14 Google+ Tips to get you started

1.  Click the timestamp on a Google+ post to find its permalink URL
2.  Click 'limited' to find out who a post was shared with
3.  Record and share up to 15 minutes of video by clicking the 'add video' button when creating a post
4.  Reply to Google+ posts from within your inbox - just scroll to the end of the email and start typing your reply - when you send it, it'll show up in Google+

Share circles to help others build their
networks - the more useful content they can
 see, the more useful Google+ is to them!

5.  Use your institutional Google Apps account for Google+ and it means that you can share posts just within the university
6.  Share with individuals - just type someone's name when you're sharing a post to let them alone see it
7.  Use + and the person's name in a post to bring it to their attention via a notification
8.  Create circles and share them to help others build up their own networks - look out for the 'share this circle' link when you're viewing your circles
9.  When viewing a circle (click on 'More' and then the circle name to do this), use the slider at the top right to control how much content from that circle appears in your stream
10. Use your Google+ circles to help you manage what's visible in your inbox
11. Edit, restrict, link to, delete, view sharing etc from the drop down arrow on each post
12. Use hashtags on your posts so that you can search for and aggregate topics easily - remember, there's no character limit on your Google+ posts, so you can use multiple tags
13. Save things you've searched for - it means that you can keep track of new content / follow hashtags easily
14. Complete your profile so that others can find you - you can always check how it looks to others using the 'View as...' function on your profile page (it's also worth making your posts public unless there's a reason not to as that way people can see if they're interested in what you're sharing).

Any other good Google+ tips you know about?  Drop in a comment to let us know!

Sarah

Chrome Extensions for Teachers and Students

The Chrome browser has an incredible number of extensions that help make the life of students and teachers easier and more productive. Yet a lot of people don’t even know what they are or how to install them.

What is a Chrome extension?

A Chrome extension will normally sit in your browser toolbar next to the URL box and normally allows you to do something with the web page you are currently viewing. For example, I currently have a few extensions installed: the Evernote extension allows me to send the webpage or part of the webpage to my Evernote account; the Screenshot tool lets me take a screenshot of all or part of the current webpage while the Diigo tool allows me to add the current page to my Diigo social bookmark account. 

My crowded extension bar in Chrome

To find and install extensions, you need to go to the appropriate section of the Chrome Web Store. You can then filter by category or popularity. Alternatively, you can just do a general search on the Web Store and look for any result that has a jigsaw piece icon in the bottom right corner. Once you’ve found the extension you want, click the ‘add to chrome’ button to add it to your browser. 

Some of the extensions available in the Chrome web store

There are many Chrome extensions that are useful for teachers and students, and here is a small selection of them:

Referencing Extensions

Reference App: brings up a small text window to enter information to automatically generate references in the Harvard style

Zotero plug-in: This links in with your Zotero account to allow you to collect citations that can be exported later to create bibliographies. It pops up in the URL bar when there is something that can be cited.  For this you do need the Zotero application and you need to go to their webpage to find both the application and the plug in.

Note-taking

There are many note-taking extensions in the Chrome webstore, so take your pick over which one you prefer. Here are just a couple I like.

Citable: clip quotes or text from the web and have it sent automatically to a Google spreadsheet.

Evernote web clipper: This connects to your Evernote account - in my opinion, the best notetaking web/mobile app available - and allows you to automatically send a whole web page or a selection of a web page to your Evernote account. 

Simple Highlighter: highlight text on a page, save it as a note, it will also try to remember and display the highlighted text the next time you visit that web page.

Search

Google Scholar Context Menu: by installing this extension, you can right click on any selected text on the page and do a search in Google Scholar.

Wolfram Alpha: click on the extension to get the fabulous Wolfram Alpha search box. Great for finding out all kinds of weird and wonderful things.

Mendeley context Search: if you use the Mendeley reference and PDF manager software on your computer, this is a very handy extension. If you come across a page that has the option to conduct a Mendeley search for publications, a small indicator will tell you and you can click on the extension to run the search.

Creative Commons Flickr image search: if you need license-free images for your presentations or blog posts, this image search extension will look for them on Flickr.

Languages

Language immersion: love this extension, great if you are learning a language. You can set it to change some of the text on any webpage to the language you are studying. You can adjust the settings so that more or less of the page is translated. 

Google Dictionary: does what it says on the tin, particularly useful for ESL learners to quickly check the meaning of words they come across on webpages.

How Do You Say: again, a useful one for ESL learners, highlight a word to hear its pronunciation in English or click on the extension button and type in a word to hear it.

Google Translate: popular Google translation tool made available from the browser bar. Click the button to translate the page you are on.

