Phil Plunkett talks about a slide gauge and creating tactile tasks in numeracy

The video features Phil Plunkett describing a ‘deliberate act of teaching’ in numeracy, and shows how a visual, tactile task and specially designed tool can make it easier to link the abstract and concrete, while also providing ‘hooks’ to help students remember underlying concepts.

You can access the complete blog post about the initiative that is described in the video.

get excited and change things: How the library is engaging with Unitec's new eLearning strategy - a case study (Fran Skilton and Penny Dugmore)

Fran Skilton started by giving some of the driver around strategy at Unitec in general and in the Library in particular. The two key points made were the Living Curriculum and Innovation in Teaching. Complementary to this are the principles of learning and teaching (recently improved).

The library has been involved with the new eLearning strategy and have been providing, for example, environments that embed literacies. Two of the librarians joined the  seventy-eight community elearning coordinators on campus.


E-resources seen as equal partners to paper-based resources, and often preferred by some students. The library have deliberated decided to purchase other formats as well. The lending stats are decreasing, but their door stats are increasing. There is demand for the library to remain open longer. There is a shift towards being a learning commons.




The librarians are changing as well and technology is no longer seen purely as the domain as geeks. The instant messaging version has been upgraded, and there has been a large number of queries from students. Several teachers have also asked to have the chat widget for the library to be installed on their Moodle sites as well. People's attitudes to student communication online are changing. Library Guides are being updated and have become quite organic. The look and feel are sometimes a controversial subject of discussion.

The training in the library needs to change as well. With the introduction of the elearning strategy the library has started collaborating with other institutional partners. These are all seen as exciting, positive breakthroughs, and the future will include further investigations into the potential still to be explored. 

Management, Marketing and Ning-ing

Today, on the auspicious day of 9th September 2009 (09.09.09) Vickel Narayan and I facilitated a workshop with the Department of Management and Marketing as a requested follow up session to a more generic Web 2.0 session, which Vickel had previously run with the group. Prior to the workshop we worked with the department to identify outcomes that they would require from two Ning sessions (number 2 in October) - this helped ensure that participants voices were 'heard' beforehand, and also that we didn't run the session that we thought they wanted, as opposed to the session that they actually wanted :-)

Session 1, today's, was a hands-on session that focussed on utilising a Ning space for their Department which could be used as a way to build more of a community, communicate and share. There was also conversation around negotiated guidelines, which they would later need to discuss. The agreed guidelines would be used to shape interactions they all felt comfortable with within the online forums, the 'identity' they shared with colleagues, and the content that was considered appropriate.

By the end of the session all participants had joined the Ning, added a profile and photo, posted to a forum, written and posted a blog reflection, and searched for, embedded and shared a video.

Session 2 will focus on using Ning with learners.

After a start where there was some trepidation, the room was filled with laughter and talking. One participant commented in their blog at the end that they were really happy that everyone was involved and having a bit of fun! A further participant came up and said she had been really anxious before attending the session as she felt she would not be able to do or accomplish anything. In fact, she had achieved a lot and was really over the moon.

Watch this space for the next installment.

Participation in Sports....

Yesterday, Monday 31st August, Diana Ayling, Ed Flagg, Trisha Hanifin and I made our way over to the Sports' Department building and having located important things (like the kitchen to make tea) we set about re-arranging the furniture so that everyone would be able to sit around the table and share laptops between them. We promptly fired up the laptops, opened the browser and the Ning that had been set up specifically for Sports. Several people had already added their profiles and a sense of community was being built by the addition of photographs from.


Diana artfully facilitated the session as I typed notes like a mad woman and fielded the occasional request for technical assistance. The session started with introductions and each person chose a category off the board which they had to describe (around assessment, evaluation, and design etc). The activity encouraged a lot of engagement, with a healthy mix of competition, encouragement and humour.

After an overview of some of Fink's ideas, Diana encouraged everyone to login to Mindmeister and start putting together the key aspects of a Level 5 course. There were some of the 'so what do we do? ' questions, but then everyone got up to speed. Someone commented that they were chuffed that we were using the same software that was used to create some of the earlier graphics that Diana had used. There was a continual buzz and exchange of ideas, with everyone on task and engaged - in fact everyone was so involved that Diana had to work hard to get everyone back into focus.



Diana wrapped up by giving everyone a quick tour of some of the key resources in the Ning and encouraged people to go and have a look at some of these resources, thereby modelling some of the uses of the Ning. She in particular introduced reflective evaluation, introducing the blogs and targeted feedback, and described what the participants were going to do as 'homework' before the next session.

All in all there was a great mixture of fun, inquisitiveness, and professionalism, which Diana worked to encourage. Roll on the next session which is on 22nd September.

Podcasting for LLN - a taster session

Vickel Narayan and I ran a 1 hour workshop (with Yong Liu as invaluable support) at the LLN symposium at Unitec NZ on 15th July 2009. The abstract for the session was: "Ongoing results from the field indicate that using multimedia with learners can be highly effective, especially where LLN challenges are being faced. Have you considered using audio tools? Would you like to try podcasting? In this 1 hour session you will find out how to adapt existing resources to audio, record in a digital format, and make the resulting files easily available to students as podcasts. You will need to bring print material (about 1-2 pages of text) which you have found students have found challenging in the past."

It was a little frantic during the setting up as we arrived 1/2 an hour early to get all of the laptops set up (with headphones that we'd begged, stolen and borrowed - mainly Vickel). A compromise was reached and the 26 participants rolled up. We had set up a Ning (http://podcastunitec.ning.com/) for the session with resources participants could access after the 'taster' workshop. We had also set up a Podomatic site so that podcasts could easily be uploaded (http://unitecnzpodcasts.podOmatic.com). After introducing the session and showing a great short video that explained what podcasts are (http://podcastunitec.ning.com/video/whats-a-podcast), we asked everyone to work in pairs at a computer. We used a 'how to...' video that went over the basics of recording an audio file in Audacity, exporting it, and then uploading it to Podomatic.

There were some glitches, but on the whole everything went smoothly and everyone enthusiastically figured out what to do. Toward the end of the session we played a successful podcast that had been made and uploaded during the session. It seemed to go really well and people seemed to be pretty inspired.

The feedback for the session was mainly positive. People were excited by the possibilities and potential for LLN, and others had a real sense of achievement, mastering skills that they did not previously have. The hands on nature of the session was appreciated, although the very large number of participants who had been signed up meant that even with Vickel, Yong and myself, it was tricky to keep up with requests for assistance. The ideal size of sessions like this is around 10 participants maximum. Some people were frustrated by technical glitches (for instance the Podomatic site ground almost to a halt once 15 sets of people started to upload podcasts...to the same account. This meant that some people were not able to listen to their podcast during the session, but had a link and login details in the Ning so that they could have a listen later - not quite the same though). All in all, though, an invigorating and exhausting session! :-)