My #BYOD4L Story (Part 1)

In advance of the fifth run of bring your own device for learning (#BYOD4L) and inspired by Sheila McNeil’s post “#BYOD4L A story of personal and professional needs and wants“, I thought that I too would reflect on my experience of my last three #BYOD4Ls.

Looking back at my Twitter Archive, I find that my first #BYOD4L contribution was a retweet on 14th July 2014:

I’m struggling to find any blog posts from what was then the 2nd run of #BYOD4L (the first looks to have been in January 2014) so I probably only engaged via Twitter and Google+.

I note that I was sticking my nose in quite early!

For curation, it looks like I was favouring these tools:

Reviewing these today, Diigo, is being updated automatically, I’m an inactive curator on Anne Hole’s BYOD4L Flipboard, I’m still using “favourites” on twitter but have stopped using Pocket, Pearltrees and Evernote!

I’ve had a dig around the Google+ site and Twitter but can’t find anything that I actually created that first outing, but here are a couple of shares that are worth revisiting:

And some opinions that I expressed:

As this post is already getting quite long and #LTHEChat 72 is about to start, I’ll stop there, and continue this story in Part 2 tomorrow.

Alternative Virtual Learning Environment

My contribution to #101 Creative Ideas

Contributor: Chris Jobling @cpjobling

Idea: Use Microsoft OneNote class notebook as a VLE and set yourself and your students free.

Practitioner comments: Students have access to my content on any device, I can annotate my notes in class, there’s a shared space for individual and group work, students can provide a portfolio of their work that is easy for me to mark and give feedback.

Credits: I was inspired to try it by Marjolein Hoekstra curator of OneNote Central (@OneNoteC)

Links: www.onenote.com

View original post

#BYOD4L V – This Time it’s Personal

Bring Your Own Device for Learning HashtagBack in January for its fifth run is the excellent Bring Your Own Device for Learning (#BYOD4L) online CPD-fest. Covering the 5Cs, Connecting, Communicating, Curating, Collaborating and Creating, this “course” aims to share great ideas and build communities. Concentrating on portable educational technology that you can use with yourself, your colleagues and your students, you’re guaranteed to discover something that will enable you and them to be more effective. And at the same time you’ll find yourself becoming part of a growing community of like-minded souls.

I’ve participated three times already and it’s a really rewarding if hectic 5 days. This year’s facilitators will be Sheila MacNeil (@sheilamcn, Alex Spiers (@alexgspiersand Neil Withnell (@neilwithnell and they introduced the course by web-cast during yesterday’s final day of the ALT Winter Conference. You can find out more and a recording of the web-cast here:
#BYOD4L V – this time it’s personal.

The community has been invited to contribute so expect to see me there.

#edventcityunilead

The Learning Enhancement and Development team at City University London (@CityUniLEaD]) is publishing a learning enhancement and development suggestion every day up until Christmas using the twitter hashtag #eventcityunilead.

Here they are, automatically updated as they are published:

Blackboard Learn v BB Student App (1)

One of my first findings while looking at the first app of 12 apps for Christmas is that the content viewer in the BB Student App doesn’t display Blackboard Learn’s own content very well:

I wondered why so I did an experiment with Chrome for iPhone, and the content displays fine.

In a follow up to my tweets, Sue Tucker (@sueinasp) pointed out that even the basic rich text handling is inferior.

So I have to wonder why developers keep building inferior versions of their web apps as native apps in the mistaken belief that’s the only kind their users will accept.

I also have to ask Blackboard why their Student App’s content viewer isn’t just an embedded Safari web browser? Or alternatively, why not disinvest in the mobile apps space and just make Blackboard Learn itself fully responsive?

Progressive Web Apps

If you want to learn more about this topic, Google has coined the term Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) to describe modern-web-browser-based web applications that are as good (if not better) than native web apps. It is also promoting the development of PWAs in its developer advocacy. See, for example, Learn How to Develop the Next Generation of Applications for the Web.

Developer Advocate Christian Heilmann (@codepo8), once of Mozilla and now of Microsoft, also promotes PWAs on his twitter feed and at conference engagements. For example see:

Some unexpected consequences

An unexpected consequence of moving from my self-hosted WordPress blog to WordPress.com was that my embedded Storifys stopped working, I lost some images, and several mysterious links to twitter javascript had appeared. A few minutes with the documentation confirmed what I guessed to be true that WordPress.com (for good security reasons) doesn’t allow arbitrary embedded HTML and JavaScripts to be included in posts and pages delivered from the hosted service.

I did discover that there are good blogger-friendly shortcuts that allow bloggers to easily embed some types of media into their posts and pages. So it turned out that to change my embedded tweets, I simply had to replace the embed code from that I obtained from Twitter with the URL of the tweet on a line by itself. Like this for this one https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/804282759120306176:

There is no embed code though for Storify, so I had to replace the embedded stories from the last few months with plain old links.

I also had to find and re-upload a few images that had vanished.

I think this work is now complete, but do let me know if you find anything odd in the archives.

Another unexpected consequence of this need to update my pages is that some posts have been re-posted and announced again on my social media sites. I didn’t intend to spam you honest!