Other useful extensions

Pocket: ever find an interesting article on the web but don’t have time to read it immediately? Install this extension and it will save it to a Pocket account that you can read later on the web or your mobile devices.

Papercuts: one of my favourite extensions, allows you to save common phrases and pieces of information (such as addresses) and then quickly access and copy them. I found this particularly useful when writing student reports where I tend to repeat the same phrases again and again or for copying common names/addresses that I need to fill in forms.

These are just a small selection of extensions available, I would be interested to hear which ones you find useful on a daily basis.


David

MOLE 2 Upgrade... why, when, what, how and who...

 Some rights reserved by zenera

MOLE 2 (our virtual learning environment -  Blackboard Learn 9.1) is due for its next upgrade this summer and its time to let you all know a little more information about the process ... the why, when, what, how and who.

Why...
This is the second half of the upgrade which started in February this year. It completes the behind-the-scenes improvements that February's upgrade began. It will also introduce a new look and feel to the system which doesn't change the functionality of MOLE 2 but will make it look rather more up-to-date. It also has numerous bug fixes which will make the tools we currently have work better.

When...
5pm Wednesday 4th July until 9am Monday 9th July
We consulted with departments giving two dates around this time and this date was chosen as the least disruptive date for most of the University. As ever it won't be perfect for everyone and we apologise for any inconvenience this will cause. Please let us know of if you can see any issues and we will try to resolve them for you.

What...
We will be taking the system from Blackboard Learn 9.1 Service Pack 7 Hotfix 1 to Service Pack 8. You would be forgiven for thinking that this sounds like a minor upgrade as it sounds like it is less than one step in the Service Pack ladder, however the size of our systems and the complexity of the application means it is a significant piece of work.

How...
How much do you want to know?  I'll give you the short(ish) version (but if you have any questions do pop them in the comments or get in touch via mole@shef.ac.uk)... and, as you'll see, we have a few different systems to test and work on the system before it gets to staff and students...

1. CiCS Technical Services research the upgrade and prepare
2. The 'Dev' System is upgraded (this happened back in March) and Technical Services test it
3. The Live System is cloned onto the 'QA' System to make sure we are testing actual data
4. We consult Departmental representatives across the university about possible dates
5. The 'QA' System is then upgraded and checked by technical services (completed in April)
6. Access is given to the CiCS Learning Technologies (LT) Team who carry out a testing regime on the courses and tools within MOLE using several different set-ups. We research and try to resolve any issues
7. We then confirm the upgrade dates
8. A decision is made as to whether to go with the upgrade on the 'Live' Service
9. Technical Services prepare the system for limited access during the upgrade period
10. The Learning Technologies Team prepare documentation to inform users of changes to the interface after the upgrade
11. The system is taken offline, upgraded, tested and assessed (such small words for an awful lot of work!).
12. If all is okay it is then released back to users... hooray! If not, we revert to the previous version and Technical Services start looking at what went wrong.

Who...
There are many people who belong to CiCS Technical Services and the Learning Technologies Team... but the main ones involved with the MOLE 2 upgrade this time have been Paul Leman and Stephen Broadbridge from Technical Services and Danny Monaghan, Jo Gilham, Ian Mumby, Khalid Rahmatullah, and Petra Devey from the LT Team.


Any queries about the upgrade please get in touch with us at mole@shef.ac.uk
Jo

Presentation: Going Social

A week or so ago I gave a presentation to my team on our approach to using social media to support learning technologies at the university and I thought it might be handy to share it here too.



The Tools

Our main tools are this Google Blog, a Google+ page, the use of a unique hashtag (#cicsltt) and a NetVibes site for aggregation of content across a range of sources.  It seems to be pretty limited, right?


It's the Iceberg approach (in a non-Titatanic disaster sense!)

If I were to describe the approach I've taken with using social media it would be to describe it as being 'the Iceberg' approach.  What on earth does that mean?  Well, by that I mean that although it looks fairly straightforward at first glance, it's underpinned by far more things than you can see.

For example, we use Google blogger for our team blog and it's more than possible to argue that there are better / more flexible / more versatile tools out there.  But, that's not the point of us using it.  At the University of Sheffield we have Google Apps available for staff and students and as one of our core technologies and I believe that it's not okay for us to say 'yes, we've used x system, but y is good enough for you'.  We have to be practitioners.  We have to use the technologies we support.  And that's why we're using Blogger.  I also use Google Analytics to keep an eye on how the blog is going and to make sure that we're hitting our target audience with what we put out there.

