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Monday 8th October 2012: Using Clicker Systems for Classroom Interactivity
The next session in The Digital Classroom series of staff development events will be an overview of using Clicker systems (such as TurningPoint and Optivote) with your students. It will take place between 1:00 and 2:00pm on Monday the 8th October 2012, at the Ormskirk campus.You can book on the session by going to the Staff Development section of the Human Resources wiki.
Clickers are also known as Audience Response systems and are used in a variety of ways, with aims such as increasing engagement, allowing students to answer questions in class anonymously, to check understanding of concepts, or to start group discussions.
In this session we look at examples of the use of Clickers, explore reported benefits and challenges related to some of their uses, and ensure that you know how you could get started using these systems (for example Optivote and TurningPoint) at Edge Hill University.
Peter Beaumont
Learning Technologist
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New Blackboard – new Browser required
Are you missing links from the top of your Blackboard page – such as ‘Learning Edge Homepage’? Do you see something like this:
If so, you are probably using Internet Explorer 7 on a PC – and will have difficulty accessing many of the facilities such as returning to the GO Portal or your Blackboard home page.
Here are two easy fixes: download and install either (even both!) the Firefox or Chrome browser from these links:
Download
Google Chrome
Download
Mozilla Firefox
The Learning Technology Development Division of Learning Services
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Getting ready for THIS year!
Next steps for academic staff – and one thing you SHOULDN’T do!
At this time of year all academic staff should have gained access to the Blackboard course areas they will be using this year*. Here are three guides from LTD that address the next steps:
Enrolling colleagues: One of the first tasks that course leaders need to do is to enrol their team into the course. This single sheet guide shows you how to do this in a few clicks.
Copying content. This guide covers the two main techniques for copying course materials from previous years: a complete copy of everything, or just selecting individual components.
Making the course available: By default all the courses in Blackboard are unavailable – it is the task of the course teams to make them available to students. This single sheet guide shows you how.
And what you shouldn’t do:Enrol Students!
This is done automatically via direct links from the student record system. Enrolling students like you enrol colleagues above will challenge the student experience as any such enrolments will be deleted in the next few days.
There are generally two reasons for students not being enrolled:
- They are not enrolled correctly in SID – if you don’t have access to SID perhaps ask your course/departmental administrator(s) (FAS, FoE, FoH).
- The student’s cohort is not part of a course merge – again, speak to your course/departmental administrator(s) for help.
Finally, there are many other guides available from LTD – available from this easy to remember tiny url: tinyurl.com\LTDGuides.
The Learning Technology Development Division of Learning Services.
*if you haven’t got access yet, please approach your module / year / programme leader – if you are a leader please approach your administrator (FAS, FoE, FoH) to give you access.
**All faculties have been doing manual enrolments. If you think some of your student enrolments may be deleted please check that those students have a permanent cohort based enrolment by contacting your administrator or your learning technologist.
