This time last year we at JISC RSC Wales were preparing for our first ever ‘roadshow’,  Barrier Busters - Accessibility and Inclusion. The idea of the roadshows was that instead of asking you to travel to us (usually in mid-Wales) in order to take part in and hopefully benefit from any training or discussion forums we organised, we would bring the event to you in different parts of Wales. In 2010 we ran 3 separate roadshows on 3 different themes in all 4 corners of Wales. As with all of our events the contents and outcomes from those events can be found in our online event support areas:

• Barrier Busters – Accessibility and Inclusion
• Learner Voice Learner Choice
• Small Steps, Great Strides – Organisational Improvement

Our latest roadshow, the first for 2011, is entitled ‘Advance and Enhance‘, the purpose of which is to bring people together to focus in a practical way on how technology can help learning providers and partnerships share, blend and deliver in the classroom and at a distance.

More details about the event can be found in the programme here: tinyurl.com/advanceandenhance

Details of the dates and venues are below … just click on the relevant link to be taken to the booking:

• 1st February 2011 – Cardiff
• 9th February 2011 – Swansea
• 22nd March 2011 – Llandudno

We look forward to seeing you there!

Back in November, RSC Wales launched its Toolkit for Teaching : a series of Moodle modules on technology skills  that will hopefully be useful both for staff development programmes and Initial Teacher Training.
Each module has a series of activities and associated guidance notes to facilitate online self-study, though access to some face-to-face support would probably be beneficial. The modules were originally put together by JISC RSC Scotland South and West but have been modified to give more of a Welsh focus, and have additionally been mapped to the LLUK Professional Standards, as well as the Application Guide to Using Technology, for Teachers, Tutors and Trainers in the Lifelong Learning Sector in Wales. The modules can be used directly from the RSC Wales Moodle, or can be downloaded into other Moodle instances. Unfortunately the modules are not currently available through the medium of Welsh.

Video from Module 3

The Toolkit for Teaching includes:
•        Module 1: Introduction to e-Learning
•        Module 2: e-Resources & Copyright
•        Module 3: Creating Interactive Resources (part 1)
•        Module 4: Designing an Inclusive Curriculum
•        Module 5: Creating Interactive Resources (part 2)
•        Module 6: Online Communications & e-Tutoring
•        Module 7: e-Assessment

In addition to this skills-focused toolkit, RSC Wales has also developed a Toolkit for Subjects. This RSC Wales Moodle area is not actually a collection of tools,  more a showcase of taster lesson/lecture plans: the aim was to provide a quick reference area covering a range of different topics and technologies that would provide ideas for the use of technology in subject teaching. Technologies were selected on the basis of their subject value (eg. online resources), their ability to provide interactivity (eg. voting systems), independent study (eg. interactive study packages from NGfL Cymru), collaboration (eg. online mind-maps) and communications (eg. Twitter). Reference is also made to other key aspects of teaching and learning including formative assessment and accessibility, and useful resources such as the RSC Wales Delicious links, Xpert and Merlot. The Toolkit for Subjects was not intended to look at technologies in any depth: there are many JISC publications and resources that serve this purpose.

from www.morguefile.com

We welcome feedback about these resources and how you have used them,  and value your suggestions for their further development. Please send any feedback to support@rsc-wales.ac.uk.

And just to add that by the time you read this, I will no longer be a member of the JISC RSC Wales team, though still working in the field of Technology-Enhanced Learning at CELT, University of Glamorgan.

At RSC Wales we use Moodle as a way to share information and resources about a wide range of topics, as well as to keep up our Moodling skills. As Autumn 2010 settles in we have given our Moodle a facelift, as you will see below and by visiting http://moodle.rsc-wales.ac.uk

Almost all of the information and resource areas are open for everyone to access. Many of them have been created by the RSC Wales team to support the teaching and learning and technical advice we give and the events we deliver and support; some of them have been donated by others … Plagiarism Awareness from Coleg Gwent, eSafety from JISC RSC East Midlands and Gwe-dditectif – Internet Detective from Coleg Merion Dwyfor.

New additions to this online resource include the Newsletters and publications area, which features our new @rscwales Twippets (highlights of the tweets we send out via @rscwales (Tweets + snippets = Twippets) that are shared with Tweeters and non-Tweeters alike in our monthly eBulletin), as well as the recent 2010 Work Based Learning e-Learning survey.

We have also taken the opportunity to provide links to all of our other online resources, like the JISC Advance newsfeeds, gathered in one place using Netvibes and our bookmarked websites on a wide range of topics using Delicious.

Over the next few months we will be adding to this online information and resources area and as always, any comments are gratefully recieved.

(If you would like this blog post as an audio file please click this link or right click the link and choose to save the mp3 file. Please note: the audio file was created quite simply by pasting the text into Balabolka (one of the tools available as part of My Study Bar/EduApps) and saving as an mp3 audio file).

… an eLearning Advisor (Learning Technologies). Taking my lead from my colleague Karl’s recent post  ‘A month in the life of … an eLearning Advisor (Learning Resources), I thought it might be an interesting experience to do the same thing, for myself but also for anyone who reads this and is interested to know what a month in the life of a JISC RSC Wales eLearning Advisor (Learning Technologies) can look like. The first thing to say is that every day/week/month is different but that ultimately I am here to provide a service to our supported post 16 learning providers in Wales. Karl’s blog post focussed on the wide range of queries he and Sam deal with, so to make this different from his great blog I’m going to give an example of a selection of the activities I have been involved in over the last month, starting with the queries.

