Practical Aptitude Tests
Each year our Engineering Dept assess the practical abilities of students wanting to access our Engineering courses. They tried the Practical Aptitude Tests on our current level three cohort to see if they would be suitable to use.  Staff and students quickly established that the questions were too difficult for our learners but the principle of the tests are perfect for our needs.  If anyone uses or knows of a simplified version of this please let me know.  Thanks.

13th March 2013

Our "toolbox" meeting this afternoon received inputs from teaching staff, admin staff and a learner. It was interesting to hear the differing views on some of the tools that we have selected to try out, and further interesting to get feedback from a learner who agreed to access the toolbox using her IPhone. I'll be collating the inputs through tomorrow morning, and I will publish the findings in the blog, tomorrow.

We have decided to try out Go!Animate, Animoto, Morguefile and Google Forms with a view to completing our deliberations by the middle of next week. We have two staff using Tablet technology, two staff using "ordinary" PC technology, and a second learner who will use Tablet technology, to access the toolbox.

Terry McHale   

12th March 2013

We would, ideally, like to find some mechanism for improving our "Reviewing learners' progress", as I am sure we all have differing systems and procedures for collecting and analysing this sort of information. In Utopia, I would like to find a "tool" that could measure learners’ progress from one step of the journey, to the next. And, of course, this tool would then benchmark the improvement, or progress, within each step against each step for each learner, cohort, group, or curriculum area. Thus enabling an identification of any "weaknesses", or good practice.  Hmmmm.

Inter-Action MK are in!

Many thanks to Andrew for help with the tricky bit of getting in here. First thing we'll try is to see what we can do with Picasa. I've got a pile of great photos of our offices and we're in a lovely setting so that's going to be a useful job and may attract more people to come and see what we do.

Humber Learning Consortium staff trying a team toolbox day

Humber Learning Consortium are using their staff team day on 20th March to test and assess the applications, so there should be plenty of feedback on the toolbox by the end of play on that date.

Quizlet

I have just used Quizlet to design a resource using words connected to employability. This was easy to create and will work really well with helping entry level learners understand some of the terminology they come across on job application forms. The flash cards that can be created will also help many with their spelling when creating their personal profiles.

The resource is quick, easy and well presented with the benefit of being able to constently further develop the resource.

I will be demonstrating this to my English tutors as a way to help develop the speaking and listening area of the curriculum.

Wendy

Tablet ease?

Initial thoughts on the "tools"
We have a consensus that Go Animate and Animoto seem to be the most "interesting" for staff to try out. We're taking the view that we would like to try them out with ordinary desk-based PC systems access, and also with Tablet system access, to try and identify and weaknesses in using new technologies.
Google Docs and Google Forms seem to crop up an awful lot, in the toolbox, and I might take some swaying from using SkyDrive (my favoured Cloud Hub resource). More testing to do!  06 March 2013

We have four members of staff accessing the toolbox, two from the admin/systems side and two of our direct teaching staff. Our initial focus is upon briefly accessing all of the steps of the leaner journey, with a view to arriving at a consensus of opinion, on four elements of the toolbox. Supplementary to this focus, two of our participants are using 10" Tablet technology to access the toolbox, hoping to provide a low-level critique of accessibility, ease of use, and overall usefulness. If we identify that the Tablet technology works well, we aim to involve learners in accessing the toolbox.

Initially, our collective thoughts are that the toolbox offers an interesting number of "tools", but a number of tools overlap into other steps of the learner journey. Provisionally we like the Animoto, Go!Animate, and Job Search tools.  08 March 2013