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Last Friday I gave a workshop on Using Turnitin to Deter Plagiarism for academic staff at St Angela's College, Sligo . St Angela's is a college of NUI Galway and occupies a beautiful site on the shore of Lake Gill, just outside Sligo, and it is always a pleasure to visit there. The workshop was aimed at teaching staff getting started with using Turnitin . As we went through the practicalities of setting up a Turnitin assignment in their VLE (moodle) and discussed strategies and options, I stressed a few points. These are the take-home messages that I think are key when starting to use Turnitin. 1. Focus on the teaching : the 12 people in the group were concerned teachers. The last thing they want or need to become is "plagiarism police", with a focus on plagiarism detection. Turnitin is best used as a teaching tool, so make sure that the strategy you use, and every option you choose, is based on improving the learning for your students.  2. Turnitin does not detect p...

I'm currently engaged in testing out Kaltura , a platform for video, as part of a 3 year extended pilot at NUI Galway. It has a rather nice integration with Blackboard, which we're hoping to launch within the next few weeks. If any members of staff are using or creating their own video and are interested in being part of an initial pilot study in the next few months, please get in contact with me. For the moment, I'm testing the embed feature. So, here's a short video recorded during our guerilla video workshop with the participants in the PG Cert in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. video platform video management video solutions video player

The Calman Learning Centre Last week I travelled to Durham for the 2012 Blackboard Users' Conference . Coming immediately at the end of the Christmas/New Year break, it was a shock to the system, and a rude kick start to my brain. But I survived, and came away with my head buzzing. Now, if I can just get time to implement some of those ideas... The two keynotes , in particular, got me thinking about training and support for our academic staff in their use of technologies for teaching and learning.  The learning technology team at CELT aims to provide pedagogical support for staff in their use of technology, although often we end up dealing with queries about user accounts and basic support for our VLE, Blackboard. Our mantra is that we want to encourage each member of staff, from their current technology use, to do something a little more. We always keep in mind that the teaching/learning is key, and we're just using the technology to (better) support it. With this in mind, Gr...