TELFest - Final day!

This was the last day of our week long TELfest extravaganza, but there was still plenty of great sessions taking place to ensure we finished things off with a bang!

We  kicked things off with Zafer Ali and David Read from the ELTC, giving us some valuable insight into using web conferencing technologies; Adobe Connect and Google Hangouts.

Adobe Connect was featured first, ably led by David Read. David explained the many features of Adobe Connect including the chat window, screensharing, use of quizzes and polls and use of virtual break out rooms.

As Adobe Connect is not available University wide yet, Zaf then showed us how Google hangouts could be used as viable free alternative. This walkthrough included screen sharing, remote access to another users screen and sharing documents.

Next up we had Farzana Latif and Zafer (who surely wins the most sessions presented award!) demonstrating how you can incorporate mobile learning into your teaching and student learning. 

This session covered a variety of mobile apps including: Aurasma, Autonomy 4D as well as Blackboard Mobile Learn (MOLE).

This session showed us how we can ably engage students in sessions using these apps. The main mantra of this session was, "give it a go"!. See how these apps can fit in with what you want to achieve. 

The lunch time panel sessions have proved very popular throughout the week and this one was no exception. This time we were treated to a showcase of innovative practice using learning technologies.

Marie Mawson, who is the Faculty of Social Sciences Library Liaison, gave us her tips on  utilising library resources that are valuable to learning and teaching. This included utilising Star Plus, the online reading list, promoting digital collections and embedding tutorials and quizzes into your modules. 

Nicki Newman gave us a great walkthrough of the Turnitin iPad App for marking and feedback. Features included the ability to mark offline, as well as it being a  more convenient/portable device to mark on. Nicki mentioned that she had saved time using the iPad App, and that by and large students really liked it. 

Gary Wood gave us some valuable insight into his work in USE -  University of Sheffield Enterprise. This included a student project case study based on the theme of syntax. This project involved students creating an online course that could be accessed through iTunes U. A main focus for the project was to help students gain and build key enterprise skills including: self belief, ambition, innovation and confidence.

Neil Everill took us through the content of a module focusing on new media skills that is now core in BMS (Biomedical Science). This modules focus was on students developing new skills in media as well as being aware of their digital footprint. The module was split into  areas including, video production, social media and google sites .

Finally, the last session of the day was led by Chris Clow and Tommy Wilson and focused on being creative in developing multimedia resources for learning and teaching.

Attendees were given some great tips and things to avoid in video production (including planning, storyboarding and recording on smart devices) before embarking on a  practical activity... ensuring that attendees could put those tips to immediate use! 

Attendees were asked to create their own 30 second video and then view it back on their PCs.

Whilst all this was going on the drop in sessions were also open once again for anyone looking for a bit of learning technology advice/help from the team.

So that, as they say, is the end of the show folks.  The Learning Technologies Team would like  to say a big thank you to everyone involved who helped make this week the success it was. From presenters, to attendees, to caterers and fellow CiCs colleagues who helped us out when we needed it.

We hope all of those who were able to attend enjoyed it, we certainly had a blast. 

In fact, it was so good, we wouldn’t mind at all running it again next year, what do you think?

Goodbye from TELFest 2014!