Queries
These are just a few of the queries (received in person, via email or Skype or over the phone) I have delt with this month:

Text Wall - we use a text wall to collect comments and questions from delegates who attend our events. During our recent ‘Learner Voice, Learner Choice’ roadshow we also suggested it might be one of the many tools that could be used to record the learner voice. A number of the organisations who attended the event had borrowed the text wall for a short period (in return for some feedback on how it goes) to try it out with their learners (Learning Centre suggestion box, opinions of Moodle, during Adult Learners Week, for feedback on lessons …) and one contacted me to ask for more details of the service (options for different walls, cost) because it was proving to be successful and she was interested in having their own wall. One follow up job for this week is to contact all of those who have borrowed a wall to find out how they got on. I’ll share the results via this blog.

Legal advice – at the last of our roadshows ‘Small Steps … Great Strides‘ I had a query from a college about whether there were any legal requirements or implications regarding allowing parent’s access to learners eILPs. JISC Legal, one of the JISC Advance services are almost always my first port of call for education related legal advice, so I contacted them and received a response within days which I passed on. Rather than attempt to summarise the response here the legal information regarding eILPs and parental access received can be found on a GoogleDoc.

Moodle – there have been a few Moodle queries this month but 3 of the most common ones are asking for a recommendation, asking for a way of doing something and asking for a solution.

• The recommendation was for someone who had experience of networking a number of Moodle’s together … I recommended the North Wales 14-19 Network;
• The way of doing something was for how to embed a web page in a Moodle page … I suggested using a handy piece of code (with the relevant web address inserted) given to me a few years ago that has been very useful: <iframe width=”100%” height=”500″ align=”middle” frameborder=”0″ src=”http://www.rsc-wales.ac.uk” border=”0″></iframe>
• The solution was for a problem a Learning Centre were having regarding how to push news out to their students, rather than expect them to go looking for it … and I recommended the RSS feed for Moodle forums that anyone could then subscribe to.

Facilitating the Moodle-Wales group
As the vice chair of the Moodle-Wales Steering Group, I have the honour of facilitating meetings. Usually the Steering Group meet face to face after one of the Moodle-Wales User Group meetings or via video conference but this time we decided to try something a bit different and we chose to use Skype (the latest beta version that allows up to 5 videos). This meant that we could all meet from our desks rather than having to book and travel to VC studios. It worked surprisingly well for a tool that is in beta.  After the meetings I compile and publish the minutes online and then get on with my actions!

Visits to providers
We try to visit all of our supported learning providers at least once a year to find out what they are up to and how we can help but we also do follow up visits too. The following are some of the real (and virtual) follow up visits I’ve done in the last month:

• Coleg Elidyr to show staff the potential of some of the free, open source applications available via Edu-Apps.
• Coleg Glan Hafren to collect the Turning Point interactive response system set we loaned them, along with feedback about its use.
• Barry College to take them on a virtual tour of our Second Life Office, followed on another day by a face to face session to show them the basics of building in Second Life so that they could borrow some space on the University of Wales Newport, School of Health and Social Sciences island (where our SLOffice is based) to try and engage with learners who won’t engage face to face.
• Coleg Gwent to take a virtual tour of our Second Life Office and the island and later to test (virtually) the Skype (Beta) multi video setup for a session they want to run.

Events
Organising and facilitating events is also another part of my role as an eLearning Advisor (Learning Technologies). This month I supported colleagues at the Cardiff  ‘Small Steps … Great Strides‘ roadshow, which was the last of the series of three roadshows, the other two of which I was much more involved in (‘Barrier Busters, Accessibility and Inclusion‘ and ‘Learner Voice Learner Choice‘). For the last few months I have also been working on organising the one big, cross sector event that we are running in Cardiff on 30th June this year – ‘Learning in a Digital Wales – Dysgu mewn Cymru Digidol‘. There are still some places available on this FREE event so if you are interested then you’ll have to be quick and book now!

Virtual communication
We communicate with our learning providers in many different ways but 2 areas I have responsibility for contributing to (as do most of the team) are:

• Twitter – I tweet as@HelenHRSC on a very regular basis but also as @rscwales when it is my turn. As a learning technologist I am constantly on the lookout for news ideas and examples of effective practise and I find that Twitter is an excellent way of sharing what I find quickly … as well as also finding out what others are doing and sharing that too.

• Our teaching and learning (and technology) blog – I managed to blog 3 times last month (twice about Moodle and once about digital communication) but this varies depending on how much I am at my desk and whether I have been inspired to blog and feel I have something worth saying!

Twitter is my first virtual port of call for sharing stuff, followed by our blog and also the news pages on our website.

Keeping up to date and sharing with the team
I use a whole variety of ways to keep up to date with what is happening in the world of education and technology (RSS feeds, Twitter, mailing lists, newsletters, attending events, taking courses,  talking to people … ) and as well as sharing all of this with our supported learning providers I also make sure I share with the team too. A couple of tools that I have come across and shared recently are Twiddla (a bit like Etherpad(as was) but allows images and password protection) and Wallwisher (a web page for sharing ideas and comments that can been used in many ways).

As I said at the beginining, each day is different and this is just a flavour of the things that I am involved with as an eLearning Advisor (Learning Technologies). I guess the job is like both education and technology … always something to learn and share … but also ever changing!

(If you would like this blog post as an audio file please click this link or right click the link and choose to save the mp3 file. Please note: the audio file was created quite simply by pasting the text into Balabolka (one of the tools available as part of My Study Bar/EduApps) and saving as an mp3 audio file).