July’s eCoffee took us on a tour through some of the tools we have explored over the year, with a chance to catch up with colleagues who have been putting them into action.
The LifeLab team have introduced the LifeSaver app into their teaching, with students working through the interactive video resource in small groups, allowing them to discover for themselves rather than having the information delivered to them.
We revisited Sway, a useful medium for presenting self-study materials. Sway makes it straightforward to create visually striking resources, breaking up information into manageable segments and incorporating a range of media, as demonstrated in the introduction to the new Year 5 PPD module. Sway can be accessed with a university account through Office 365.
Sway can also be included in a Nearpod presentation, alongside interactive questions and activities to help consolidate and develop understanding. Nearpod’s ‘Live Lesson’ option helps students participate more actively in a taught session, while the ‘Student Paced’ setting allows them to work through activities in their own time.
The showcase of presentation tools concluded with a look at Prezi, which allows users to follow a path around a single screen or image, zooming in to uncover further text, images or video.
Volunteers shared their first attempts at using some of the tools introduced in previous sessions, with results demonstrating that with a clear idea, beginners can produce great results.
– Lucy Green created ‘What makes you strong?’ using VideoScribe as an engaging way of presenting research findings.
– Judith Holloway gave a quick demonstration of using Biteable, resulting in an appealing video to promote MSc Allergy that was neither time nor resource intensive to produce.
– ThingLink‘s interactive 360° image tool has been used to draw together different IDS Research Areas, with each individual in the photo linking out to further information.
In a new guest spot, recommended app of the month was Photomath, which reads and solves handwritten equations.
We finished the year with another look at Twitter and talked about raising the profile of tweets by (for instance) including the @handles for relevant events or users in a tweet or adding appropriate hashtags to make tweets searchable. The Faculty marketing team can help source an appropriate image for a university Twitter account from Shutterstock, or the university’s Media bin is another option.
We will return with further sessions in the new academic year.
On September 25th, the Medical Education Innovation Network launch conference takes place; further details are at https://www.mein.academy/. If you have enjoyed exploring some of the ideas and tools shared through ecoffee sessions, do sign up to attend what promises to be an inspiring morning.