In-Folio Guides

Two posts in one day!  I couldn’t get a YouTube video to upload to our team blog so I’ve moved back over here.  We’ve eventually got a selection of excellent ‘how to’ videos from Matt Harrison at Portland College and some not so good ones from me. The basic introduction is here.

There are 5 in all with more to come in the new term.  However, they are all linked together in a Xerte package so progression is easier to see.   You can access the package here.   For those not familiar with Xerte you navigate using the left and right arrows at the top right hand side of the pages.

In-Folio was developed as a collaboration between JISC Techdis, the Rix Centre and Independent Specialist Colleges.  We are intending to publish the code for this development in the next month so are hopeful that we will then build a community of developers.

Open Badges and Assessment

The Open Badges and Assessment forum is looking at “investigating new ways to credentialize learning

With the upcoming release of Mozilla’s Open Badges framework this group is an opportunity for educators and interested parties to discuss the various ways such badges could be used in educational contexts.”  The whole concept of open badges is explained more fully on the Mozzilla wiki page.

There is a short one page document explaining the concept -

We’re just approaching the end of week 2 and I thought I’d add a few of my own thoughts.    You can join or just read and lurk at http://p2pu.org/en/groups/open-badges-and-assessment/ 

“I’ve been following the discussions on here with interest and it’s good to have such committed and knowledgeable contributors.  Doug’s comments that “So some badges will be static, well-known things, whereas others could be much more ad-hoc, fluid, or even humorous badges. ”  gives us a pretty broad remit for this project.  I’d like to offer a couple of comments.

I really like the idea of the awarding of badges by peers.  In an FE college in the North west of England they set up a staff development system to encourage their staff to use technology to enhance their teaching.  This was set up as an 8 step process from ‘uploading the course documents’ to ‘ facilitating collaborative and interactive learning’.  The nice thing about this was that once a tutor had gained their 8^th level they automatically became an assessor and were able to verify work done by another colleague.  This took away the need for the staff development team to spend a large amount of their time in verification and encouraged peer development and support.  This might be a possible model for the awarding of badges within an organisation for staff or learner development.

My main experience in teaching has been with learners with complex needs (short hand for students with more than one difficulty, learning, sensory, physical or behavioural.)  I note the comments about rewards not being the end in themselves but there are very valid reasons for embracing and using them.  Many more complex learners achieve in very small and sometimes almost imperceptible steps.  Tracking learning and achievement for them is detailed and sometimes overly complex.  Involving the learner in their learning has always been something I tried to do.  I like the concept of learners assessing their own and other’s contributions to a lesson and we encouraged them to also reflect on their PLTS (personal learning and thinking skills).  We used to make the evaluation of the lesson part of the lesson and each learner reflected on their own and their peers achievements.  (we had very very small classes!)  However, this was recorded against pre-set targets etc within the information management system of the college.  How great would it have been for the students to be able to award each other and themselves badges to be added to their achievement records, portfolios or blogs.  The badges could also be used as a reminder of their achievements when the next lesson comes along (for students with short term memory loss getting to the place that you finished the last lesson is a major issue!)

An additional problem I did and still struggle to resolve is the ‘spiky profile’.  I was in a specialist provider a month or so ago as a young man showed me how he edited the college’s podcast for the week.  He was a wheel chair user and had the use of only one arm.  He also had no functional literacy (in the general sense of the word).  However, he knew what he wanted to do, and was able to use audacity well to edit the audio track, add some incidental music and record the introduction.  I could see a badges system working well to recognise and celebrate this sort of achievement.  Many learners have a level of digital literacy which is far higher than their perceived traditional literacy.  They can do what they want/need to do – upload photos to facebook, download music etc.  But couldn’t write a college newsletter. “

 

Access: YouTube

Mike Thrussell is a technologist at Henshaws College in Harrogate.  He’s developed an accessible interface for the YouTube website.  Many of  the students at Henshaws have a visual impairment and additional difficulties so Mike has created  an interface to address the complexity of the standard YouTube website by simplifying the functions to search for and play videos. He has blogged about it here and will be a guest blogger on our new ISC blog – part of the main Techdis blog which is currently being re-designed by Laura in our team.

The home page is simple and easy to use. 

Although the most popular searches are listed at the bottom of the home page it works for any search.  Below is the result for the search RSA.  The search result page also has a large ‘home’ button taking the user directly back to the main page.

Mike has stripped the pages of any unnecessary content and ensured that all the links are correctly named to give a clear indication for users of screen readers.

Once the video is chosen the player has clear and simple control buttons.

You can create permanent links for specific searches that a particular student likes – so http://access.mwjt.co.uk/youtube/index.php?v=take%20that  will take you directly to a page of links for Take That videos.  Mike is keen for others to comment on the site and you can contact him at  mike.thrussell@googlemail.com .  You can follow him on Twitter as @mikethrussell or follow his blog which has videos demonstrating the use of the site.

