Sid's Blog

So, what am I talking about, I’m talking about TurningPoint’s ‘ResponseCard Anywhere’. Some of you may already be familiar with Personal Response Systems’ (PRS) which we use in and around the University for student feedback and data gathering in the classroom. The PRS which is most commonly used within the University at present is ‘TurningPoint’ (see Ref 1).

So, let’s get down to business, what is ‘TurningPoint Anywhere’. Turning Technologies the company, have two voting systems with similar names, they are ‘TurningPoint Anywhere’ and ‘ResponseCard Anywhere’, the product we will be talking about is ‘ResponseCard Anywhere’ (Image 1).

(image 1)

RCAnywhere is a piece of hardware that you can use to gather student feedback, no matter where you are and without the need for software, a projector or even a computer (image 2).

Back in October 2011, a colleague (Dr Jason Truscott) and I were given the go ahead to trial a PRS ‘ResponseCard Anywhere’. The aim of the trial was to see if the device lived up to expectations and if it could benefit the staff and student communities.

(image 2.)

In testing the device and thanks to Dr Mark Anderson, we had the good fortune to accompany staff and students on a field trip. Observations and findings from the field trip were reproduced in a subsequent report.

In summary, the device proved a success and subsequently purchased.

There are a number of benefits in using this system, polling students on the fly, anonymous polling and the immediate display of results are just a few.

The Learning Technology team now have a ‘ResponseCard Anywhere’ device which we loan to staff.

References:

Ref 1. TurningPoint – http://www.turningtechnologies.co.uk/buy/voting-options

Association of Learning Technologists: Technology supported large group teaching (ALT) http://tinyurl.com/3nn7xj2

Sid White

I had the pleasure of attending this years Computer Aided Assessment (CAA) conference at Southampton. For me, this conference ticked a lot of my expected boxes. For instance, I wanted to know what CAA tools were being looked at in the education sector. I had this answered in buckets. Universities across the UK pitched up with their experiences with new and not so new CAA tools. ‘ROGO’ (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/rogo/index.aspx ) is a newcomer to the CAA scene, so elicited a lot of interest. ‘Moodle’ (http://moodle.org/) has been around for a long time now, developing in stages, but with major enhancements from the Open University it is now getting to the stage where it could be a very serious contender to the Commercial VLE’s such as ‘Blackboard’. ‘QuestionMark Perception’ (https://www.questionmark.com/uk/) was visible by their absence, which surprised me, as they have always had a strong profile at these conferences. The ever popular ‘Xerte’ (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte/) was also a favourite of the delegates and is constantly being improved upon, making it a wonderful Self Assessment tool. STOMP II (http://www.stomp.ac.uk/) is a revitalised assessment tool which first appeared in the mid 90’s and has now been redeveloped for the 21^st century by Dr Richard Bacon of Surrey University.

The Keynote address was given by Steve W. Draper (http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/staff/index.php?id=SWD01&pbl=full).

Amongst others, Steve argued that CAA had not fulfilled our expectations in online assessment and feedback was not necessarily important for learning, a point raised during interviews with 1st Class degree students. These students stated that feedback played no part in influencing their learning. Steve also argued that students learned as much from watching videos of lectures and tutorials as they would have, had they attended any of the live sessions. It was also suggested that students were more interested in the marks awarded to them than feedback presented to them and how the marks would influence their grading http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/talks/caa.html . I’d like to add that Steve’s view on feedback is not held by the wider educational community.

I spent the final day of the conference listening to a number of sessions on the Question Test Interoperability (QTI) standard. I know, I know, it sounds stuffy, but I felt I had to find out more about this important standard. I wasn’t disappointed, the speakers were engaging and presented some good examples of what was possible with this standard. The standard allows you to create questions that you can then imported and exported between different CAA software tools, it also enables you to embedded them more or less anywhere.

Paul Bailey from JISC gave the closing address in which he made the following points:

• It had taken CAA a long time to get to where it was now
• We need to change and adapt more quickly
• Students would be more involved in Peer and Self assessment
• More students would be involved in collaborative writing between themselves
• Feedback was still a major requirement and should be continued
• JISC had always been a great supporter of Open Standards such as QTI
• It remained a challenge to get developers to use Open Standards
• JISC would continue to encourage collaboration between institutions and that 50% of their customers were from outside the UK
• More student studies should be shared between institutions

He believed that future trends would go in these directions:

• Learning Analytics would be widely used
• The ITEAM PROJECT  is a project to measure economic benefits and improving student support and learning. (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/assessmentandfeedback/iTeam.aspx)
• We will see more hosted services along with their cost and benefits
• More and more students will be used at the feedback stage
• Student Digital experience and engagement

Yes, I can safely say that for me the conference was a success. I felt I had learnt something and came away with fresh vigour to try something new. My one regret was that I wasn’t able to speak with the many delegates present. Those I did manage to talk to were enthusiastic about what they did and that still, thankfully, they had students at the heart of it all.