Team blogging

The reason that we've gone for a team approach to management of our blog / Google+ page is to encourage dissemination, increase the likelihood that what we're doing is sustainable (discovering a good blog only to discover that it's petered out within a month or so is disappointing) and ensure that we're representing a community of views.  Our site authors aren't just centrally based learning technologists - they're also practitioners and that means that you'll also find our academic colleagues as well as learning technologists based in departments here too.  We have so many pockets of brilliant and innovative / engaging practice at the university that having a vehicle which helps to share that has been a revelation.  It's vital to give our innovators and early adopters a voice to share with the rest of the academic community.

Design

We don't use the corporate branding.  I know... I know... but... there is a reason for that.  Our pages are deliberately departmentally agnostic (with contributions from people involved in learning technology from across the university) and by not using lots of colour can easily be embedded in 'official' university sites... but equally can be accessed direct.  The same simple style applies to the blog, to Google+ etc and works on multiple devices.  We link from the blog to our Google+ page and back again.  Within the blog we use the link within gadget to point people to related content on the site as well as ensuring that all links open in another window... and as a result our bounce rate is lower than average for a blog.  The gadgets used on the right hand side of the blog are all about discoverability, sharing and participation.  Again, arranged so that the most important (to us!) things are most prominent.

Google+

The Google+ page is a way for us to promote content but further deepen that community - both internally and externally.  As a Google Apps institution having the 'You+' link visible to all staff means that it can be readily viewed as a professional tool as well as a tool for our students to communicate.  However, without a purpose for use it's hard to see where it might fit in the already bulging bag of learning technology - so, our Google+ page gives us the opportunity to experiment.  See what we can do with it.  Try out new ideas.  Show how it could be used.  And interestingly, it's been as effective as simply promoting our content on Twitter has been in terms of getting traffic to our blog.  We're also starting to use Google+ as a way of collaborating across the team and supporting others as well (hangouts are fantastic for this)... and without the hook of our initial Google+ page, I think it would have been far more difficult to promote it as a tool which had real value.

Visibility

Up until a few months ago, we really didn't have any kind of presence.  Well, we did... but it was patchy and internally visible, if that.  What using social media has done for us is to open up our practices.  Using Google Analytics I can see that well over 150 educational institutions worldwide have accessed our blog in the past two months alone.  That's a powerful door to have opened.  One of my favourite new phrases to hear is 'I saw it on the blog' - and that gets said internally and externally too, which is fantastic.

Educational institutions visiting the Learning Technologies blog
March to May 2012

Getting it working

One of the things that also sits underneath our use of social media are guidelines (I blogged about our team blogging guidelines a while ago) - they're pretty lightweight and are along the lines of 'use a conversational tone, don't say anything you might regret, don't infringe copyright etc...' but also asks people to use an image with each posting, give their posts labels and for them to post regularly.  The point is really that it isn't a free for all but neither is it proscriptive to the point where you don't get to 'hear' the individual authors.  It also means that Google+ or the blog are used in a purposeful manner which is helpful in getting an audience to engage with what you're writing but makes it easier for people to write for their audience.

What about Facebook or Twitter?

It's probably at this point that you're wondering why we don't have a Facebook page or a Twitter account.  Well, we have got the latter but it's really only there as a placeholder.  It pushes out content we've saved on Delicious and things from this blog and may / may not be developed further.  Both Facebook and Twitter, however, are personal tools.  We already have Google here so it's a core technology.  Facebook and Twitter aren't and the line between personal and professional is a tricky one to negotiate.  Instead what we're doing is suggeting that if people want to use their own Twitter accounts - where we've most likely already grown our followers to a pretty large extent over several years - then just using a hashtag - #cicsltt - is a way of getting work-related tweets out there to a pre-existing audience... and we can aggregate and share those tagged resources easily (as we do on the blog and the NetVibes page).

And that... is just about it.  The iceberg approach.  Should look nice and simple to your audience but with hidden depth!

Sarah

Weekly Learning Technology Digest... 13

Image from Jeremy Vine Design, available under a
CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license

Time for the weekly learning technology digest yet again and a round up of all that's been wafting around!

To be honest, it's been a gorgeous week weather-wise and almost too nice to be sitting down reading articles online... however... there were plenty worth the sacrifice of a bit of time in the sunshine... and so here they are...