Well done Mike – a good example of working with students, listening to their needs and creating something which makes it easier for them to be more independent.

Scotland’s Colleges Conference

I’ve spent the last two days up in Glasgow in order to take part in and present at the Scotland’s Colleges conference on ‘Accessible ICT on a budget and e-safety for learners with profound and complex needs’.  Scotland’s Colleges is an agency who exist to ‘support, represent and promote the college sector in Scotland.

They

• seek to prepare and assist the sector deliver its vital contribution to the economic and social needs of Scotland
• serve the ambitions of Scotland’s learners and the demands of Scotland’s employers
• enhance the sector’s national and international reputation.

The event was organised by, Scotland’s Colleges, BRITE, RSC Scotland N & E and S&W and it was great to see Mags McKay, Joan Walker and Craig Mill from the Scottish RSCs.  I was with Rohan Slaughter from Beaumont College delivering a short workshop on e-safety for complex learners.  Rohan outlined the work on e-safety at Beaumont and I followed up with a short update on the current projects with JISC Techdis .   We had a stand with some of our resources and publications and I did a short demonstration of In-Folio during the lunch break.

The event documentation was available in print as both text and in symbols.  (Not the best image but it was from my phone)

The morning session included a demonstration of some free tools by Fil McIntyre from the Brite Centre in Edinburgh.    He included the use of Prezi as a filtering system for youtube videos and Maavis (nobody could agree on how this should be pronounced) which provides a simple version of a website for ease of navigation.  It did however seem a little complicated to administer which I fear will put many people off.

Craig from RSC NE Scotland did another of his wonderful presentations on the work he’s doing with free software.  I took a usb stick of the latest content but unfortunately something on the stick alerted the anti virus on my laptop so couldn’t access it properly.

In the afternoon, we had a presentation from Marilyn Slavin from Common Knowledge.  Common Knowledge or CKUK is a website and much more which “provides online learning, accessible information and social networking for people with learning difficulties.”  They are a small independent charity which provides  opportunities to make friends, tell their stories, learn about life, their rights and share with others their skills, talents and interests for people with learning difficulties.

The site has a number of mini sites within – these cover a range of subjects including – CK respect ( bullying), CK pose (developing positive images of adults with LDD), CK sex talk (clear unambiguous information about relationships, sex and sexual health)  and CK grows (gardening).  CK click is an online user generated news magazine with stories, videos and quizzes.

All content is accessible, appropriate, interactive and engaging.  

The main thrust of the site is as a social networking tool – CK Friends.  CK Friends has been going longer than Facebook and has a very strict vetting procedure.  All prospective members are telephoned by a member of the team.  There is a very clear message also that – “If you send a bad message on CK Friends you will be banned” .    The site is getting up to 20 new members each month and in April 2011 they had over 46,000 hits.  This is a small charity and they are very short of funding.  There is an opportunity to donate to the charity on the site.

A great event and in keeping with my usual comment – the chocolate covered strawberries were truly delicious.

Symbol Sudoku

This is a shortened version of a post on the main JISC Techdis blog on the publication of a symbol based newspaper for learners with learning difficulties and/or disabilities.

It is produced using SymbolStix and looks very good.

Each edition has the same features as a regular newspaper – sports pages (though I’m not sure how many UK users will appreciate news on the NFL – couldn’t they have made an effort and covered the end of the football season?) sudoku and a crossword.   I really liked the idea of the sudoku which could be adapted very easily for lots of subjects.

This appears to be a one off but the download page does promise symbol based resources later in the year. 

Using Document Map for Easier Navigation

I’m a great believer in making things easy.  I used to work in a college where we had to contribute to a 25-30 page report for each student.  It was difficult enough to find you own department’s section when using the search facility but most staff simply scrolled down – a frustrating waste of time. If we had formatted the documents correctly we could have just used the document map and gone directly to the right place.

I wanted to demonstrate two things with this post – one that formatting a document correctly is easy and saves time and two that you can create a simple ‘how to’ video guide in a very short time.  This was done using camstudio free software for capturing what happens on the screen.  It’s not polished, it’s not perfect and there are a couple of mistakes – but – it was quick and simple to do.  In fact it took as long as the video runs – 2 minutes.

The video shows how the use of  the document map view can help a user navigate round a long document.  The fact that this then makes the document very accessible to all users is an added benefit.  This was done using word 2007 – 2010 is much the same but the option to be clicked is ‘document view’.  Why isn’t information like this included within mainstream training courses?

