Adventures in Technology Enhanced Learning @ UoP
Click on our blog posts below to view what the team have been up to, where we’ve been and what inspires us in learning and teaching. We are always looking for keen bloggers to contribute to our site, if you are a University of Portsmouth member of staff and interested in writing a post for Tel Tales then please get in touch with your ideas.
Today we’re looking at Slack — a messaging app that aims to reduce the amount of email sent between people working in teams. The app is available for iOS, Android, Windows and MacOS. Although it’s aimed primarily for teams of people in the workplace, it’s applicable to teams working together on any project. The benefits of Slack will vary depending on how you and those you work with communicate: if you chat a lot, share files and thoughts, and like the fact that everything is searchable, then Slack might just be for you. We use it in the 12Apps office and we love it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RJZMSsH7-g
Slack requires you (or someone in your group) to take the lead and set up your team. This will be the place all of your communication is stored. Once you’ve done that you’ll need to invite the people you want to work with.
Slack organizes messages into what it calls channels. You’ll start off with some default channels, but it’s best to take the time to set up some of your own. Think of these as topics of conversation — in the 12Apps team we tend to set up a new channel for each project we are working on; this helps keep our chat on-topic and focused. Of course we all need a break so it’s also a good idea to create a channel for general off-topic chat, and perhaps even the occasional animated gif!
Notifications are extremely customisable in Slack. You can be notified for all messages, if you wish, but since that might become overwhelming there are options to reduce the amount of pop-ups you receive. You can instead choose to be notified only when your name is mentioned; or, which is what many of us in the 12Apps team do, you can enter keywords that notify you when they are used in messages by others. For example, if you were working on part of project that involved the use of Moodle, you could enter the keyword ‘Moodle’ and it would notify you when someone mentioned it. It’s a clever way of reducing the distractions that endless notifications can provide.
What’s crucial is that the app keeps everything up to date across all of your devices — that obviously includes your messages, but also the notification settings we have just looked at. These are all adjustable on one device and then they populate across to the other devices on which you have Slack installed.
Setting up open channels to discuss projects (or distinct parts of projects) has meant our team has been able to share much more of what we are working on with each other; this has helped us contribute ideas and thoughts to projects that we wouldn’t necessarily have been involved with before.
Having all your ideas about a project in one place proves to be convenient when you realise you need to search through your chat history for a specific exchange or file you sent to another team member a some time ago. Slack’s aim is that you spend less time searching for files and content, and spend more time creating — hence it’s tagline: ‘Be less busy’.
This is one of those apps where you get out what you put in — so if there’s a group of you who need to work together, give it a go!
Ideas for using the app:
To find out more about Slack, check out how the TEL team are using Slack in ‘Is your team ‘slack’ing when it comes to communication ? ‘
Duolingo is a free language-learning app that works on iOS, Android and Windows mobile devices as well as the web. With the help of Duolingo you can attempt to learn around fourteen different languages, including most of the main European languages such as French, German and Spanish. The selection of languages available on Duolingo continues to increase, so you’re sure to find one you’d like to have a go at! The video embedded below gives you an overview of what the app aims to do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyzJ2Qq9Abs
Duolingo is a brightly coloured app that’s fun and simple to use. Once you’ve signed up for an account you choose the language you’d like to learn, and then proceed through a series of lessons of increasing difficulty. Repetition is encouraged – if you don’t grasp something straight away, the app will suggest you spend more time on that specific area.
Duolingo is brightly coloured and engaging
In terms of lesson style, Duolingo makes heavy use of gamification. Each lesson consists of a variety of challenges – filling in missing text, choosing the correct meaning of words, translating spoken words or even pronouncing words or phrases into your microphone. All of these challenges are instantly graded, so you get immediate feedback on what you got correct and what you got wrong. If you get an answer incorrect you’ll lose a heart, and once you’re out of hearts you have to start over again – just like a game. The app gives you hints on what to work on, based on your scores.
To keep you coming back day after day, Duolingo records how many days in a row you spend learning your chosen language(s). This ‘streak’ keeps increasing until you miss a day, so make sure you don’t!
Whether you need to learn the basics of a new language for work or leisure, hope to get more out of your summer holiday, or want to get a head start on your IWLP course – Duolingo is a fun (and free) way to begin.
Ideas for Duolingo:
If you’d like to learn more about Duolingo visit their website – and have a go!
Lynda.com is a website designed to help you gain new skills in a variety of different subjects. As well as supporting your own learning it is possible to share courses, create playlists, embed courses into Moodle, all making it easy to support the learning of students and staff. All staff and students at the University of Portsmouth, have unlimited access to Lynda.com which contains a library of high-quality instructional videos covering a vast range of skills.