• The first bit of news came in the form of a piece of research done by the Million+ group which reported on a 'collapse in the number of mature students' as a result of funding changes. The full report is worth a read.
• Another interesting bit of research from Harvard University appeared in The Guardian under the title of 'Improve efficiency – switch off your smartphone' - we're under pressure to be 'always on', but this article reports on the fact that 'predictable time off' was better for balance and efficiency. Also applies to those learning and teaching online too, I would have said!
• If you fancy listening to a link rather than reading... why not head to the latest of JISC's 'On Air' podcasts which is about 'Developing Digital Literacies for Working in a Digital World'.
• If you're after other guidance, then 'Social Media Etiquette do's and don'ts' will help you work out how you can make more of social media. A nice straightforward list!
• '6 drivers of mLearning in the workplace' - I do like a good list... and this is another that although it's talking about the workplace, to be honest, will equally apply in education.  Especially with a strong employability agenda pressing on the curriculum!
• I know I've mentioned them before, but I do like a good infographic and infogr.am has just launched to help creating them easier.  Let's face it though... lots of infographics aren't good at all... 
• Never one to lag behind a trend (*coughs politely*), we have something new from Microsoft, 'Microsoft's New Social Network, So.cl: It's Like Google+ for Wonks'.  My instinct is to say 'nod in its direction and then ignore'.
• There's a lot about cloud computing (and has been for a while) around... so, if you'd like to know about the different routes businesses are going into this area, then The Guardian's Media Network gave a good overview of an evolutionary vs. revolutionary approach which is worth a look.
• Educational Technology and Mobile Learning had '8 Free Video Websites for Inspiring Talks and Lectures' and while you may have heard of TED, there are several more sources of free university lectures out there which this points you towards.  Flipped classroom fodder - and useful to bookmark.  Oh, and they also have some excellent links for teachers wanting to create presentations and slideshows if you're after even more ideas!
• The final thing I discovered this week - although how this has passed me by, I'm not sure - is the weekly Tech Weekly podcast from The Guardian.  This week's is about how search has changed as well as stuff about data activism.  Only last week Google announced the 'Knowledge Graph' as part of enhancing search functionality... so this podcast is very timely.

That's your lot.  And there really was a lot this week.  From resources to help enrich your teaching to research reports and new developments.  It can sometimes feel hard to stay on top of all that's changing out there, can't it?  Maybe we should all follow that advice from Harvard and switch off every so often and not worry too much about it!

See you all next week!

Sarah

Structuring materials for online learning: A conceptual model

Structure of course within our
virtual learning environment, MOLE

Last September ScHARR (School of Health and Related Research) here at the university offered a brand new programme for distance learning, online postgraduate study: the MSc in International Health Technology Assessment, Pricing and Reimbursement. Catchy title! The course can be taken as a full MSc, Diploma, Certificate or even single module options. It is delivered entirely online as a part-time course for working students. The pedagogical model was derived from the author’s own work for the UK Higher Education Academy (HEA) evaluating student experience within this population (Carroll 2011, 2009).  One of the findings of this work was that working students, under pressure from work and domestic responsibilities, responded better, i.e. felt greater control of their learning, when the time available for completing exercises and interacting was not always restricted to a single week. Working students could find time within a 2-week period to work through materials and interact, but struggled when faced with tighter week-by-week deadlines. For this reason, all materials are delivered as 2-week “blocks”. This was the basic structure adopted for delivering materials.

The programme leaders created a model for all module leads to follow when producing their materials (some converting existing materials, some creating materials from scratch), taking them from their E1 forms (for new modules) to the final version for the Virtual Learning Environment (known at the University of Sheffield as 'MOLE'). The last stages use the My Online Page Editor (MOPE) tool. The model is described in Figure 1 below...

Figure 1: ScHARR 6-stage model for developing materials

As more module leaders and tutors became involved in delivering on the programme, it became necessary to provide more detail, to open the “black box” of Stage 3, to describe the steps to be taken in combining lectures, guided reading and exercises or tasks in a systematic and structured fashion in any 2-week “block”.

Figure 2 - structure of a learning block

A 2-week block can have up to 4 or 5 iterations of this model if the exercises are relatively small or a single iteration if the formative exercise is a single substantial piece of work. For example,

Weeks 1-2 might consist of:

1 or 2 screencast lectures (not more than 20 minutes each) + a Multiple Choice Questionnaire (MCQ); some guided reading + an online discussion; then guided reading + an individual wiki exercise with exemplar or personalised feedback;

Weeks 3-4 might then consist of :

4 or 5 lectures (not more than 20 minutes each) + some guided reading + 1 large piece of formatively assessed work

The key is the application of variety in the delivery of materials, and the methods used to test and explore students’ understanding of what they are being taught and what they have learned. A student’s understanding of an idea, principle or concept can be assessed in multiple ways, by MCQs, by completing either a short or substantial exercise, by engaging in discussion or group work.

Variety of tasks offers a means of providing students with problem-solving interaction that is intended to be more challenging, stimulating and thought-provoking than  a “1 week, 1 task” or “read this, write that” approach to online learning.

