LearnApps

Often, we hear students’ quest to use technology to make their lives easier – Portable devices such as laptops and mobile phones offer the convenience and accessibility they need.   Have you thought of having some personal applications for yourself, which you can bring along wherever you go?

During the JISC Conference in late March, I had a good chat with colleagues from the RSC Scotland North and East.  They introduced me a new package called LearnApps (which has been published lately on their website). It provides students a good mix of applications ranging from work processing softwares, organisers, multi-media tools, to other handy applications such as web browers and mini-games. 

What I find it helpful is you can download the package to your USB stick, and use it everywhere without going through the process of installation. For those of you who would be interested in tools for teaching, there is another package for teaching professional which includes Moodle resources.  You can also pick and mix your own package, so I am sure you would find something useful for you!

Digital literacy

After our series of training and consultation events with college students, I am now working on the footage and data collection from the raw materials.  One initial and common response from students, when we asked them how they used technology for college work, was to “research with tools such as Google and Wikipedia”.  While this is understandable and most of us do that to quickly retrieve information, is it good enough for more serious academic pursuit?

A student from Ireland conducted an “experiment” by putting a faked quota onto Wikipedia (News article can be found here) and tested whether the public would be able to identify it.  A number of media organisations, including Guardians (Their response can be found here), failed to verify the validity of the information. While this incident shows the worrying practices of media or the public as a whole, we also need to ask the question on whether our students are aware of the issues of information validity and reliability on the internet.

When we discussed about the needs of ICT guidance and support with our students, they often associated the knowledge and skills with application and usage of hardwares and softwares. Transferrable skills such as criticial thinking do not seem to come across their minds as something related to the technological world. Some of them also believed that the “digital literacy” we referred to was more or less like “common sense” and was taught many times during schools.  Bearing this kind of students’ feedback in mind, what do we need to do to raise the awareness, as well as equip our students with the necessary skills which they wrongly believe they master well?

This experiment done by the Irish student is a timely call for a reflection on what and how we should support our students in the technological era!

Welcome!

Welcome everyone!

Serving as a channel of communication for a project on technology and learner voice under Becta and National Union of Students (NUS), this blog aims to act as a platform to provide relevant information, share experience and disseminate good practices across the further education and skills sector. We are particularly interested in looking at the following two key areas from learners’ perspective:
- What our learners think about the current use of technology
- How technology can help our learners to voice out and get involved

As the famous American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Our best thoughts come from others”. No matter you are individual learners, student representatives, practitioners working in the sector or simply interested in this topic, you are cordially invited to leave comments and share your experience here.