With more than 5,000 courses taught by industry experts – and more added every week – Lynda.com is designed for all levels of learners, and it’s available whenever you’re ready to learn. You can access from www.port.ac.uk/lynda, directly from Lynda.com or you can view courses on your mobile device by downloading the Lynda.com app.
Searching for a course in Lynda.com is as easy as using the search bar to find a specific course, or you can browse through categories if you aren’t looking for a course on a specific topic. You can then watch the lesson that you’re after.
As mentioned above, a Lynda.com app for iOS and Android is also available, and this enables you to learn on the go, it’s perfect for using that train journey to learn something new, or even refresh a topic you’ve learnt in the past.
Across the University, students and staff have accessed Lynda.com and viewed nearly 2000 hours of learning so far. Content from Lynda.com has been embedded into Moodle as part of provision by the Graduate School, it has also been used in the Enterprise toolkit. Many students are using Lynda.com to support their studies, for example the top course in Creative and Cultural Industries is for 3DS Max, animation software directly relevant to some of the courses. In Science statistics tools such as SPSS are popular, while general skills such as Excel and Time Management are popular overall.
You can use Lynda.com to access learning at anytime on any device to support your learning, professional development or teaching. It is possible to share courses, create playlists, embed courses into Moodle, all making it easy to support the learning of students and staff.
With Lynda.com you’ll get:
To find out more and log into Lynda.com, visit www.port.ac.uk/lynda
Please also join our Lynda.com Google Community, keep up to date, get ideas and it would be great to share how you’ve used Lynda.com in your own learning and to support others
Check out ‘Lynda.com – Online training for everyone‘ written by our very own Lynda.com guru – Adrian Sharkey.
Today we’re looking at something new for this year, H5P. H5P is a content creation app available on the web and in Moodle at the University of Portsmouth. H5P allows you to create interesting and varied interactive content like Video Quizzes, Flashcards, Picture Sliders, Memory Games, and more! You can do all this really quickly through an easy to understand interface – with no coding knowledge required.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W7NlAfTZU4
The H5P website allows you to sign up for an account and save created interactive elements online. If you use the app within Moodle you don’t have to sign up, and you create your content directly inside the familiar Moodle user interface.
H5P gives you a variety of options when it comes to creating content. While we won’t go into the whole list here, a selection of the most interesting options include:
H5P takes you through setting up whichever type of content you choose, with varying degrees of success. Some content types are easier to get to grips with than others, though to mitigate some of this complexity there is an active community forum, whose members are more than willing to help experienced and new users alike. Of course in addition to this, our own elearn team offer training and assistance for staff who want to get to grips with H5P.
Each content type has pre-made examples for you to try out, this helps you visualise whether a certain content type fits what you are trying to accomplish, though as always we’ve found that the best way to explore all the options that H5P offers is to sign up for an account and have a have a go with the different tools yourself.
Whilst creating content on the H5P site is excellent for embedding it a variety of places, the Moodle integration is really good if you want to record the scores students get in each of the activities, as H5P will record them in the Moodle gradebook, using H5P from the website won’t do this.
It’s worth noting that you’ll find that the tools that are offered on the main H5P website may differ from those that are available in Moodle directly.
H5P is an excellent way to create new and interesting types of course content for students. It’s easy to get stuck creating the same sorts of activities for students over and over, so H5P offers a simple way to expand what you can offer students studying your course.
It’s also really useful for students who want to create website content for their projects really quickly and easily.
If you’d like some more information on H5P and what it can do for you, contact elearn and ask about our training programme.
One query which we often receive from students here in TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning), is that they are concerned that they have one or more units missing from their Moodle homepage. This is usually because the unit(s) they are enquiring about, are for Teaching Block 2.
Teaching Block 2 units are normally hidden from student view until the day students return from the Christmas vacation, which this year is Monday 8th January 2018. However, this is not always the case as some units have two different cohorts of students attached to them. These units may have a short name that looks similar to this: UXXXXX-17SEP & -17JAN or this UXXXXX-17SEP & UXXXXX-17JAN. Depending how the unit has been set up, both cohorts may have access to the unit in September, or maybe the January cohort won’t be able to see the unit until the lecturer releases it to them at a later date.
Lecturers decide when to release their Teaching Block 2 unit(s). Some lecturers prefer to release them when the students break up for the Christmas vacation so that they can start looking at them, while others wait until the first day back or when the first session starts. Some students may be able to see their Teaching Block 2 units now. It really is up to the individual lecturer.
We’re often are asked why does the January code not reflect the new year – for example, why does the code say 17JAN and not 18JAN, as in 2018. This is because the code is taken from the year that the academic year started in, so as this academic year started in 2017, the code is 17JAN.
This is not to be confused with courses that actually start in January 2018 where there might be the odd short name that does end in 18JAN.
It’s all very confusing at times, but whatever course you’re on and whenever it started, as long as you can see your unit when the lecturer says you should be able to see it, that’s the main thing. If you can’t see your unit(s), please email us at servicedesk@port.ac.uk.
