‘TEL’ Me About… Workshops

Throughout this academic year, the TEL team will be delivering a series of lunchtime workshops. These sessions will cover a range of tools and technologies available at the institution for enhancing teaching, learning and assessment. If you have a spare hour at lunchtime – bring your lunch and join us!

‘TEL’ Me About… Moodle Reports
Wednesday 19^th October, 12pm – 1pm in HG147

Moodle offers a variety of options for enhancing student engagement & tracking progress, including Grades, Conditional Activities, Activity Completion, Course Completion, Course Reports, and the Progress Bar & Engagement Analytics plugins. Come along to this session and find out a little about each of these ‘Behind the Curtain’ features, and identify which ones might be useful to you and your students.

‘TEL’ Me About… Student Engagement Tools
Wednesday 16^th November, 12pm – 1pm in HG147

Class participation tools can facilitate student engagement with each other, the subject content and the lecture. This workshop will show you how to use a range of free online tools to engage more with your students. Tools that we will explore include: Kahoot, a multiple choice quiz tool; Padlet, a tool to allow students to share their thought on a common topic easily; Nearpod, an application that enables tutors to create interactive teaching resources that can be accessed by students on laptops and mobile devices (iOS and Android).

‘TEL’ Me About… Improving your feeback through Turnitin
Monday 5^th December, 12pm – 1pm in HG147

This workshop will look at methods for providing clear and consistent feedback. We will focus on how the features of Turnitin can be effectively used to facilitate and enhance feedback for students.

‘TEL’ Me About… Content Curation with Twitter, Storify, Scoop.it and more.
Wednesday 25^th January, 1pm – 2pm in HG147

Most subject areas will now benefit from an abundance of free, online content available to support key topics, but how can you take advantage of some of the tools available to curate this information to ensure that it is credible and relevant? We will show you some of the free web apps, such as Storify and Scoop.it, that are available for this purpose and show you how you could use them to create your own digital artefacts but also how you could encourage students to utilise the tools themselves to support their learning.

‘TEL’ Me About… Moodle Workshop Activity
Monday 6^th February, 12pm – 1pm in HG147

Students don’t just learn from tutors, they also learn from one another. In this ‘TEL’ Me About session we will explore how tutors can use Moodle’s Workshop activity with students for self or peer assessment. The Workshop activity enables the collection, review and peer assessment of students’ work. Come along to this session and find out more about how these and other approaches might enhance your teaching, learning and assessment.

‘TEL’ Me About… Digital Capability
Wednesday 22^nd February, 1pm – 2pm in HG147

Digital Capabilities can be defined as the skills and/or competencies required for living, learning and working in a digital society (Jisc, 2015).

The Jisc Digital Capability Framework provides a structure to help individuals understand what skills are needed and supports the development staff & students. Following extensive sector-wide consultation, and an evidence-informed approach to development, Jisc have produced an initial model of the framework which describes digital capability as six overlapping elements: ICT Proficiency; Information, Data & Media Literacies; Digital Creation Innovation & Scholarship; Communication, Collaboration & Participation; Digital Learning & Self Development; and Digital Identity & Wellbeing.
“Effective use of digital technology by university and college staff is vital in providing a compelling student experience and in realising a good return on investment in digital technology.” (Jisc, 2015)
Even today’s students need support with some areas of digital capability, particularly in an academic context, so it’s important to make sure that these needs are met. In addition to the general definition provided above, Jisc have also created four example Digital Capability profiles for students, academics, researchers and leaders, and we’ll explore each of these in more detail in this interactive workshop.

‘TEL’ Me About… Open Badges
Monday 6^th March, 12pm – 1pm in HG147

The Open Badges Infrastructure is a new online standard to recognise and verify learning. Alongside assessed summative work, degree programmes at York St John offer lots of opportunities for students to develop professional skills that will benefit them once they enter professional life. Open Badges can be used to digitally accredit these skills and students can display their badges on various online platforms, including LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. This workshop will give an overview of Open Badges and how they work and will feature guest speakers from YSJ who have already implemented Open Badges into their programmes.

‘TEL’ Me About… WordPress
Wednesday 3^rd May, 1pm – 2pm in HG147

WordPress is an online platform that allows you (individually or collaboratively) create websites and blogs. Staff and students have access to WordPress here at York St John University and they are using it to create collaborative class websites, to create placement journals, to disseminate and support research projects and to create online portfolios and journals. Why not come along to this ‘TEL’ Me About session to find out how you can use WordPress in your Teaching and Learning or for your own professional development.

‘TEL’ Me About… Video and audio for teaching and assessment

Tuesday 23^rd May, 1pm – 2pm in HG147

This workshop will introduce you to methods and tools for using video and audio for enhancing teaching, learning and assessment. You will have the opportunity to see some of the tools available at YSJ and hear about how they are being used to create learning materials, provide feedback and improve students’ digital skills by using video and audio assessment methods.