We have found that such diversity in methods of interaction and collaboration enhances the learning experience of students engaging online.

Although designed with the 2-week “block” and online learning in mind, this conceptual model offers a generic “toolkit” for structuring online content for education purposes.

Chris Carroll and Luke Miller

Getting quizzed about quizzes...

Image from Leo Reynolds under
a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license 

Do you ever have one of those weeks where you seemed to be randomly asked the same thing by several different people? Well a couple of weeks ago I received a few questions about creating online quizzes, and so spent a bit of time looking into some methods for doing so. Here's a couple of solutions at my disposal that I've been fiddling with.

Hot Potatoes
Hot Potatoes is a cross-platform piece of software, which is free to download for educational use, and was recommended to me by a number of colleagues when I was looking for quizzing tips. It's an easy to use and quite powerful tool for creating a number of different types of quiz, including a series of questions, matching pairs, crosswords and missing words.

Once a quiz is created, an HTML file is generated. Completing the quiz is intuitive for the respondents, and they get an evaluation of their results.

It really is a great piece of software, creating professional quizzes quickly and easily.

See here for an example of a pair-matching quiz.


ZohoChallenge
ZohoChallenge is one of several web-based quiz-making services out there, in which users can create account and make professional-looking quizzes. It beats some of its competition with its versatile WYSIWYG editor for question creation, and its good results evaluation.

It can be useful beyond Hot Potatoes when you want something that's more easily embeddable onto a webpage, or statistics on logged answers, although your choice of quiz-types is more limited. Another limitation the free version is restricted to 100 respondents per month per account.


Camtasia
As well as screencasting, I've used Camtasia for inserting short tests into presentations. If you want to test your users of their knowledge during a presentation, then questions can be inserted into the normal presentation, pausing while your users go through the questions. This means respondents can be slickly led through a screencast or video which tests their knowledge of, and gets them thinking about, what they've just been watching. There are downsides - some of the options are quite limited, and webspace will need to be found to place the Flash files created to run the quizzes - but it's a good way of creating interactivity to presentations.

So that's just what I've been playing with, but there's plenty more stuff out there. This includes Google Forms, and the grading plug-in Flubaroo, which I discovered just as I'd finished this blog post and I'll write a separate one about later... And of course there's plenty on the market that can do all the above and more, including such packages as Articulate Quiz Maker and Adobe Captivate. I'm also liking the look of Articulate's new package Storyline, and plan on downloading the 30 day free trial over the next few days to have a fiddle. So expect another blog post about my fumblings with that very soon.

(Edit - and, as has been pointed out in the comments, MOLE, the University's VLE, has some great quizzing functionality. I should have pointed out that these solutions were for people who for various reasons did not want to, or could not, use the VLE for their purposes).

Pete

Top 5 e-Assessment functions in Turnitin

Wordle of features in Turnitin

This week I thought I would share some of the functionality in Turnitin that makes it a really useful e-assessment tool....cue Top of the Pops music (actually I would like to point out that this is in no particular order)...

You can find more information on the products mentioned below on the Turnitin website.

1.) Audio feedback

The new kid on the block. This cheeky little addition to GradeMark has given us the ability to add up to 3 minutes of our own dulcet tones to assignment submissions in GradeMark, which students can then access via the GradeMark report. The audio capabilities are basic but functional; there is play, pause, stop, delete and save. Indeed you could argue that you don't really need much more than that anyway. The pause button is useful if you prefer to break up your commentary rather than recording in “one take”. The delete button is there in case you want to re-record; perhaps because volume levels were too low or you had made a mistake.

Inserting Audio feedback comments in Turnitin

2.) QuickMarks and general comments

QuickMarks have been around a while and are a feature that can both help speed up the marking process and make feedback clear for students. Turnitin has a standard set of QuickMarks in GradeMark that include: Awk(awkward), C/S(Comma splice), Citation (improper and needed) and P/V (Passive voice). There is also a “comment” QuickMark which allows you to type in your own free text comment. All of these QuickMarks can be drag and dropped onto the student submission.

You can access other QuickMark sets or create your own by accessing the QuickMark Manager. Other sets available in GradeMark are: composition, composition marks, format, punctuation and useage. You can also click anywhere on the submission itself and add in your own free text.

General comments can be left on the (surprise suprise) general comments box, which is also where you will find the audio feedback panel.  You can add free text of up to 5,000 characters.

