Come and join us in The Qube for the second round of 30 Minute Tech Takeaways. Discover a new tool and create a new resource to use with your students.
Featuring over the next fortnight is Zaption, the interactive video tool, and a second round of Thinglink for those that missed out last week. For session times, check out the flyer below.
To see a simple example of what you can do with Thinglink, take a look at this one.
The TEEL Team will be running several 30 minute sessions in The Qube over the next two weeks on a couple of cool and easy to use tech tools. First up will be the interactive image generator Thinklink and animated presentation tool Powtoon.
The aim of these sessions is to give you the skills to create a resource you can takeaway with you (virtually speaking) within half an hour.
Check out the info sheet for details. If you can't make the session times listed, come and see us anyway to schedule an alternative time.
The new Technology Enabled and Enhanced Learning Space, The Qube, will open in the Rex Williams building on Monday 2nd November. We have a range of technology tools for you to try and we are here to assist you in any way to enhance your teaching with technology.
Look out for TEEL focussed workshops in upcoming weeks.
To kick things off we are running 15 minute familiarisation sessions everyday next week at 12.15 and 3.15, so come and have a look, or feel free to drop in anytime between 9am and 4pm. Chocolate and lollies on us!
Wednesday the 14th of October saw the Teaching Development Seminar Series move to Bongard Campus with a focus on teaching to large groups. Anne Bradley and Greg Bold shared their experience with us and offered some great strategies for larger classes. Have a look at their presentations below.
At our recent lunchtime Teacher Development Seminar, the English Language Team gave an excellent talk on strategies for teaching students who's first language is not English. They made the interesting point that these students are not necessarily international students studying English, but also New Zealand citizens and domestic students who grew up speaking another language.
Take a look here.
The focus of the presentations from the lunchtime seminar session held on 16 September was the importance of the teaching and industry interface and the importance of developing and maintaining strong relationships with local industry.
Have a look at these videos to see what Betty Ormsby, Brian Dillon and Lee Pearce had to say about the importance of industry liaison for their programmes and their students.
Our ever expanding personallibrariesof documents,photos, videos and music has resulted in an exponential increase in the amount of data we store. In Part One, we looked at the history of computer storage. Today, more and more individuals and businesses are choosing to store thiscontent somewhere other than their personal computer, hard drive or phone.
Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, OneDrive; the names are familiar and they essentially all do the same thing - store files remotely for you.Add insocial networks like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube for photo and video storage and you the have potential for a significant amount of your data being stored in "The Cloud"
No, your files are not orbiting somewhere in the stratosphere, but stored on enormous facilities full of hard drives spread around the world in what is a global scale computer network connected by the internet.In essence, you files are sent along a pipe, and filed on someone else's hard drive, then backed up on otherhard drivesin different locations around the world.If you have an active internet connection you now have free (or very cheap) data back up solutions available to you.
But hang on, is my data safe if I store it in the Cloud? The simple answer is yes. Sort of. Everything is hackable and nothing is breach proof, however if you follow standard precautionary rules like choosing credible providers and using strong passwords you are much less likely to lose data than by using home grown methods. After all,rates of personal data back up is very low.We've all been there - laptop gets left on the bus, flash drive gets put through the wash, or phone falls down the toilet and you don't have a backed up copy of that important presentation or precious photo. Syncing your data with a cloud solution can avoid these potentially painful experiences, not to mention making your files more accessible when you are away from your computer.
The investment in storage and security by big players such as Facebook and Google in security and infrastructure is vast. As an example Google has a dozen data centres around the world, containing an estimated 900,000 servers using 260 million watts of power. Facebook's most recent facility pictured below (note the trucks for scale) is built on the edge of the Arctic Circle in Sweden, in an attempt to keep energy usage lower. Amazon is currently building a similar facility in remote Northwest China for the same reason. All those targeted advertisements on web pages and in your Facebook feed are there in part to pay for this infrastructure.
It is estimated that 2016 will be the year that a mind-blowing one Zettabyte of data will be stored online, that's enough for a 22 billion year long music playlist and remembering Moores Law this amount will only continue to rise. So whats next? In part three we look at streaming services and productivity in the cloud and answer the question, how much data fits into the human brain.
Since the time when computers became a significant part of our lives, the need to save and move data has existed. In the first installment of this three part series, we take a look at the history of removable data storage.
Prior to the invention of the floppy disk in 1971, computer storage existed in several mediums
including punch cards, magnetic tape and even rope. The original floppy disk made it possible to move data easily from one computer to another and on release had a grand total of 80KB of memory, enough data for a ten page word processed document or approximately 1% of a modern digital photo file. Floppy disks went through various iterations in physical size and capacity over a twenty year period and maxed out at 1.44 MB of storage before newer technology superseded them.
