I have found my VLE's best friend!

Embed.ly is an amazing site that I have only just discovered. I have been working on my VLE, and I was working on the topic of advertising. I needed a way of embeding  widgets of magazines onto the VLE. I know I could have just had a link to the sites but I thought a widget would look more pleasing and be more interactive. 

Embed.ly is a site that will turn any URL into a widget HTML code for your site. What's also good about this site is that it doesn't ask you to sign up, you can start straight away by clicking create embed.

All you have to do is copy and paste the web address and click embed! Then it gives you a preview of what it will look like. To complete just copy the embed code and the bottom and paste into your web page! 

                                                                   



This allowed me to add magazine widgets to my VLE which was extremely handy for the topic of advertising.

Student's work!

 http://creativemediastudents.weebly.com/

I have finally had time to upload the students work onto my VLE. I was really happy with the work they did for their last project and I'm excited to share it with you. Now on the homepage of my VLE there is a slideshow of all the students work from the last project 'Dreams'. Changing the home page for the website to the students work makes it look a lot more personal. It looks like their website rather than mine. 

Creating the slideshow was extremely easy. In edit mode I went under the basic tab and they have a varitey of free things you can add to the website. I chose slideshow in the end instead of a gallery because on a slide show all the work gets seen and it keeps moving rather than having to select.

 











I asked the students to pick their favourite image from the project (they had to produce between 4-6), and I used it for the slideshow. Each image gets around 4 seconds, I tried out which speed would work best because I didn't want the slide show sitting on one image, I wanted all the work to have a chance at being shown.

I'm also glad that the slide show function has an autoplay button. At first I thought you could only use the slideshow if you hit the play button. But under advanaced you can change this.

Using Today's Meet with my Post 16's

https://todaysmeet.com/

What is Today's Meet?

Before half term my students had a deadline to complete work for their visual diary and 4-6 images to go with it. The students needed to critique each others work and give constructive criticism. If it's your first time it can be quite hard to think on the spot and give your response straight away so I decided to use Today's Meet.

WHY?

Today's Meet gives the students a minute to think before they answer. They have a chance to write what they want to say, see if it makes sense, then send. It definitely helped, the students felt more relaxed and enjoyed the activity. 

After they finished writing I would go through each response and ask them to expand as they are only given something like 140 characters to respond in. The students were already prepared with what they are going to say and feel more confident to say it. 

When I first thought of using this I was nervous, it has lots of benefits but it is also a tool to cause distraction. I was worried about them not concentrating and writing silly things. 

Ok, I admit they did write silly things. But it wasn't as distracting as I first thought. Yes sometimes I would get the odd silly comment, but it was never anything negative, which was important for me. My students need to feel safe in the classroom environment. 

I would recommend others to use it in their classrooms. I know you will get silly comments, but as long as their positive and may even get a little giggle out of the students, it doesn't really matter. It makes it enjoyable and theirs. As long as the work gets done I don't mind having a giggle with my students, I think it's an important part of being a teacher, being able to enjoy your lessons. This is one thing that makes me think I would never enjoy teaching solely online. I would miss the teaching experience too much.

New resources on my VLE

I've started to put new resources on my VLE. Pinterest is my most used teaching tool, I use it practically every lesson when I am introducing a new subject, photographer or project. On the VLE I have put a section called Pinterest boards, Pinterest allows you to create small 'widgets' (just a smaller version of Pinterest with a link), where my students can find all the images and resources I used in a particular lesson. The students have found this really useful, and no longer ask me what photographers we looked at last lesson. 
 Something that I really want to do with my VLE was to create Photoshop tutorials for my students. Tutorial videos are huge and you will see thousands on Youtube. But I want to create specific tutorials, looking at what we have done that lesson, or what I think will be useful for the future.I have learnt loads off video tutorials, they are quick and easy to follow as you can pause it whenever you need to, and you can watch it as many times as needed. 

A downside to using the weebly for education site is that to upload video you need to be paying the subscription fee, and my VLE is a free web page so I don't have this feature. But you can have HTML code. So I uploaded the tutorial to my Youtube account then took the HTML and copied that onto my web page. 