Managing QuickMarks in Turnitin

3.) PeerMark

PeerMark is Turnitin’s peer assessment tool. It allows students to electronically evaluate other student submissions. When you set up the Peermark assignment you decide what criteria students will use to perform their evaluation. The criteria can be created in the form of free response questions, Likert scales (1-5), or questions from libraries already in PeerMark (you can also create your own).

You can also choose how the distribution of assignments to students is handled. You can pair students together yourself, let students choose, or let PeerMark handle who gets what submission. You can also control how many submissions students will review and require that students review their own submission.

4.) Rubrics

Rubrics, or grading schemes/marking criteria, can be handled in Turnitin thanks to its Rubrics functionality. I have found that accessing Rubrics is easiest from the Libraries tab as this is where you can control Rubrics, Quickmark sets and PeerMark questions. The rubric scales themselves can be made as complex or basic as you need and are split into three main areas, Scales, Criteria and Comment. Criteria is the area being assessed (e.g spelling) and the proportion of the mark being awarded. The scale is the level of mark awarded.

The Rubrics can be scored in three main ways, Percentage, Custom or Qualitative. Selecting Qualitative means that essentially the rubric will be more for reference and will not calculate scores.

Both Percentage and Custom Rubrics are interactive. This means that when you come to mark a piece of work in GradeMark your Rubric can be used to calculate and input the resulting grade.

Rubrics in Turnitin

5.) Blackboard 9.1 Integration

Okay...  you got me.. this isn’t a feature of Turnitin per se, but the integration with Blackboard does make undertaking e-assessment easier in our University and I think it deserves its place in the top 5.

Why is this useful? Well I think for these reasons...

• Keeping things simple: Students can access any Turnitin assignments (including PeerMark) set up directly through Blackboard. There is no need to send students to an external site
• Student enrolment: There is no need to upload class or student lists, all your students will be already enrolled via Blackboard.
• Grades: Grades posted in GradeMark will feed through to the Grade Centre automatically  in Blackboard.
• Turnitin Blackboard tool: There is a tool within Blackboard that allows you to either access all your Turnitin assignments in one page (handy if you have a large course in Blackboard) or to divide them into groups via the groups tool.

There you have it... my top 5 e-Assessment functions in Turnitin... what would you add?

James

Interesting stats (?) and an office move

(L-R) Ian Mumby and Khalid Rahmatullah
Learning Technologies Support Desk

Life on the Frontline with the Learning Technologies Support Desk...


I keep stats regarding the volumes and the nature of the enquiries we handle here on the helpdesk.
(I need to get out more!)

I have been doing this for two years now. Looking back and comparing the two years, month by month, I find it interesting (did I mention I need to get out more?) that the numbers of enquiries have mostly matched each other.

The chart below shows the enquiries received from September 2010 to last month. This year's figures are in blue.

You can see that mostly the monthly totals mirror each other. The only significant difference was in February when this year we had 679 enquiries compared to 364 the year before. This can be attributed to the fact that this year in the Spring Semester we had extra calls relating to our new VLE which wasn't in existence the year before.

Total Enquiries

I have mentioned before that the biggest percentage of enquiries we receive on the helpdesk is from students and staff requiring access to their relevant VLE courses.

The volumes of these types of calls also seem to match per month year on year. 

Enquires re access to VLE courses

 

No doubt the statisticians out there will say there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this and it's all relative and nothing unusual, why is he drawing attention to this?

The answer is I find it interesting - I need to (you know the rest)

Office Move

So we moved into a different building last weekend.

I duly informed all and sundry at the university by various methods of internal communication that from noon last Friday until noon on Monday, the helpdesk would be unavailable to allow us to pack everything away, uninstall the IT stuff etc. etc. and then do all that in reverse in the new place on Monday morning.

Surprise, surprise we were still being contacted throughout this 'closed' period.  I spoke to one chap on the phone and explained I would have to get back to him later as we weren't actually able to access anything currently because we were in the middle of moving offices and in a state of organised chaos as had been widely advertised.  "Yeah I know that" he said. "I just thought I'd try you anyway".

Cheers fella! - well at least we know we are needed!!

Ian Mumby

Leaning Technologies Support Coordinator

Weekly Learning Technology Digest... 12

Image from Thomas Hawk, available under a
CC BY-NC 2.0 license

Another week has zoomed by and the weekly learning technology digest has been scooping up lots of bits and bobs from across the web.  Sometimes it seems that everything's nicely connected... other times there's a complete hotchpotch of 'stuff'.  This week falls into the latter camp!

