Tuesday 27 September 2011

Using Twitter in Teaching & Learning

I've been using twitter for over 3 years now, and have found it a great way to find/share information and engage with others with similar interests (whether that's eLearning topics or my beloved Everton FC). I had already posted my thoughts on Twitter some 2 years ago - many of which haven't changed. The one thing I wanted to explore was using Twitter within teaching, and luckily that now I'm in the position to implement this myself, the twitter 'movement' is at it's largest yet, with over 100 million users worldwide.

I've seen and read about others using twitter within their teaching and really think it can help bring students together to communicate. Bill Wolfe's post on 'Using Twitter in the Graduate Classroom' does a good job at highlighting some US-based work. He talks about the use of twitter as a back-channel and alludes to the development of a 'community' of learners - exactly what I hope to achieve.

I'm also interested to see how many of my students are part of this growing 100 million figure; if they welcome the use of twitter for their studies; and if they continue to use it with their colleagues beyond learning.

To start with, I've introduced a hashtag  - what twitter uses to record posts about a specific topic/idea, and I've used the Twitter Widgits to quickly show any 'tweets' with the course hashtag (#MM5362) directly in my Moodle area. I'm also building a twitter 'List' to display student aliases so they can each follow each other and build that community.

If you are aware of any research in this area or are interested in using Twitter in your teaching, feel free to get in touch - you can even follow me on Twitter
Follow reedyreedles on Twitter

For those not too familiar with Twitter, I leave you with this introduction:




Creative Commons License
This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Wednesday 21 September 2011

Forum Subscription and Email Digests...

If, like me, you have access to a number of units and programme areas in Moodle, you will probably be receiving regular email alerts based on each discussion forum post.

I appreciate these email alerts can start to clog up your inbox, so this quick screencast demonstrates a simple way to reduce the amount of emails through the options available under 'Update Profile'...




Creative Commons License
This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Thursday 8 September 2011

Moodle Course Area Checklist

With the big changes around the University, and the increasing impetus to engage with blended and online learning, I thought it would be a good idea to develop a Checklist that would guide Unit Leaders in the development of their Moodle areas. What's great, is that it's licensed with Creative Commons!




It was important to keep the checklist as short and simple as possible, but still highlight key points to ensure a smooth and consistent student experience with the VLE. Hopefully this will help ensure a minimum standard within and across Unit areas.

I teamed up colleagues from CeLT: Rod Cullen who is well known to the Faculty, played a huge part in bringing this together and brought excellent understanding of the legal requirements around accessibility, as did Neil Ringan and Christopher Meadows.

The checklist is available from the Moodle Training Guides page of the Staff Resource Area in Moodle, and can also be accessed from from my public Dropbox.

Creative Commons License
This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Friday 2 September 2011

Moodle Training Sessions

So, the bathing suits are back in storage and September is here, and no doubt staff will have all hands to the pump preparing for the start of term. WebCT has now been switched off and Moodle is here!

To help staff ready Moodle areas, there are some mop-up sessions to introduce and run through some of the basic workings of Moodle. There are three sessions booked in over the next couple of weeks:

Wednesday 7th September: C1.01: 10.00-11.30am
Wednesday 14th September: C1.01: 10.00-11.30am
Thursday 15th September: C1.01: 10.00-11.30am

Please use the booking options below to reserve your place.


There will be various other awareness raising and training opportunities throughout the year, but if you have any specific requests, feel free to contact me: P.Reed@mmu.ac.uk.


Creative Commons License
This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.