Saturday 19 July 2014

Day 5 #BYOD4L Creating by @suebecks


Image source: http://pixabay.com/en/love-hand-foot-creative-339163/



Day 5 and the final Tweet Chat is going to be led by Chrissi and myself on creating. This has to be my favorite topic and it fills me with joy at this stage of BYOD4L when our learners and facilitators are sharing so many creative ways of learning and teaching. From ideas in the classroom to fun activities that can provide great activities for inductions or icebreakers in workshops.

Final f2f meet-up at Sheffield Hallam Uni

A small group of us met (myself, Andrew Middleton, Julie Gillin and Ian Glover) and during the hour we talked about feedback. First creating a mind map of sort using the whiteboard, we discussed feedback quite broadly and then focused in on the role of smart devices, apps and social media could now enhance this process. Andrew Middleton then captured our summaries using his iPad and posted the video on YouTube. 

Two things came from this: 

  1. Rather than just talk about the topic we created a visual map each with a pen in hand. We didn't worry about colours and shapes of boxes, but did refer to this and the digital tools like Mindmeister mindmapping which make it easy to collaboratively work on a mind map and move elements around. For today we used a paper tissue and re-wrote!
  2. We captured a summary (un-rehearsed) of the key points we had discussed. This took under 4 minutes and is now saved to listen back to.

The aspect I talked to was tutorial feedback. The opportunity for students to capture the feedback they are being given can now be done in many ways using the very devices they carry with them every day - their mobile phones. 

Examples might include:

  • recording an audio or video file of the conversation
  • making bullet notes on paper or the whiteboard and taking a photo
  • creating a mind map using an app, paper or whiteboard (plus photo) 

What is important is giving the students the choice to capture the feedback in a way that is meaningful and useful to them and encouraging them to do this. As educators we should help our students to utilise technology to enhance their learning and guide them towards ways they can do this.  




Poetry

Sam Illingworth planted the seed in our evening Tweet Chat, Ian Guest set up a Google Doc and before we knew it a group of us had written a poem, each contributing a verse each! How did this happen? I think we simply responded to a challenge and knew we had a small time frame to complete this. It was fun and creativity won the day. 
http://byod4learning.wordpress.com/poem/

In the digital jungle

Reaching out into the chaotic, swirling abyss
Feeling that e-learning can be so hit and miss
I want to avoid device apathy and neglect
But what does it mean to really connect?

So onwards we go
But where, do we know?
Wouldn’t it be great?
If we all started to communicate

Curating a task, can be quite unfamiliar,
belonging in museums, art galleries and similar. 
With mobile devices we curate a different way 
Sharing resources with scoop it and Mendeley 

Five brief days, so short and sweet 
In Twitter and Google we gathered to meet 
Inspired to explore, discuss and create
Minds now expanded; an enlightened state 

Knowledge isn’t just facts 
Or historical acts 
Its cerebral energy we state 
When we start to create 

But this isn’t the end! 
We now each have a valuable PLN to tend 
Our #BYOD4L community will continue to grow 
Help us reach out to let others know

Contributors
1 Sam Illingworth
2 Neil Withnell
3 Ian Guest
4 Peter Reed
5 Carol Haigh
6 Sue Beckingham



GCU Games On

A mini collaboration with Sheila MacNeill gave us the opportunity to take part in a creative challenge alongside a course she was running. Sheila and team from Glasgow Caledonian University have taken their first steps into the world of open online education this week with the launch of GCU Games On - a three-week, open online event to celebrate the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games. 
I was thrilled to see our community embrace this with Hayley Atkinson getting my gold medal; Julie Gillin and Cheryl Dunleavy getting silver and all of the other creatives a bronze medal. You can view some of the shared photos below!





The Tweet Chat
The final chat #BYOD4Lchat - well at least for this iteration. Plans are already in the making to run BYOD4L again and invite other institutions to take part. But back to the Tweet Chat. We broke all the conventions of the previous structures chats. We asked the community to go create something that visualised what they would take away from BYOD4L. We were not disappointed! So many wonderful examples were posted on Twitter.  
We then moved on to Socrates and a Question Shower led by Chrissi. For the final 10 minutes  we put out the challenge to create an activity we could do together and the community rose to the challenge! It was fun, fast and furious! There was a feeling we didn't want things to end and the conversations went past the hour. I wish we had more time to give the participants to develop activities and set us challenges. There is the potential I think to start earlier and make this a 2 hour interactive active tweet chat! It is all about experimenting and adjusting. Who'd have thought so  many educators would dedicate an hour of their Friday evening to this?!
To see more about the final Tweet Chat take a look at the Storify slideshow.

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