• Your Digital Tattoo: What the web says about you! – For Staff

    Is how you present yourselves online important? When people search for information about you what might they find, and how does that affect your reputation and employability? How can you take control of what people can find about you online? Over the last few years we’ve spoken with hundreds of Edge Hill students about issues…

  • What Does Your Blackboard Course Look Like to Students?

    Academics sometimes want to check what students can see and do within their Blackboard Courses. One way to see a student view is to select the ‘Enter Student Preview’ button at the top right of the screen. An alternative is to set up a student account for long term use. This can be done using…

  • Using Classroom Voting Systems

    Learning Services have been supporting the use of the Optivote and TurningPoint classroom voting systems over the last eight years. Recently the sets have been moved from the Learning Technology Development offices in the LINC to the University Library. This change means that the systems can now be booked via the Loaning Equipment page on…

  • Using Optivote in Large Lectures for Student Engagement and Enhancing Learning

    In this post Elaine Hughes, Senior Lecturer in Adult Nursing and a SOLSTICE Fellow, tells us about her experience using an Optivote voting system. If you are inspired to think about using this type of system in your own teaching, there is plenty of support and information available to help you get started. Could you…

  • Getting Started with Virtual Reality

    We have a weekly meeting in Learning Technology Development where we get together to talk about things that have interested or inspired us. Recently I brought along my Google Cardboard so that the team could try out some Virtual Reality experiences. There is a lot of interest in Virtual Reality at the moment with Facebook’s…

  • Blackboard Profile Tool

    Many people have uploaded profile pictures to Blackboard. When they post messages on Blackboard Tools such as the Discussion Board their photos now appear next to the messages, and simple personal profile pages are available. Research by Kear et al (2014) found that some learners in online courses felt personal profile pages helped provide social…

  • Games for Health UK Conference at Coventry – 14th May 2014

    On Wednesday 14th May I attended the Games for Health UK conference, held at Coventry University’s Simulation Centre. This was a satellite event linked to Games for Health Europe, which is an organisation based in Amsterdam. Jurriaan van Rijswijk spoke first, talking about Games for Health’s vision of using games as a way to change…

  • Accessible and Inclusive Design: iSpring Version

    For those who couldn’t make it to the recent session on creating accessible content I thought it would be worth making a version of the session available. In the session we looked at how content uploaded to Edge Hill’s Learning Edge online learning environment can be created in ways that make it more accessible to…

  • Introduction to Profiles and Social Learning Tools in Blackboard

    Blackboard’s ‘Social Learning Tools’ form a small scale social networking style environment within Blackboard, which your students can use outside of their course areas. They include the Profile tool, People tool, Messages tool, and Spaces tool. The Profile tool will be the one you are most likely to have noticed. The profile pictures feed into…

  • Looking to the Future: The Horizon Report 2014

    The Higher Education edition of the Horizon Report always comes out this time of year, and is worth a read if you’re interested in emerging technologies and their impact on teaching, learning and research. The 2014 edition of the report is split into three sections. Key Trends looks at things like the growth of social…