FAQ: Printing your assignment with feedback from LearnUCS

This FAQ is student has a student focus

Increasingly, staff are using LearnUCS to collect your assignments and provide inline feedback and comments as well as an unratified grade. You can access these assignments via the My Grades area within LearnUCS.

A common request is, how do I print out my annotated script as I'd like to read these offline?

The following two videos (no audio) illustrate how to do this using the software available on computers at UCS.

Step 1: Download your annotated file

It is important to select download with annotated comments



Step 2: Use Adobe Reader (installed on UCS computers)

• Open Adobe Reader
• Open the file you have downloaded (you'll see all the comments inline with your document. When you print, these become footnotes)
• Click on Print
• Select Summarise Comments
• Print

Online, real time support on Learning Technologies ... Elevate's Google Hangout on Air

We are trying something different around the provision of support and opportunities to talk to us. For the rest of the academic year, we are offering an online surgery via Google Hangout On Air.

This will provide staff and students at UCS with an opportunity to ask the Elevate Team some questions based around the effective use of the Learning Technologies used here at UCS.

During the session, there will be informal discussions on the tools UCS provides it's staff and students, such as, LearnUCS, Mahara and some of the classroom technologies.

The sessions will run every Thursday (14.00 to 15.00).

To start your conversation, go to http://snap.vu/azge

If you wish to ask the presenter/s a question about any on the above, please use the Q&A app and use the ‘Ask a Question’ button to the right of the video (Google Account required). Any general comments or technical queries may be removed from the Q&A stream.

Please note that due to the potential sensitive nature of some of the answer to questions, we may advise during the Hangout that you email us instead.

Student Inductions 2014 (February Starters)

The Elevate Team attended a total of six student inductions this month to introduce a new influx of students to some technologies they could use to enhance their learning outside of UCS. The tools that were on offer to the students were:

• Using Twitter as a Personal Learning Network
• Social Bookmarking with Diigo
• Collaborative working using Google Drive

There has been a change this year to the lineup of tools, we moved Mahara out of the list of options to choose from and added it as a mandatory item, mainly to raise students awareness of the tool and encourage it's use away from the tools they have to use for their UCS studies. We used to mention it as an option students could pick from to discuss (Chosen using audience response clickers) further in the presentation, however it was a rarely chosen item.

The structure of the sessions runs through a couple of the services here at UCS, we don't run through any how-tos or tutorials, simply highlight the fact they are available and what they provide students.

We then move onto some tools that can be used outside of UCS to enhance the students learning, such as the above mentioned tools.

The idea was to then raise Mahara's profile to round-off the session focusing on bringing in some of those experiences and evidence into an e-Portfolio service. However after answering the influx of questions during and after the demo of two of the tools, we've found we regularly run out of time to discuss Mahara in any great detail.

Taking the above into account, we will look at rearranging the session again to bring Mahara back into the front of the presentation but explicitly removing any attachment to it being a mandatory UCS learning tool and more of a space 'provided' by UCS. We can then adjust the demo accordingly to how much time we have left, as we would rather leave out less important features from the tools rather than lose the pitch we could give Mahara give an allotted position in the session.

Providing online, real time drop-in surgeries for staff and students: google hangouts

The Elevate Team offer a number of support routes including Drop-in Surgeries in various buildings, at various times for various audiences (staff and students). This have various levels of success :-)

We are aware this approach has a number of limitations, in particular, geography (excludes the learning network), and time (not very flexible). Therefore, we will be piloting the use of Google Hangouts to offer an online, real time, surgery for both staff and students to ask questions around support and development of technology enhanced learning.

The aims are

1. to provide a regular, online surgery for all staff and students across UCS
2. further develop are knowledge around effective uses of Google Hangouts (web conferencing) to transfer to course teams and curriculum design
3. explore if this service could be offered within core support hours (9.00 to 17.00)

In the initial period the "office hour" will be every Thursday, 14.00 to 15.00. We'll be distributing a short url to our Google Hangouts event page. We'll be using the on air facility to enable the session to be recorded and the use of Q&A feature. The recording will to allow us to slice up the session as video guides, and auto archive to our YouTube channel.

