Solving a problem with lots of emails using Google docs embedded in moodle

I was asked by the Early Childhood Studies team to take a look at their process for tracking when students choose their placements. The process previously involved students filling out a form stating their 1st, 2nd, 3rd choice of placement location, full contact details and other details on paper. The team then transcribed these into a spreadsheet.

As the students were all registered to a single moodle site, I advised the team to use an embedded Google form, and worked with the team to create the form in Google Docs. This form spanned 3 pages using a simple conditional question to determine whether students had the correct CRB paperwork, and automatically transcribed results into a Google spreadsheet, which the team could download as an Excel spreadsheet.

The Google form was then embedded into a moodle webpage inside their source, thus allowing only the students enrolled to enter their details.

In addition, the team mentioned that they may email the form to their students before the course started, in order that students would be able to sign up for their placement even before the course begun. Because the Google form is not within moodle as such, this possibility was also open to them.

A neat and tidy solution using Google docs to reduce paperwork and admin

Using mobile phones in geography education

A special session was run for the 1st year geography education students on using mobile phones in the classroom. The session was run by Andy Hoang (E-learning advisor for the department of education) and Stephen Ruddick (3rd year geography education student) and aimed to utilise the smartphones in the students pockets to distribute and collect data for learning and presentation.

The mobile smartphone is a powerful tool that can be used to display many types of multimedia from text and photos to videos and audio. Smartphones have huge potential in the classroom as a means to get personalised information out to students. With many students at university now owning a smartphone, we decided to run the lesson using the students own mobile phones.

There is a wealth of information available to learners on the internet, that's easily accessible on a smartphone, but as it's difficult to input long, complex web addresses (URLs). To overcome this we used QR codes to encode URLs, photos and videos and Google docs to publish our own custom documents on the internet for students to download.

QR codes look like this

You can use the barcode reader on your smartphone to open a video on using the digital compass - it will play on your phone.

The lesson started with a treasure hunt. Directions were encoded in a QR code like below

This gave groups directions around the campus, including links to some cryptic images that confirmed where they were along the way. To get to the places mentioned, students needed to use the digital compass built in to their phones. We also provided analogue compasses for students to compare.

When students got to their destination, they found another QR code, with instructions for an investigative task, to do with improving their campus environment. Students were asked to investigate a different element of infrastructure such as signage, catering or outdoor leisure and they were asked to collect evidence supporting their argument of how the campus could be improved. They could use any type of supporting media they wanted.

Students went out and took video interviews, photos and audio recordings, then came back and downloaded their findings on to a netbook computer, which was then used to put a very short presentation together for the class.

The lesson lasted two and a half hours and the time seemed to fly by. Students were engaged and excited to get out and about and didn't stray off track at all. Overall the lesson seemed to go down very well with the students and we hope to see some of them taking this out to schools

Twitter - Analysing the collective voice

In an earlier post I talked about analysing text content with Tagul, which is an alternative to Wordle

I recently presented this presentation on using twitter to analyse what your students pick up in your lectures in real time using twitter.

Twitter - Analysing the Collective Voice on Prezi

Since then, I've discovered a site that can do this automatically at eduserve - http://summarizr.labs.eduserv.org.uk/

Using delicious.com and netvibes.com to create a personalised resource portal for Spanish students

In the Spanish department, Sabela and the team had been collecting many many weblinks for students to learn Spanish. However, the links were very difficult to keep track of, and students confronted with this unsorted link list would have probably turned round and found their own, thus making it pointless for the staff to have found them at all.

They needed a way to store and categorise the links. The best way to store links online is using a social bookmarking site, and after taking some advice from the e-learning department, they chose to use delicious.

Delicious has one feature that makes it perfect for this job. When you save a bookmark you can tag it with any number of keywords which makes the links you save much more easy to find. Specifically, if you search for a tag in your delicious stream, delicious filters out all the links tagged with that word, AND allows you to output an RSS stream of that query in a very logical sense.

For example, if you want to filter the myroespanish delicious links for all the resources for learning about the "pasado" tense, just click the "pasado" tag and the URL changes to http://delicious.com/myroespanish/pasado

Look at the URL and you can see that it's very easy to understand. It's the subset of myroespanish and below that the subset of pasado tags. Simple!

On every search page, delicious gives you the option to output an RSS of the search term

By outputting this and feeding it into customised  feedreaders at Netvibes.com/myroespanish Sabela created a customised link portal for the students which lets them search for pre-pricked links by topic

Content analysis with Tagul

I used Tagul to analyse the output of tweets from the recent Moodlemoot, which happened last week.



Here's a tag cloud of the keynote speech at #RULT10. This was made halfway through the speech and I wasn't even in the room. Gives you an idea of what they are talking about, visually!



Here's the tag cloud from the end of my session at #RULT10

Facebook groups for publicity of events

From Blogger Pictures

Pathik Pathak in Crucible has recently been running a series of session entitled "Talking Allowed", which are in the format of a panel discussion on current issues. He chose to use Twitter and facebook to publicise the event and one of the most important elements of this strategy was the facebook group.

Students are informed of upcoming events and, with the Students Union helping to spread the word too, the reach of this event and it's audience vastly increased with minimal investment through word of mouth.

Linoit for group brainstorming

Linoit is an online noteboard, which allows multiple users to post virtual post-it notes at the same time. It's free to use and once you have your account any number of people can write on your noteboard, either as logged-in users or as guests.

Andy Hoang has been using Linoit in class as a way to encourage students to talk about their experience with using interactive whiteboards. It has been really useful specifically because it appears to be informal and allows people to express their ability anonymously but in real time, thus allowing for frank discussion in class.

To set up a Linoit board like the one above

1. go to www.linoit.com and make an account. It's free to make and as far as I know it comes with no adverts. 
2. Start a new board
3. Set the settings to allow students to post as guests - this way they won't have to make accounts
4. send the address of the board to your students. In this case, as the address is quite long, I used the URL shortening service http://tr.im to shorten the address. I can then customise the shortened address too

During the lesson, to see the new entries, just refresh the browser screen by going to the refresh button in the toolbar, or pressing F5.

I've also used this to collect opinions anonymously at a distance in preparation for meetings.