It was really quick to do and the video can play straight from my website. So it doesn't send you to the Youtube channel, which I like because I wanted the video actually embedded onto the website, I didn't want it to send the students to the Youtube account.


 

The start of my VLE (virtual learning enviroment)

The website I used to create my VLE is Weebly. I tried a few different websites but I found them very limited with the design, and very limited with the amount of space. I used Weebly to build my photography website, and I find it extremely easy to use, it has plenty of space and it is well designed. So I was very happy to find out that Weebly had another website builder for education.

I hadn't seen this website builder before, so I had to do a bit of research to see if it would work as a VLE. With this version you can add a class to your website, each student gets a log in, and they each get there own basic web page. I'm not sure if I am going to get the students to use their own web page as part of the class because I don't think I will have enough time to go through it with them, as they have a lot of deadlines coming up. But I will encourage them to use it in their own time. 

I kept the design for the website quite simple at the moment as the students are still getting used to it. But for the home page of the website I plan to have a gallery of the students work. 

 The builder has a two or three different ways of displaying images, I am hoping to have something like these two on the front page, but with the student's work. I haven't quite decided which one I prefer.

The website also allows for students to submit their work online and you get it in an email. I have recently tried this with my students. The only problem we encountered was that you could only upload one submission at a time. Since I was getting the students to upload between 4-6 photographs, this proved difficult. I have suggested from now on that the students create PDF files and upload them instead of each individual image. 

 I am looking forward to adding more resources to this website and to see how it develops!

Pinterest has become my best friend

I show a lot of photographs in my classes, and I mean a lot! I think I have used Power point once out of all of my lessons, as it's just so much easier to use a photo friendly site like Pinterest. 

 Where I am placed they don't use Pinterest as a teaching tool, because they never really had too. There isn't a lot of 'chalk and talk', because that's the nature of the course. I don't do a lot of 'chalk and talk', but I am aware that I need to introduce the students to different photographers, and I like to show video clips or articles to go along with the subject. The other lecturers have been doing this for years and don't hesitate to just bring up the videos or websites during the session, but this is because they have the confidence to do that. I am very new to this teaching malarkey. Having all my resources in one place makes my planning and my life easier. 

 In my more recent lessons, when I have been looking at photographers, I have put a lot more work on the Pinterest board than I'm actually going to look at. I leave this page open on the Interactive whiteboard and during the lesson if the students want to go up and look at some other work, they can do so. Just by clicking directly on the board. This gives them more access to resources if they want it.  I have circled the images I actually used to present the lesson.

The last great thing I'm going to say about Pinterest, is that my students have instant access to all the resources I used in class. All they have to do is go to my Pinterest page and all the lessons are there! This helps them find exactly what they are looking for when doing visual diary work. Of course like other colleges and universities they have a virtual learning environment (VLE) that they use, Moodle. But in my lessons I am mainly showing photographs and videos, Pinterest is a much easier platform to look at images and video rather than Moodle. Pinterest is for me, the most useful teaching tool out there.

We now have Interactive whiteboards!

I say that we now have Interactive Whiteboards, but they have been there since I started back at my placement, I just never blogged about it! 

The course I am at placement on, had moved to different block a year ago. The course I am on has amazing resources, but the interactive white boards weren't installed in there new rooms. But they have just had ( about a month ago) new ones installed! Previously, they were using flat screen TV's to teach, which was good, but the Interactive white board is about twice the size! Which means the students can see more and learn better. 

The students enjoy being able to walk up to the screen and take part in making notes and picking images to look at. It is a lot easier to teach with an interactive whiteboard, mainly because I have to demonstrate tools on Photoshop all the time.
 

For anyone who hasn't seen Photoshop before, this is what it looks like. All the menus and tools are tiny! Trying to teach a class of 16 how to use this is pretty complicated, especially if they are all struggling to read off a tiny screen across the room from them. The size of the interactive white board makes it so much easier for students to learn and see, and for me to teach.