TPCK, data and learning design

‘Samantha is an experienced educator, technologist and creator.‘

This is my standard biog text. Technology is both what I have studied and what I have taught others. The use of technology in learning activities was authentic and integrated into the learning design. Technology, pedagogy and curricula are therefore intrinsically intertwinned.

For meaningful use of technology in teaching and learning these three elements should form a braid.

The 2007 paper What is Technical Pedagogical Content Knowledge? is a good discussion of this interplay and is pretty much how I view the relationship between technology and pedagogy.

When talking about learning and the use of technology in learning I often used the phrase and advocate for ‘pedagogic intent’.

Its a great phrase, but what does it mean?

Lecture capture is very popular with students, and increasing numbers of lectures are recorded.  However, there can be a quite passive use of the technology.

However, it can be used create engagement in the classroom.  The technology becomes part of the pedagogy of the classroom experience.  Our UCL colleague Parama Chaudhury presented a great webinar for the Echo 360 EMEA community on ‘Engaging students with active learning: lessons from University College London’.

This technology can also be used post session to identify content that is that is either difficult, identified by a flag, or of particular interest to students, that could inform future session planning.

Additionally, many taught modules have corresponding Moodle courses.  Although the e-Learning baseline introduces a degree of consistency, these vary immensely in their purpose and content types.

A move towards blended learning designs provides data points that could support post-course review or, perhaps most interestingly, to flag ‘critical-path’ activities (quizzes, forum posts, downloads etc) for intervention in real time. In this case ‘blending’ in online activities becomes an essential part of the student experience.

This identification of course elements of pedagogic interest of existing learning designs and how resulting questions could be answered by the identification of corresponding data points and analysis can be embedded into the learning design process.

The upcoming JISC Data informed blended learning design workshop aims to help participants ensure that their blended learning designs are purposeful. It will seek to make explicit the pedagogic intent in a learning design and explore how data can enable us to understand whether or not learner behaviour is corresponding to those expectations.

Thus returning us to the intertwinned relationship between technology, pedagogy and curricula.

from Digital Education team blog https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/digital-education/2018/02/13/tpck-data-and-learning-design/
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Introducing StepShot Manuals

For a while now, I have been quietly promoting StepShot Manuals (StepShot for short) to my colleagues in ISD. StepShot is a rapid documentation development tool. Which is not nearly as bad as it sounds. StepShot allows you to record an on-screen process – for example, formatting a table in Word or filling out an expenses form – taking screenshots, adding callouts and annotations and writing explanations as you go.

Some key uses for StepShot include

• rapid development of training materials and technical documentation
• developing test scripts for UAT
• recording test results or bugs
• creating knowledgebase articles
• recording process for business analysis and process review

If you have ever done these jobs, then you might have combined several tools, for example

a screenshot tool (Windows has one built in), Word, an image editor (Paint or Photoshop), with a workflow like this: take all your screenshots, insert them into word editing, cropping etc as you go, adding explanatory text.

Stepshot brings all this together in one tool. You set it up to record the activity and select to create a screenshot for mouse clicks or keyboard actions or to use a specific hot key combination for screenshots. As you go through the activity recording images you can also give each a descriptive title and a comment. When you stop recording StepShot opens its editing tool. This latter looks a bit like PowerPoint: your images are listed vertically down the left while the main window allows you to edit an image and add text.

Click to see the animation!

This is already a vast improvement on hacking documents together with separate applications, none of them specifically designed for the job, but wait there’s more! StepShot can export your document when you have finished, as Word, PDF, HTML, XML or DITA and can publish directly to Confluence, SharePoint or WordPress. (If they add a PowerPoint option I’ll throw a party). There are simple built in templates for output and with a little effort you can create a customised or branded template.

So, currently about a dozen people at UCL have taken up a license (contact ISD Training Administration for licensing information. To use StepShot you do need admin rights on your Windows or Mac PC.). It has been used to create training materials for lecturecast (published on Confluence), it has been used in UAT creating test scripts, it has been used by software testers to record bugs and communicate them to developers. No one currently using it has had more than a two minute informal introduction to the product but people seem to pick up its basic use very quickly. Users report that they enjoy using it as well. The most commone response using it for the first time has been about the immense time savings you can achieve and next about the simplicity of use. One or two people have commented that they don’t really like the look of the output, but this is largely because they haven’t learned how to customise output. I have offered a short workshop on customisation and hope to run it again.

I have created a Microsoft Team site and I will be keeping in touch with people using it since I have been asked to feedback our experience to the developers.

from Digital Education team blog https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/digital-education/2018/02/08/introducing-stepshot-manuals/
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New digital skills course dates announced

ISD Digital Skills Development have released course dates for the second half of term.  As usual, we are offering a wide range of courses covering Excel, Matlab, LaTeX, Photoshop, R, Unix and more.

Back this term we have our popular Kick-starting your literature review but this time in an extended format.  This session aims to help you leverage some simple software tools to help you get started with your literature review.  Learn library and literature search strategies and techniques and how to build a bibliographic database, annotate PDFs and extract and report on annotations.

If you can’t attend any of the dates we are currently offering or there is no date available for the course you want, enrol on our Moodle course to be the first to be notified about any new sessions.

Most of our courses take place in computer workrooms so there is no need to bring your own device.  However, please note that you should bring your own laptop for Kick-starting your literature review and all of our R sessions.

For a full list of all the courses and workshops on offer visit the student course catalogue or the staff course catalogue.  Visit the student booking system or staff booking system to book.

Digital Skills Development at IOE offer training in a wide range of apps including Sway and OneNote, tools for infographics, mind-mapping, screencasting, blogging, live polling and more.  Some sessions are specifically aimed at Mac users. Visit IT for IOE IT Course Booking for details and to book.

We have a vast range of high-quality video-based courses available at Lynda.com. These cover technical skills but also business, personal and creative skills as well.  Visit the UCL Lynda.com page to find out more.

Not sure what you need or have a more specific issue you would like help with?  Come along to one of the Digital Skills Development drop ins if you want more individual support.

from Digital Education team blog https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/digital-education/2018/02/01/new-digital-skills-course-dates-announced/
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source https://triplejumprunway.tumblr.com/post/170387775402