IMP Saturday Workshop

Interesting session today - I have come away with some good ideas to use in my own practice.

Something that will hone ILT skills AND (importantly in FE) give students an opportunity to examine and practice their speaking and listening skills is the activity that we did at the start of the day. In pairs, with one person in one room and one in another and using Skype via webcam and microphone, each pair tried to build the same shape using Lego in 10 minutes. This was a fully audio-visual exercise - and tested participants' use of language in order to see whether the shapes made by each member of each pairing was exactly the same (or, in my case, reasonably similar.) I think my plan to make a TARDIS was a little ambitious: other pairs went on to make simple animals shapes and were far more successful in cooperating to build the same result.

ICE House Project and General IMP Stuff

As an update on the last post - I've just been given a new 0.5 role as part of University of Plymouth / Peninsula Centre of Excellence in Teacher Training (CETT) and Cornwall College's ICE House Project (as web / VLE Developer). Click here for a link to the website that I will be working on and to find out more about the project. When I've made a start and know a little more about the project I'll add a bit more to this blog.

AND...WooT WooT!!!! The 2 Masters modules I did last year with the University of Exeter have been APLd across to the IMP, so I now have 60 credits towards my Masters (was concerned that the 2 modules I did with Exeter last year may not be valid in some way, and that I had possibly wasted a year. But no!!! Woohooooo!!!)

So...now to start thinking about what I am going to do with this module...

...I really want to see whether the Second Life / web 2.0 PTLLS I've just started teaching is going to successfully deliver real world teaching skills that can be transferred successfully into a real life classroom. As part of this pilot I have already arranged interviews (to be carried out at the start, midway point and end of the course) with a few group members to talk about their experiences on the course (be they good or bad). However, though I know that this is something I want to investigate, I'm not sure how I'm going to go about doing this. I guess it's going to involve questionnaires and a mix of discourse and data analysis and I also think that I am going to need to deliver the course a second time to a different group - but this is something that can be firmed up in a tutorial - so for now I'll carry on delivering it, making notes along the way.

IMP Blog Post: How I use ILT in my Practice

I'm going to continue my blog with posts relating to the University of Plymouth IMP module I am enrolled on ("iLearn"), so this is a continuation of my experiences as a student, this time on a second ILT-based course. This also gives me a chance to kick-start this blog again, as it's been dormant for about 9 months! (I finished the MUVEnation course, so stopped using the blog and moved to "Posterous". BAD Bex!!!)

I'm still a Lead Teacher / Learning Technologist at Cornwall College's School of Education and Training and still teaching PTLLS, DTLLS and the Level 5 Diploma in Teaching English. Rather than write a lengthy (and possibly dull) narrative examining all the stuff I do that involves ICT and ILT, I'll do some bullet points:

• Project Manager of Cornwall College Island in Second Life
• About to deliver the first (ever I think) Initial Teacher Training course that uses web 2.0 applications like Flickr and Skype, cloud computing, moodle and Second Life and has no face-to-face content at all. This I think, will form the basis of my research paper: can teaching skills be taught in Second Life then transferred into as real life classroom by trainee teachers who have never met their tutor? We start in two weeks, so this blog should be a useful place to record what is happening!
• Administrator for Cornwall College's moodle site, setting up courses for staff and delivering training (again to staff) at beginner and intermediate levels both face-to-face and using GotoMeeting
• Run a PTLLS and the Level 5 Diploma in Teaching English as blended learning courses, with one third of the content delivered in the classroom and the remaining 2 thirds on moodle / Twitter
• Deliver ICT / ILT training to staff to improve their personal ICT skills and think about how to use ILT effectively and imaginatively with their own students.
• Also collaborating with the University of Glamorgan to develop electronic graphic novels as learning resources for HE students who find academic writing, referencing, research and study skills hard to get to grips with. I am hoping to develop an iPod Touch/ iPhone app. that will display these graphic novels aspart of this project...but need to learn Objective C and Cocoa programming in order to do this...(gulp)

I'll add to this post if anything else crops up or springs to mind, but for now I think that's it...