In 1987 (Walk Like an Egyptian anyone?) Toshiba invented flash storage, a new type of technology that uses printed circuit boards rather than spinning disks to store information. It wasn’t until the turn of the century though, when personal computers began shipping with USB ports, that removable flash storage in the form of thumb drives became widely available. Although expensive in its infancy, flash storage is now cheap, reliable and has enormous capacity compared to its floppy predecessor. In keeping with Moores Law that suggests computing power doubles every two years, Samsung have just revealed a flash drive with 16TB of capacity, enough for over 1000 HD copies of the entire Star Wars Series (or about 16000 HD episodes of Game of Thrones if that's more your style). Most recently, with the adoption of smartphones, cameras, GPS, etc, flash storage is everywhere in the form of SD cards. While other storage mediums like CD ROM have come and gone, flash, with its tiny size, large capacity, high speeds, 10,000 write cycles and great reliability have meant we've come a long way since the humble floppy disk of 40 years ago and it would be unusual for a person to not use flash storage in some form in a typical day. As always with all technology however, even a 16TB flash drive will soon be obsolete. Tech companies Intel and Micron are working on a new type of storage called 3D XPoint that is 1000 times faster than flash and ironically shares some concepts with the 1960's rope storage technology that was used on the Apollo Space Mission. So where to next? In part two we examine cloud computing and why Facebook is building data storage facilities in the middle of ice fields.
Mike Scott, Senior Academic Staff Member and winner of a 2014 National Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award, put together this excellent short video recently on how to create a Teaching Portfolio in support of a teaching award application. For those of you considering an application, or even to just document your teaching career to date, this video is a must watch.
Our second series of lunchtime PD sessions started on 9 September with the theme being 'Facilitative Teaching'. This is a shift from what is often viewed as traditional teaching to one of the teacher adopting a facilitative role, which is a student centred, flexible approach to learning. We had Donna Dinsdale, Allister Field and Graeme Jeffrey sharing their experiences of how they adopted a facilitative model of teaching in their programmes. Here's what they shared about their experiences.
The second Teaching Development Seminar focussed on Alternative Assessment, with Tracey Clissold, Lindsay Skyner and Amy Raymond sharing examples of how they have re-designed assessments to support learning and engage learners. Here's what they did!
Over 200 billion emails are sent every day. What type of information do you send in emails on a daily basis? Are you confident that your emails only contain information that you would be happy for anyone to read? If not, you might like to check out the Confidential CC Android and iOS app which features self-destructing, encrypted email that can be viewed only once and can't be forwarded or printed. Very 007! Check it out: http://www.confidentialcc.com/ Any other Techno Geeks out there who would like to share their 'Geeky Stuff'? Let us know and we might publish you on our TEEL Blog.
The first of our Teaching Development Seminars kicked of with a focus on Tech4Learning, presented by Lesley Mochan, Anne-Marie Simon and Dennis Keys.
The theme of all three presentations was the the use video to provide students with a range of resources they could revisit anywhere, anytime, to confirm some of the key learning points from their classes.
Lesley was looking for a resource to support her students learn the propagation process for a new type of rootstock. She found a programme on eTV, which was just what she needed. However, she didn't want to simply provide a video for them to watch but a resource that would engage them in the learning by adding some interaction. So she ran the video through Zaption, added some key information and some questions for students to answer to confirm their understanding. Click the Zaption image below to see what Lesley produced for her students.
Anne-Marie wanted to produce some learning
resources to support students to learn numerous
techniques. She wanted to provide a range of resource options with written step-by-step instructions, physical
sample and QR code, linking to video. By adding QR codes to the machines
students use on campus, they are able to scan the QR code on the machine to see
how to do a range of things such as threading or setting up the machine. Students can review the video as often as they need until they have mastered the technique. Check out this example of what Anne-Marie
has developed for her students by clicking the image below.
The Carpentry Team decided to
produce videos to provide learning resources that would allow students to revisit the operation and health and safety practices when using the range of
machinery in the Carpentry Programme. When demonstrating practical skills in
the workshop students can miss some of these essential key points however, these videos would allow students to watch them as often as they needed. By adding
QR codes to the machinery, students can scan the QR code with their mobile devices and watch the videos
in the workshop if they are uncertain of any aspect of the operating procedures.
With the help of Mike Scott, they have also produced a number of ‘60 seconds of
safety’ videos. Click the image below for an example of
what the Carpentry Team have produced.
Kylee New, Phil Grimmer and Mariana Tapsell from the Hospitality, Trades Training and Foundation Studies programmes spoke at the recent Teaching and Learning Seminar that focused on strategies for engaging youth. Each tutor spoke of the challenges they faced, how there was a need to be flexible in their approach, and their strong desire to see the young people on their courses succeed.