There is a much more comprehensive details of this on our main website as part of Accessibility Essentials

Recording Lectures Webcast

Earlier this week my colleague Terry McAndrew and I went up to Glasgow to take part in a JISC Legal live webcast.   The subject was ‘Recording Lectures’ and it involved us as well as Steve from JISC digital media and Jason from JISC Legal.  We had done a huge amount of planning beforehand with Simon and Alistair and Terry had drawn up the ‘mother of all mindmaps’.  We had a large list of points to bring up – which would have taken more than the 2 hours allocated to the event.  We had wanted to start with a ‘why lecture’ discussion and then move onto the reasons for and against recording lectures.  As it was there was little time for a more in depth discussion.

They have a pretty neat set up in the Alexander Turnbull building of Strathclyde University with 4 cameras and a basic production suite (I think).  There was not enough room for both Terry and I to take part in the broadcast so I felt like an anxious manager as I sat behind the camera trying not to pull faces or put anyone off.  I monitored the twitter stream which was quite busy though the hashtag of #jisclegalwebcast is a bit long and complicated.  There were lots of questions and the two hours flew by.  Terry was brilliant and managed to tweet at least 5 links to our resources during the session.  Another useful link he mentioned were the Seed Guides from the English subject centre which I hadn’t come across before.

There were just under 500 people who logged in though some of those may have been multiple log-ins.  The recording will be available in a week or so and I’ll post it here once it is.

So thank you to Jason and the team for inviting us and for your generosity and hospitality (the strawberry tarts were truly delicious).

In-Folio

Since I started here at JISC Techdis I’ve taken over the responsibility for the InFolio project.  Infolio is an accessible eportfolio which was developed for Techdis by the Rix Centre at the University of East London.

It was financed by 4 Independent Specialist Colleges (ISC) pooling some grant funding and was launched in the summer of 2009.

The In-Folio Rollout Tour – Summer 2009 from Rix Centre on Vimeo.

Since then a large number of specialist colleges have received their own server to run Infolio in their own organisation.  We have had a few teething troubles with these servers but these are slowly being ironed out.

In-Folio is a great application which allows learners or users to upload their own content in a simple and effective way.  It allows users to create their own digital identity.  It has automatic text to speech and can host images, audio and videos.

It also has a unique and innovative picture log in with ‘secret clicks’ which can be customised for each individual user.

There will be more – much more about Infolio over on the Infolio page – at the top of the blog.

JISC Techdis

For the last 6 months I have had a new position with JISC Techdis.  I am still employed by Lancaster University and the RSC Northwest but am seconded to the new team at the Higher Education Academy in York.

JISC Techdis is a leading UK advisory service on technology and inclusion. The Service specialises in supporting organisations within the education sectors and has numerous resources and a wealth of expertise that can also be transferred immediately to the business and community sectors. We support organisations that seek to achieve greater accessibility for their users and customers by stimulating innovation and providing expert advice and guidance on disability and technology.

What this means in practice is that I’ve been and still am involved in some great projects and although the workload is considerable, it is time to share these experiences with a wider audience.   So the blog is being re-vitalised and re-populated and I look forward to sharing some of the great moments on these pages.

iPod2010 Conference

I was at the iPod 2010 conference at Oldham City Learning Centre yesterday.  This was a celebratory and collaborative event looking at the use of ipod touches in education.  The event started with a look at the educational context to using mobile technologies for teaching and learning, by Richard Millwood, Reader in distributed learning at the University of Bolton.   I would like to say more but the content of the presentation doesn’t seem to be available yet.  There were then a few short presentations on the use of ipods in schools.  I was particularly impressed with the presentation from the ESSA Academy in Bolton.  They had introduced iPod Touches for all pupils as part of a home/school contract.

The day was punctuated with workshops for discussion.  Unfortunately these were dominated with technical questions and while technical matters are vital to successful implementation of mobile technolgy for learning, they were not of particular interest to a non techie like me.  Perhaps future events could split the delegates according to their interest.   I was also disappointed that all the good work that has been done by the MoLeNet projects over the last 3 years was neither acknowledged nor even referred to.  It did seem to me that the delegates (and possibly the organisers) were unaware of their existence – a sad state of affairs considering the amount of work done on learning using handheld devices (not necessarily iPod touches).  As usual with these events the networking opportunties were excellent and they have set up a Ning to enable ongoing discussion and collaboration.

The afternoon session saw three year 3 and 4 pupils talking about how they used their iPods.  They were obviously keen and it was impressive to see them talk to a room of nearly 100 adults.  Finally there was a presentation from Sharon Tonner from the University of Dundee on how to enable teachers to take ownership of the tecnhologies and embed their use in their own practice.

A good event and it was useful for me to see what the school sector are doing  to embrace handheld devices.

You can catch up on tweets from the day with the hashtag #ipod2010 (I didn’t read the wifi instruction to the end so omited the proxy settings – situation normal – RTM!)  This will hopefully be the first of a number of events organised by the City Learning Centres network – I hope I’m invited to the next one.