document which breaks it down.

The second talk from Ciara was on various way of using podcasting to engage learners, such as delivering content in different formats to provide a break from screens, using it for audio feedback, and getting students to produce audio content which from their experience has helped students who are less confident writing to “find their voice”. Again, interesting debate on the pros and cons in the comments. It was interesting to note the increased use of podcasts during the pandemic, something I’ve found anecdotally and which colleagues here seemed to agree on. Ciara surveyed their own students and found that 52% reported listening to at least 4 podcasts per week. They also discussed the technology platforms they have experimented with, including Anchor.fm, Audacity, Vocaroo, and the native audio recording tool in Moodle’s Atto text box editor.

Recordings are available in the embedded YouTube above. They got that up quick, before I finished writing this! Makes me feel ashamed of the month-old draft blog post on my desktop about CanvasCon.

Leave a Comment

The CELT Top +-10 Tools, Mostly “Free”(ish)

Published 17th November 2020

Padlet Map Example
Experiments with the new map board in Padlet

I recently delivered a staff development session for our Instructional Design team, as part of which I was asked to cover what fun and exotic external tools we particularly use or recommend. I have an extremely comprehensive list in my browser bookmarks, and have a small handful of “go to’s”, but to put together a proper list I consulted with my CELT colleagues and put together our Top 10. Which had 12 things on it. Or 14 really if you include what I put on another slide to get more ideas. Whatever, counting is over rated, just ask the Republican Party. I thought it would be useful to share, so, in no particular order, here they are:

Kahoot
An audience, or student response system. It’s bright, loud, fun, and people seem to like it, though it’s not my preference as I think it’s a tad unprofessional for HE. Like most of the things on this list it works on a freemium model, with the free version limited to two question types – MCQ and True/False – and 50 players. Staff wanting to use it will need to create an account which requires an email address, but students do not have to sign-up to use it and can submit responses via a website or mobile app.

Poll Everywhere
This is my go-to student response system. Works on the same model as Kahoot, but looks a lot more professional. Less intuitive to set up, and only 40 responses per poll with the free account, but many more questions types (23, I think). Students can also respond by SMS, getting around the problem of ‘I don’t have a smartphone / data’ which can still be an issue sometimes.

ThingLink
An old favourite. Upload any image or photo to ThingLink, then make it interactive by adding hot spots that can include text, audio, video, or links to other content. Free version limits the amount of hot spot icons which are available to you, and each image has a viewing cap of 1,000. For an example of use, here is an interactive world map I created for a Sociology module showing country health profiles created by students: Country Health Profiles.

Piktochart
Infographics have become an increasingly popular way of showing a lot of data in a very simple, visually striking format, and Piktochart is an excellent and easy to use tool that lets you create these. Free accounts are limited to 5 charts, and export quality is limited, though still very good. Images can be exported as flat PNG files, or embedded with a bit of iframe code if you use interactive elements. In relation to the aforementioned Sociology project, here is an example I created in Piktochart using facts I totally made up about Wakanda (Black Panther was in cinemas when I ran this with the first cohort): Wakanda Health Profile.

Prezi
An online presentation tool, an alternative to PowerPoint or Keynote which breaks the ‘slide’ paradigm and allows you to move through a presentation in interesting ways. The free version only works online and has limited templates and editing options.

Padlet
Have you ever done any activities where you get students to stick post-its to a whiteboard, or add or move contributions to a board in some other way? Padlet is a way of doing that online. Free account is limited to 3 ‘pads’. I want to say this has been updated quite recently, as I remember it as just having variations of a whiteboard style layout, but when I’ve used it recently there are lots of new template options, including maps which I’ve been experimenting with. For EDPM10 I got students to annotate a map with a book, novel, philosopher or thinker which has influenced them. EDPM10 Exercise.

Canva
Not to be confused with Canvas! Canva is an online image editor with a very low barrier of entry as it provides around 100 design types to get started with, e.g. posters, flyers, banners, icons, and 250,000 template images and widgets.

Twine
An open source tool for creating interactive stories, think create your own adventure books.

Unsplash
I love Unsplash, I’ve been raving about it for years to anyone who’ll listen to me, and you’ll see Unsplash photos all over this blog. It’s a stock photography site, like Shutterstock, but everything on Unsplash is free to download and use for any non-commercial purpose. Very high quality and pretty comprehensive, and you don’t even need an account to use this one. All you have to do, as a matter of honour, is give credit and a link back to the original photographer. A pro-tip for Mac users – they have an app which gives you fresh new wallpaper on your desktop every day.

Creative Commons Image Search
And when Unsplash can’t do the job, or it’s images you need rather than photos, I recommend people use the Creative Commons image search instead of Google to ensure that you only get results that can be reused with a Creative Commons license. Also Google is evil.

Open Culture
I’m not sure if Open Culture bills itself as an open education repository (OER), but that is essentially what it is, or at least it’s a huge part of it. A massive collection of resources in the public domain, either because copyright has expired or been waived. Includes entire courses, books, art, photos, music, movies, etc.

