Human Rights Wiki

Students became active creators of knowledge on a Human Rights field trip by contributing to a Historical Issues wiki.

Students were able to add photos, reflections and video commentaries which enabled them to show others what they had seen on their trip, what they learnt and what they felt.


Students seemed to enjoy this project because they were truly engaged in producing knowledge and reflecting critically in a creative, but convenient way.



This student spoke about the project enthusiastically at the LTEU conference earlier this year...

http://historicalissuesinhumanrights.pbworks.com/

Producing Reality Blog

The film department is experimenting with Blogger for a documentary film-making course. Students share ideas on interesting documentary films they have seen on a class blog and are able to embed video from youtube, add links and add comments to each others' postings. This informal method of learning appears to be a popular method amongst students for developing thoughts and ideas before they go on to create their own documentaries.

Consecutive Interpreting - Peer Review

On the 'Consecutive Interpreting' module, Jacqueline Page has been using an innovative method of providing feedback to her students. Each week, student interpretations are filmed by Jacqueline using a Flip video camera. Initial feedback is given to the student who has performed the interpretation during class. After class, students have the opportunity to review the clips of their peers in their individual blogs and then post constructive comments beneath them.

This method of peer review gives students further time to analyse their own and others' interpretations and to reflect on these in order to help them improve in future sessions. Both students and teacher have a convenient record of work done in class and a valuable learning tool.

Other staff in the modern languages and translation departments have quickly recognised the value of this as a means of providing feedback and now wish to explore its use elsewhere.

Postcrossing in primary schools - Geography education department

If you've not already heard of it, Postcrossing is a website that connects people through postcards.

The goal of the project is to allow people to receive postcards from all over the world, for free. Well, almost free! The main idea is that: if you send a postcard, you will receive at least one back from a random Postcrosser from somewhere in the world.

How does it work? The short version:

1. request an address from the website
2. mail the postcard to the address
3. wait to receive a postcard
4. register the received postcard in the system

After reading about a school using postcrossing as a class project, I thought I'd suggest it to the Geography education department as something to look into.

Using flickr geotagging to learn about geography

The geography education department have been working with GPS-enabled mobile phones for a while now, using the packaged educational software. One of the most important things about wildknowledge, that made is useful for geography education was the ability to geotag images.

Geotagging is adding geographical data to an object, for example marking where a photo was taken. By geotagging photos we can plot them on a map and build up a picture of where all the photos were taken.

Geotagging also works with other services, like Twitter, so show where users are broadcasting from, and this presents us with a whole host of possibilities.

The Geography department and the e-learning team are looking at ways to utilise flickr's geotagging in education. This project is looking to use flickr's native geotagging ability to recreate functions that may be prohibitively expensive for many schools.

This project is still in it's formative stages at present. Watch this post for further developments