• 'Eight free tools for teachers to make awesome infographics' - we love infographics for visualising data / making clean, succinct points... we love free... so, what's not to like from this article I spotted on the Educational Technology and Mobile Learning blog?  Nothing!  But... for a bit of balance - you might like this article from ReadWriteWeb which questions whether easy creation of infographics is a good thing!
• I attended a webinar where the following resource was shared 'Critical Friends and Effective Practice' and thought it was worth passing on this week too.  Whether you're talking about large-scale projects or small-scale practitioner-led innovation... developing an activity to developing a programme - having a critical friend can be more helpful than you might realise. 
• At the same webinar the 'JISC Change Management InfoKit' was shared - and again, if you want to stash this one away to refer back to, it's a good one to know about.  I'm sure when you read the 'organisational cultures' section you'll have a penny dropping moment about your own institution and this will really help when it comes to thinking about how to approach change issues.
• For the past few weeks online open courses have been very much the hot topic.  Which makes this article in Forbes, 'What my 11 year old's Stanford course taught me about online education' fascinating reading.  A couple of points - the (slightly disturbing) way the 11 year old applied his new found knowledge and the quote "The most important button for video lectures is not ‘play’ but ‘pause.’" - have given me real food for thought.
• Learning analytics were also on my radar this week - and 'The State of Learning Analytics in 2012 - A review and future challenges' by the Open University's Rebecca Ferguson is well worth reading if you're getting to grips with what this might mean for learning and teaching practices as well as the learners themselves.
• Google launched their 'Research tool' - which essentially means that your Google docs become active spaces in which you can carry out web-based research as you go (it's gradually being rolled out so you may not see it yet - I can see it in my personal gmail account, I can't yet see it in my Google Apps account).  While this is no replacement for Google Scholar, it's a great addition - and reveals yet again the importance of information literacy in the curriculum.

The Research tool accessed via a right click in a Google Doc

• 'Google+ Engagement still way behind Facebook and Twitter' was an interesting headline in Mashable... but... the problem with their figures is that they are only analysing public postings / interactions... since Google+ is centred around the use of circles to control the audience to which you release content, it makes this a bit of research to take with a pinch of salt. One of the quotes in the comments on this article I think hits the nail on the head in many respects, 'I don’t think of it as a stand-alone social network; I think of it as a social layer added to most of Google’s other products', so whether or not comparing it with Facebook and Twitter is even relevant, I'm not sure.
• And finally... a few random articles if the above didn't satisfy your appetite for all things ed tech! 'What's the point of hashtags?' from ReadWriteWeb (handy overview), 'The Fallacy of Information Overload' from Brian Solis (it's a lack of purpose, relevance and focus instead if you're interested!), 'How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet' from Gizmodo (fascinating look at why things can go wrong) and the last one '20 ways of thinking about digital literacy in higher education' from The Guardian's Higher Education Network.

A bit of strategic thinking, a little slice of social media, a smattering of digital literacy, a small selection of tools and techniques for the classroom... and that's your lot!

See you next week.

Sarah

Google spreadsheet mail merge... makes rollover a joy!

 Some rights reserved by limbte

My work life is mostly occupied by the rollover (moleover) at the moment and so it's the little things that make the process easier, more efficient and generally more interesting that please me greatly... and one of these things is the humble mail merge!


In MOLE (Sheffield's VLE) we have things which I've always called Custom courses... I'm no longer allowed to call them that as users don't know what that means so aside from calling them non-standard or non-CIS courses I'll have to fall back on a fuller definition...

Courses which are not created automatically as part of student information system integration (modules) but are requested on a case by case basis by academics. Before we had Organisations these courses were used as community spaces and departmental virtual offices amongst other things but now they tend to be courses for a whole programme of study or used for cross modular projects.

Anyway, long winded explanation over, we have these courses which are not part of the automated rollover each year and so we have to rely of the course owners to get in touch with us and let us know what they require for the following year. Previously we have sent out general emails requesting that people fill in forms and let us know what they require. Invariably people didn't know the email actually required them to do something and so a number of things happened...

1. The course would disappear from the student's list before expected
2. The course wouldn't get the next year's cohort of students added

So this year I've attempted to streamline the whole thing a little....I thought that if I could gather the requisite bits of data about the non-standard courses I could create a mail merge to send the emails to the individuals directly involved in the courses which contain the specifics of the current course and even pre-fill some of the form fields for them on the Course Request form for the coming year.

Mail Merging

• So first gather your data - in my case it's about all these non-standard courses which includes useful things like the Course ID and Name, the Instructors on the courses and their email addresses (very important!) and also any module/programme codes which have been used for student enrolment.
• Then put all of this into a Google spreadsheet and here comes the interesting bit...
• Go to the Script Gallery (under tools) and install a script called 'Yet another mail merge' (accepting the permissions along the way).
• This mail merge script integrates with Google mail so you can format your draft email and insert the spreadsheet fields as variables written like this - $%fieldname%. You can even put a variable in the email subject (which is dead useful!)
• So once you have your email written and your data in the spreadsheet (including the email addresses) you click the mail merge option in the menu and off it goes... it asks you which email draft you would like to use and also for the column containing the email address (if it's not obvious from the title). It then populates a new column in your spreadsheet telling you an email has been sent.  