Trello
Possibly the black sheep of this list, but included for the value I get from it. Trello is a super-powered to-do list using Kanban methodology that I use for organising my workload and, with mixed success, corralling my team! A big empty board that you populate with lists and cards, and each card can have a range of content within it, a detailed description, a task sub-list, due date, etc., and these can be moved around between lists and boards, and assigned to other team members. I’ve experimented with Trello a lot over the past couple of years, changing how I use it to try and get the best format that works for me. Currently I have a Work Board for the year, with lists categorising my typical work and any specific projects which need their own special management. I hesitated a little to include this one. It annoyed me earlier in the year when they changed how accounts work, now you need to use at Atlassian ID which doesn’t work as well, especially on the iOS app, and it seems to have been generally buggy of late. The quality and long-term trend is worrying me, and I am intermittently looking at alternatives.

Class Tools
This first of two items on my ‘also’ slide, Class Tools is a collection of little web apps, widgets and templates. There’s a random name pickers, an on-screen timer, lots of templates for creating fake but real(ish) looking social media posts, and lots of little games and quiz tools like a crossword generator. There are a couple of items on here that are premium, but most are free to use (with ads).

Top Tools for Learning
And finally, if this list isn’t long enough, the Top Tools 4 Learning site lists the top 200 tools for learning, as voted for by learning technologists, educators and other interested parties. Categorised for easy searching, ranked, and showing how tools have changed position which is great for spotting trends.

Leave a Comment

Game Boy Refurb

Published 14th November 2020

If you’ll indulge a rare non-work related post (though it is about technology and I did learn a lot, tenuous I know), I recently refurbished a Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP as a little lockdown project.

The whole Covid / lockdown situation hit me pretty hard back in March and April when it began, as I lost pretty much all of my hobbies – gigging, karate, cinema, travels – and then one by one everything fun I had booked in throughout the year, from a big once in a decade holiday, to new tattoo appointments, were all cancelled. Still, I am safe and well, my job is as secure as one can be in this age, and my loved ones are all pretty safe, so overall I’m not doing too bad and I pulled myself together. One of the hobbies which has grown to fill the void has been gaming, especially retro gaming, and my partner and I stumbled into a YouTube hole of people refurbishing Game Boys (this one by Odd Tinkering was the start!) So I thought I would have a little crack at that.

I chose the Advance SP because I wanted one system that would play all Game Boy games, plus I like small things. I was also hoping that the lighted display would be good, though I was mistaken on that. The starting point was a beat-up but functioning unit from eBay that I took apart, cleaned up all of the electronics with isopropyl alcohol, and then put back together in a new shell along with a new battery. I did make things somewhat complicated by deciding on a two-colour design with echoes of the original Game Boy and NES, which meant that I actually had to buy two new shells and, separately, two sets of button to get the red and black. But everything worked! And it was beautiful, until I turned it on and had to deal with the reality of that screen…

The model I purchased was the AGS-001 with a front-lit screen. There is a later model with a backlit screen, the AGS-101, but this only had a limited release in Europe and they go for about 100 quid on eBay, which was more than I wanted to spend (lol). Now, I had a Game Boy, Game Boy Colour, and the original Advance back in the day, and none of those had lighting of any kind, and I don’t recall being particularly unhappy with any of them. But how time and technology move on. That front lit screen is just absolutely unacceptable today. Pale, washed-out, terrible contrast. I wonder at how young Sonya coped!? Furthermore, there were a few blemishes on the screen, micro-scratches and dust motes that had gotten in between laters. So my refurb project ended up having a second, considerably more expensive phase – adding a modern IPS screen.

Replacing screens with IPS panels, or adding a backlight to the original DMG and Pocket models is very common in the community, but it does require a bit more work and expense. First of all the panels are typically about £60-70, then you need to make some hacks to the inside of the new plastic shells to make room for the larger components, and finally there is often some soldering work required too. In the case of the Advance SP, this is optional to add a brightness control to the panel, but of course that would be very nice. These are all things I didn’t want to do, least of all because I haven’t soldered anything since high school. Luckily for me, my most wonderful partner not only has mad soldering skillz, but a Dremel that made modding the shell so much easier. Once installed and reassembled for the second time it was gorgeous. The final step was adding a dodgy flash cart which lets me load any and all ROMS my heart desires – legally obtained of course, *cough, cough*. I was worried about battery life – that IPS and flash cart are big power draws, but I have stress tested it and got about 5 hours of life which is comparable to my 3DS.

And finally, my eBay purchase came with four games that I didn’t really care about, except for the mysterious Pokemon Green cartridge, a game that wasn’t released outside of Japan. A rare import? A dodgy cart? I was curious, but that along with two of the other four games didn’t work upon arrival, so it was back out with the screwdrivers and the trusty bottle of IPA. A little bit of scrubbing later and all of the carts came back to life. The inside of that Pokemon Green cartridge was a mess, cheaply put together and with no Nintendo or official branding anywhere, so definitely a fake. Playing the game revealed it to be a ROM dump of Pokemon Blue, with the word ‘blue’ on the title screen replaced with ‘green’. Nevertheless, it works. A very successful wee project all in all, even though it did end up being a tad pricey!

A shoutout to RetroSix and ZedLabz who between them supplied all of the new bits and bobs I needed, I can highly recommend them both.

Leave a Comment