Some common themes emerged including the importance of building a community of learners, the need to develop trusting relationships with students and the long term benefits of making the effort to spend time with each student to check on their progress both as a student and young person.
Take a look at their talks below. They were filmed on a self tracking camera called a Swivl. If you would like to have a go using this device in your classroom, get in touch with the Teel Team.
Yes it's another educational strategy to consider, but never fear, help is here! So, what does it mean? Gamification means to include elements of computer gaming into what you do with your students. Still sound scary? I suppose the first question is ‘why’, so here’s some stats:
Across the planet three billion hours every week are spent playing video and computer games
28 million harvest their crops on Farmville every day
Over 5 million play an average of 45 hours computer gaming per week
How many people do you know who play Minecraft or Candy Crush? What makes computer gaming so compelling and how could we harness some of that for education? Players are hooked through levels, points, rewards, competition and instant feedback. How about ‘gamifying homework’ through some sort of reward system. How might you bring gamification into your classroom and tap into some of what compels people to ‘play’ computer games? Want to know more? Check it out here: http://www.edudemic.com/ultimate-guide-gamifying-classroom/
This weeks learning and teaching seminar is focused on strategies to improve youth engagement and success. Come along to C12 Wednesday 26th at 12.05pm, grab a cup of soup and a roll and listen to senior staff from three schools share their experience
The idea of Virtual Reality (VR) is not new, in fact the first VR machine, The Sensoramawas invented way back in the digital Jurassic of the 1950's.
Those of you lucky enough to grow up in the pre-digital era will remember arguing with siblings over who got to watch Disney cartoon strips through the awesome Viewmaster, who's early versions pre-date the Sensorama and will be relaunched later this year based on Google's $25 Cardboard VRheadset. And of course lets not forget the universe was saved from the forces of the Dark Side by an imploring Princess Leia hologram to Obe Wan Kenobi.
So what's VR got to do with education?
In some fields of study, it will be truly game changing. At Case Western Reserve University for example, the Medical Faculty is using new Microsoft technology calledHololens. Not only can anatomy students project a human body in front of them, they can use hand movements to interact and manipulate the hologram. Think Chemistry students inside a virtual atom, Automotive students studying an engine with specific parts removed, Architecture students developing 4D buildings and doing walk throughs as not so unrealistic future examples.
To see Hololens in action, take a look at the video below.
With heavyweights like Microsoft, Google and Facebook (who bought startup VR headset maker Oculus Rift for $2 billion earlier this year) all developing VR hardware, expect to see this technology trickle into educational, industry and entertainment applications in the very near future.
For your own completely free VR like experience downloadthis app from VR company DAQRI (iOS and Android versions available). . Follow the instructions and be amazed.
One of the things we often get asked is, "What's a TEEL?"
To start with, lets look at what we're not. We are not an essay writing model, nor are we a glamour aid from the pre-war era.
What we are is a team that’s here to help provide direction and build staff capability to use technology enabled and enhanced learning (TEEL) strategies. In essence we are here to help you in any way we can to use technology to help enhance the learning process with your students. Yes, we are the Moodle People, but we're more than that too.
The TEEL team consists of Ruth Boal, Linda Shaw and Josh Burrell. On Windermere Campus we are located in C11 and at The Bongard Centre room 213a. We love to have staff drop in and discuss their needs with us at any time or feel free to get in touch via email.
The first of the Return to the Future Series for 2015 kicks off at Windermere in A3, lunchtime August 12th. The theme is Tech4Learning. Come along, grab some soup and a bun andlisten to three tutors discuss how they are currently using video to provide just in time learning resources for students.
Anne-Marie wanted to produce some learning
resources to support students to learn numerous
techniques. She wanted to provide a range of resource options with written step-by-step instructions, physical
sample and QR code, linking to video. By adding QR codes to the machines
students use on campus, they are able to scan the QR code on the machine to see
how to do a range of things such as threading or setting up the machine. Students can review the video as often as they need until they have mastered the technique. Check out this example of what Anne-Marie
has developed for her students by clicking the image below.
The Carpentry Team decided to
produce videos to provide learning resources that would allow students to revisit the operation and health and safety practices when using the range of
machinery in the Carpentry Programme. When demonstrating practical skills in
the workshop students can miss some of these essential key points however, these videos would allow students to watch them as often as they needed. By adding
QR codes to the machinery, students can scan the QR code with their mobile devices and watch the videos
in the workshop if they are uncertain of any aspect of the operating procedures.
With the help of Mike Scott, they have also produced a number of ‘60 seconds of
safety’ videos. Click the image below for an example of
what the Carpentry Team have produced.