Prefilling google form fields 

In my case I wanted to make it as simple as possible for the Instructors to fill in the Course Request form and make sure that we received accurate data back and the best way of doing this was to try and pre-fill some of the fields on the form. You can do this by finding the ID element from the HTML code for the form field you wish to pre-fill something like entry_05 and then append it on to the URL for the form in the usual way using &entry_03=$%fieldname%.


https://googleURL.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dFhWaFRUTjRMQ&entry_15=$%CourseID%


What I did find was that, as this method of pre-filling the form fields is a little bit of a hack (I would be glad to hear of a better way), it only works for fields which are on the first page of a Google form. Any subsequent values disappear as they are in the URL (GET) and the form is submitted using a 'POST'.


I have yet to send out the full mail merge but I have tested it successfully and I am looking forward to all the responses coming into another lovely spreadsheet rather than having to collate all the individual form responses of previous years!


Jo

First look: Google+ Hangouts On Air for education

Hangouts On Air enabled

Well, in the last few days, Google have been opening up the 'Hangouts On Air' facility within Google+.  What this means is that you now get the opportunity to stream your hangout live and have it recorded on YouTube - which is fantastic.

However... though I think Hangouts On Air for education could work well for sessions you want to be completely open - webinars are a prime example...  wherever you want your students to engage and discuss things in an honest, open - and sometimes vulnerable way... I'm not sure that the recording / streaming of a Hangout On Air outweighs the potential barrier that lack of privacy while the hangout is live would present.

Equally, it's also worth thinking about your institutional policy on the openness of your teaching? Does your institution allow you to broadcast to the rest of the world?  That's going to impact on this too... and is important to bear in mind!

Here are a few of the 'early days' pros and cons... am happy to be corrected / have others add things to this list.  It'll be interesting to see Hangouts On Air develop as a product and to see what Google prioritise...

Pros:

• Easy to use
• Free
• Readily available if you have Google Apps enabled for the campus
• Can stream live to YouTube and reach a global audience
• Hangout is saved as a video on YouTube
• Can invite specific people to take part live - but have to do this ahead of going 'On Air'
• Can share apps within the hangout (as with normal hangouts)
• Recording can also be downloaded from YouTube
• Can control visibility of YouTube video after the event
• Can embed video within an institutional VLE
• Can create screencasts using a Google+ Hangout On Air - you don't need an audience to hang out
• Can edit the recording using YouTube's video editor - including annotation, closed captioning 
• Can take advantage of Creative Commons licensing within YouTube for the resulting video

Cons:

Copyright notice / participation agreement
on entering a Hangout On Air

• Cannot limit the audience on YouTube when streaming - it's either public or public
• There are extensions on Chrome which will allow people to 'find' your Hangout On Air easily too - and which further publicises your hangout and diminishes any privacy
• Cannot share resources for which you don't have permission / have the copyright
• Difficult to moderate comments on YouTube whilst running the session
• Because when it's live on YouTube it's public, random strangers can comment on your Hangout On Air
• Learners might be put off participating because of the public nature of the Hangout
• You can't kick someone out of a Hangout - only block them
• No private chat facility in Hangouts - which is potentially even more of an issue in a Hangout On Air where your responsibility for the session is heightened by the broadcast
• If the URL of the Hangout On Air is shared then anyone with the URL can join even if they weren't invited
• As the broadcaster, you have to take responsibility for others copyright infringements

Useful further resources:

More on Copyright in Hangouts On Air

Commons questions about Hangouts On Air

Hangouts On Air - Terms of Service

Final thought:

Hangout On Air live and public on a Google+ stream

I think that Google+ Hangouts which you can limit to very specific groups - circles and individuals (or even an institution) will be a more comfortable informal learning environment for now... unless Google allow a finer control of the live audience for Google+ Hangouts On Air.  The advantage of built in recording and integration with Google Apps sites really makes Hangouts On Air a very attractive teaching tool... but since part of learning is about admitting what you don't know and experiencing failure - I think that having a 'safe' environment in which that can take place is vital.  Google+ Hangouts On Air aren't that space at present while Google+ Hangouts can be.

It takes a brave person to learn in public.  It takes an *extremely* brave person to learn in front of a potentially global audience!

Sarah