References:

CAA conference 2012 proceedings:  http://caaconference.co.uk/proceedings/

You know when you receive an invitation to attend a Webinar, but then you realise that the kick-off time will be in a different time zone. This happened to me recently, and I wanted to find out what the time gap was. Yes, I could have looked it up on Google, but I now have a World clock to refer too… neat.

Roll over the various countries to find out what Time Zone they are in, then try dragging the time presented to another location. When you get bored with this game, you can drop it in the Delete section, bottom left of the image. Alternatively you can double click on the Country of choice and have the time zone appear at the bottom of the page.

If you would like the World clock in your blog or web page, check out this web site: http://www.clocklink.com/world_clock.php there are loads of clocks to choose from. Never be late again eh

For many of us the keyboard is just a typing tool, but for others it’s a lot more than that. Built into your computer are shortcuts just waiting to be used! Short cuts can help you work more efficiently and importantly, make you less reliant on the mouse or touch pad.  I have to admit that when I found out about keyboard short cuts years ago, I had my doubts as to their value, what could be quicker and easier than using a mouse. I agree, the mouse is very efficient, but over the years I’ve found more able ways of doing things. Now I’m a convert, I use short cuts where I can and believe me you’ll be surprised how versatile they are once you get to use them.

While I have your attention, press the Alt key on your keyboard. If you are reading this in a browser or as a PDF[1] then you’ll see File highlighted on the toolbar and the letter F underlined. Now use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move the highlight area across the toolbar then up and down the dropdowns. When you have finished with the short cut keys, press Alt again and the options will be removed.

If you are reading this in a Word document then you will have noticed a host of letters appearing next to each heading. If you press the Alt key at the same time as one of the letters you will have a new set of letters appear. Using this method you can happily navigate around the page just by using the keyboard shortcuts.

Why not have a little experiment with this; you’ll be surprised how useful some of these actions are.

Some mouse moves scream out for a short cut. Here are some I regularly use.

If you have students in your class with disability issues, then short cut keys may be of help to them and if you find yourself without a mouse or on a bumpy road (I’m open to other suggestions) trying to use a mouse or Touch pad, then this can and will solve navigation issues.

This has been a brief overview of some of my favourite shortcuts. If you want a comprehensive list to try out then go to this link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/301583 or Google ‘Keyboard shortcuts’.

If you want to know what shortcuts there are for the Mac computer then follow this link.

Download this document: Keyboard short cuts – PDF

During the writing of this article I spent a few hours just using my keyboard to navigate pages and do all the other things I would normally use my mouse for. It was an interesting morning, but a nightmare. Don’t throw away your mouse people.

[1] http://www.cnet.com/Resources/Info/Glossary/Terms/pdf.html

Pictures or graphics can balloon the size of your PowerPoint, Word or Excel documents significantly. A reduction in the size of your file can speed up the download time and consequently save you a lot of file space.

Some of the ways you can reduce the file size?

1. Crop the picture to focus interest on one area
2. Change the resolution of a picture

Photographs, which are High-resolution images that have lots of colour pixels, can benefit from optimisation; these file names will have an extension of PNG, JPEG, JPG, TIFF, BMP or GIF.

Cropping the picture to focus interest on one area

1. Select the picture whose size you wish to crop
2. Go to the Format tab and click Crop

3. Adjust the edges of the graphic to the desired size.

Changing the picture resolution

1. First select a picture, this is important otherwise you will not see the Format ribbon

2. Go to the Format tab and click Compress Pictures

3. To change the resolution for the selected picture only and not all of the pictures in the document, select the

Apply to selected pictures only check box.

4. Click Options, and then under Target Output, click the resolution that is most appropriate.

5. Click OK

Your files should now be compressed and at a reasonable size for presenting.

If you would like to view this tutorial in another format then please follow these links:

Video tutorial

Compressing pictures (pdf 210k)

There is one type of graphic you cannot compress and that is a vector graphic. This is a drawing format used mostly in clip art.