The use of Hangouts on Air will mean it is more open (a good thing), however, it will mean we'll not address certain questions which will lead to potential data protection issues. Those areas will be dealt with off line.

Participation can be through two routes:

1. view only - you will need to simply go to the URL and watch
2. ask questions - you will need to access the event with a google account

Screencastify - A Google Chrome Screen Capture Extension.

For those of us who use Google Chrome and make use of the plethora of extensions that are available I'd like to raise your awareness of one that we have come across which you might find useful.

Screencastify is an extension to the Google Chrome browser that lets you very quickly and simply record what's going on in either a single 'Tab' or your complete desktop, including audio.

The extension itself is very easy to use and there aren't a lot of options to configure. Once installed you simply click the extension icon and click record. Once you have finished you can click stop.

Once you have recorded your video it stores the video locally within the extension, here you can choose to download it for further editing or, and this is a major bonus, upload directly into your YouTube.

We have tested a few screencasts with this and are happy with the results. You can even present from Google Slides or PowerPoint and as long as your record the 'Desktop' you will record the presentation and of course any audio voice over that accompanies it. This has the potential to replace the use of Debut here at UCS as the primary method of recording the screen, we will be in discussions with IT Services here to investigate the options.

If you use Google Chrome and would like to use Screencastify you can install the extension from Chrome's Web Store - Screencastify on Google Web Store

Online webinars on using Clickers in Teaching and Learning

An increasing number of people at UCS are using clickers in their teaching, and the Elevate Team are working with course teams on developing more effective learning designs which combine clickers (face to face teaching) and online (LearnUCS).

For instance, a learning design might be at the end of a set of lectures around a key theme, the lecturer would like to assess the level of understanding within the class. However, the lecturer is keen this isn't simply them providing a number of questions. One potential solution is;

Pre-session

• Create Groups in LearnUCS, with Group wiki tool
• Auto enrol 4 students in each group
• Each Group must write two MCQs. This must include 5 answer options, the correct answer marked, why the correct answer is correct and why the group thinks it is a good question

Session

• Select 5 questions across all the groups
• Group activity - one clicker amongst three students

Post Session

• Upload saved powerpoint to LearnUCS
• Create a quiz using the unused questions

There are a large number of different opportunities for you to use Clickers in your Teaching and Learning Models.

We are pleased to say, the company who develop the clickers (TurningPoint Technologies) are running a number of online support and development webinars during 3rd and 7th March. See the link below, and note ... at UCS we use the Powerpoint Polling option.

• http://www.turningtechnologies.com/Pages/UK-webinar-series

We'd encourage you to attend one of the above sessions, and if you have any questions, please contact the Elevate Team and we'll help embed this within your teaching.

Elevate Team Staff Development Videos: February, 2014

Background

Given we are all becoming multi-modal learners - The Elevate Team are organising some support material through a featured videos series. These videos will be created by either the Elevate Team or other people, including other e-learning teams, or software vendors. We are organising these by month, and focussing on how to use the tool, or learning design considerations. Our selection criteria will be to focus on one tool which is used regularly at UCS, and one which is less well known tool.

How to use the tool

How to create a random block of test questions

If you are using the quiz engine (objective questions) for formative feedback activities, you can add a random block of questions to your test. This is intended to reduce the likelihood of students getting the same questions as each other, or if you allow the student multiple attempts, of getting the same questions. The following Blackboard guide illustrates the idea




How to create a blog

The blog tool offers a number of exciting opportunities within your teaching and assessment model. The following video guide illustrates how to set up a blog on your course.



Learning Design Considerations

The following video is based upon the ideas around making your assessment pattern more even:

• http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/page/30631817/ESCAPE+-+Assessment+timelines

If you'd like to discuss how you might use these tools in your teaching, learning and assessment, please email the Elevate Team (elevate@ucs.ac.uk).