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As I mentioned in my last blog post, I've been attending the iClicker Pedagogy Webinar series over the last few weeks, and find them very interesting. On 25th January, Roger Freedman ( @RogerFreedman ) spoke about Pedagogical Best Practices. On 15th February, Angel Hoekstra spoke about Pedagogical Strategies for Teaching with Clickers in the Social Sciences. This week, on 22nd February, Jennifer Kaplan spoke about her use of clickers in large Statistics classes. It's interesting to hear about the different approaches, and also to see the common themes. In my post last week, I gave an account of the student feedback on the use of clickers in the College of Science initiative at NUIG. On the whole it was very positive, and it encouraged the College to expand the use of clickers to include 1st and 2nd year undergraduates. But, what about the staff issues? Three group meetings were arranged during the academic year, when all staff involved in the clicker project were invited to c...

I've been "attending" some of the webinars in the iClicker Pedagogy Webinar series over the last few weeks. They are organised for 1:00 EST, which translates to 6pm Irish time. If I race home from work, I can just about catch them while watching over the kids. On 25th January, Roger Freedman ( @RogerFreedman ), Physics lecturer and clicker enthusiast, talked on the topic of Clickers in the Classroom: Pedagogical Best Practices. Roger gave a lovely presentation, making a compelling case for using clickers and demonstrating that there can be a significant learning gain from integrating them into teaching. The webinar was probably more suited to people getting started with clickers, but it was very interesting to see some of our experience here in NUIG being mirrored in what Roger was saying. In September 2010, 762 clicker devices were distributed to incoming first year undergraduate Science students and Foundation Medicine students at NUIG. In addition, 40 RF receiver dev...

EdTech 2012, on the theme of Digital Literacies, will take place from May 31st to June 1st, at NUI Maynooth. This year's keynotes will include Lesley Gourlay @lesleygourlay (who is external examiner on our Learning Technologies module here at NUIG), Martin Oliver , Doug Belshaw @dajbelshaw and Martha Rotter @martharotter . The call for abstracts is now open, and submissions are welcomed, before 30 March, on the following themes: Teaching digital literacies The student experience  Learning resources - collaborative and social Creativity and learning design Online practitioner competencies  Assessing digital competencies Sustainable models of innovation Technology-supported assessment approaches More details about the conference are on the ILTA website . Check out Lesley Gourlay's keynote at the CELT/NAIRTL conference last year at NUI, Galway, on the topic of The tyranny of participation? Critically exploring notions of student engagement .

NDLR Resourceful Coffee Morning 2011 , a set on Flickr. On Tuesday 6th December, in collaboration with the NDLR, we hosted a Resourceful Coffee Morning in CELT. The purpose of the event was to Find out more about Open Educational Resources for Higher Education Browse through digital resources relevant to your teaching See how other academics are using digital resources in their teaching practice Learn about collaborative projects and communities of practice Catherine Bruen, manager of the NDLR service, came from Dublin to demonstrate the potential of the service. Here are some photos from the event.

Image: Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net At the Durham Blackboard users' conference last month, there was a panel discussion on threshold standards for VLE courses: whether we should have them; at what level; and what they should include. Others have written about the discussion including Julian Beckton's excellent blog post and Matt Cornock's summary . Here are my thoughts on the issue of threshold standards  for Blackboard courses at NUIG. Since Blackboard went mainstream in 2007, we have never required that academic staff use Blackboard to support their teaching. We make it easy for them to use, authentication is via ldap so no new userids or passwords have to be remembered, the courses are created and ready for use, the students are automatically enrolled in the correct courses, we provide training and support. Uptake has been massive, with very few staff not using Blackboard and, I estimate, very few students who don't have resources (at some level) a...

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