Bring Your Own Devices 4 Learning #BYOD4L

This week I’m taking part in this online course. Here are some useful links:
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Tuesday – Communicating

In the student scenario the student talked about joining a degree course as a mature student and seeking to manage the demands of university study, a job and family life and considered the challenge of how to use technology to stay in touch with his course and fellow students. This is exactly the situation the students I teach are in. They are Teaching Assistants (TAs) in schools, coming to university for one day a week so its vital for them to be able to stay in touch with us and each other when they are not at university.

For us as lecturers we have a several channels of communication:

Blackboard NILE – announcements, which we often choose to have sent as emails to students. We hope we can guarantee that everyone gest this information.

Course Blog – to share interesting items and resources that is additional to core content. Students are encouraged to subscribe to this so that they will get an email alert when a new post appears. A link to this is also tweeted.

Email – to individuals, usually responsive to student questions and concerns.

NILE discussion boards – Sometimes we create a NILE discussion board for students to use to ask questions and share ideas, especially about assignments. This allows tutor answers to be shared by all students and might mean that we don’t have to answer the same question via email to many individuals.

Task 1 Visualising – A representation of myself as a communicator: I created this ThingLink introducing My Digital Self in the summer.

Task 2 Making – I’ve represented a summary of my formal channels of communication as lecturer with students using Penultimate:

Task 3 Reflection – We allow students to decide and manage communication within groups for themselves and this often evolves. Perhaps it is dependent on someone in the group deciding to take the initiative using a channel they favour. One group has a Facebook group and another use Whats app. As tutors we do not get involved with this but are aware of some of answers to questions, for example, being shared in this way. My only concern is that the chosen channel does not exclude some students in the group eg if a group used Facebook but one or two members are adamantly against Facebook and so are exclude from the conversation and support.

My reflection  on future actions – I wonder if we need to be more proactive about this during Induction into year 1 so that students choose one from several channels after discussion of their features and the students’ own devices, skills and attitudes to them. I think I will contact each existing group and ask what they use and their evaluation of it to see if we can learn something from this ready for the students who join us in September 2016.