We now have a couple of new pages on the blog primarily for GCU staff. The GCU Learn Page provides information on GCU updates, and also provides a quick overview guide to GCULearn, and blended learning here at GCU. The Rubrics and Turnitin page provide links to our assessment and feedback principles, and overviews of Rubrics and Turnitin.
We have been exploring some new (to us) tools (BlendSpace and Adobe Slate) to create these guides, which are all based on text based resources/files. Both these tools are free to use (at the moment) and have fairly intuitive user interfaces.
Blendspace is quite nice for simple progression, informational type content like our guides. It has a variety of grid based layout options and you can insert “live” webpages and youtube videos into your design which is quite handy. There is also the ability to comment on pages so you can have a discussion within the content, again quite a handy wee feature to get quick feedback, provoke further discussion etc. Another good thing about Blendspace is that it embeds easily into our VLE GCULearn (Blackboard). Just copy and paste the embed code it generates. It provides a really nice, simple way to add more interactive (and attractive) content. You can also share links via the usual social media channels, so your activities aren’t locked away inside the VLE.
Adobe Slate is an app (so you need to have a tablet to create content with it – the finished content can be viewed on any device, even a desktop machine!). It is more a presentation tool, but I can see how it could be useful for creating more attractive/engaging content for learning activities than a standard Bb content page of text. It has some nice features including make links more like buttons, searching directly to your drop box for pictures etc. It doesn’t have video embedding (yet) but has some quite neat, photo layouts (grids) and some slightly swooshy, picture carousel type things (glideshows) where you can annotate photos/pictures. Again it has easy sharing links to social media. It’s embedding in GCU Learn isn’t as good as Blendspace, you are taken out of GCULearn to view the “slate” as they call it.
As with any type of tool/technology, use all depends on what you are trying to do and in many ways your own preferences on the end product. Adobe Slate is great if you have an ipad/tablet, but that does bring up the issue of devices for staff. We are often asked “can you give us a list of tools?”, which we tend to answer “can you tell us what you want to do”. I think from now on I might use this but add “teachers” to the heading .
What do you want kids (and adults!) to do with technology? pic.twitter.com/sXFrC2ZQuR
— Bob Harrison (@bobharrisonset) July 24, 2015
For more ideas on presentation tools you should look at the DigiThings course developed by FOIB, University of Plymouth, a great resource full of different types of tools to explore. Thanks to the FOIB team for sharing.
GCU Digital Learning Innovation Blog 