In the meantime, the TEL Team would like to wish everyone Season’s Greetings and a Happy New Year.
Image credits: https://pixabay.com/en/sparrows-christmas-christmas-time-2900850
Today’s app is NUS Extra, a free lifestyle app to accompany the student discount card, which University of Portsmouth staff can also take advantage of. Available on IOS and Android, with over 200 exclusives discounts from well-known brands, the app is the easiest way to keep track of them all.
When you first install the app on your phone you are prompted to enter your student (or staff) email address and password.
Once signed in, you can view your NUS account details and start searching for discounts in your surrounding area. You can search for well-known brands, find the nearest ones to your location and view the discounts they are currently offering.
The various discounts are organised into categories, these are then subdivided by brand. The categories you can browse through include:
A nice little feature to the app is that you can also save your favourite brands in one place so they are literally a click away when you are out and about and want to find out the latest discounts and offers.
It’s great if you are popping out for a bite to eat as the app will flag up the nearest deals in your area. It also works just the same if you are off on a shopping trip, which comes in handy this time of year if you are looking to save some money on Christmas presents!
If you haven’t claimed your NUS Extra card already make sure you do to take advantage of all the discounts available out there and download the app so you don’t miss out on any of the offers!
Today’s app is Smiling Mind, a free mindfulness app for iOS, Android and the web, created by a not-for-profit organisation of the same name based in Australia.
Mindfulness centres around taking time out of your day to become aware of what is happening at that moment. When you practice mindfulness you focus on what you are feeling and thinking right now. It’s an experience many people find therapeutic and relaxing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sceq4mtZhjI
Once you’ve signed up, Smiling Mind takes you through an ‘introduction to mindfulness’ which gives you a taster of some of the exercises you can expect on the full programs. It’s worth noting here that the programs are all free of charge (unlike similar apps which follow a ‘freemium’ model, allowing you to download the app itself free of charge but then asking for payment for the particular features or programs you’d like to take).
Smiling Mind offers programs for all ages, from children as young as seven all the way up to adult. What seems to work well in this app is how the courses are tailored for specific age ranges, and so can address issues that people in particular age groups may need to address – meeting new friends, dealing with change, and so on.
There are also programs available for “Sport” and “the Workplace”. These are specifically designed to help you deal with the stresses and strains of those two particular environments.
The app asks you to rate your mood (pictured here on the right) based on a set of criteria. Doing this provides you with a record of how your mood varies from day to day, and helps you to assess whether working on your mindfulness is improving how you feel.
Mindfulness is something that many people don’t consider to be important, but research shows that it can help us stay calm and relaxed during our day. The app is free, so why not check it out and see if mindfulness can help you?
Ideas for using the app
If you would like to find out more about mindfulness and other associated mental health topics, you can contact the Student Wellbeing Service on MyPort, who offer help and assistance to those who might want to talk to someone about a specific issue.
Today we’re looking at Evernote, a popular note-taking app available on iOS, Android & the web. The write up proved a popular in 2015 and it has such a variety of educational (and personal) applications that I thought it worth revisiting this year!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pjn6YkCY2yA
The app allows you to create a record of anything from simple shopping lists, to notebooks full of research images, files and notes for your course, all synced over the web for you to access wherever you happen to be. The video embedded in this section gives you an introduction to how Evernote looks, and some of what it can do. It’s well worth taking a minute to watch this!
Evernote has a consistent look and feel across the web and the mobile apps so you’ll know where features are wherever you are using it.
Once you have downloaded the app on your chosen platform, you’ll be able to sign up to an account, and then you can begin. You can create things called: Notes, Notebooks and Stacks.
The easiest way to think of these are that Notes are stored in Notebooks, and Notebooks are stored in Stacks. Stacks are groups of Notebooks that may have a related theme or topic. For instance you could have a Stack of Notebooks with distinct themes, but which all ultimately relate your dissertation. This structure is the key to utilising Evernote to it’s full potential, as once you have everything in Evernote, it’s all searchable!
Note, into Notebook, into Stack, it’s simple really!
We should mention the elephant in the room (i’m here all week): cost. Whilst there are paid tiers Plus, Premium and Business, the good news is that for most people the free ‘Basic’ option is more than sufficient for average use. If you really get on with Evernote then it might be worth paying for the increased upload space and extra features but it’s certainly not necessary.
Another pretty cool thing you can do is link your Evernote account to IFTTT (If This Then That) which is an online service that links up your various different apps with each other. For example, you may like to save your favourite tweets to Evernote, or perhaps save all screenshots you’ve taken on your iPhone to a specific notebook within Evernote. IFTTT makes this easy (and automated), we would encourage you to check out the website as there are lots of other uses both for Evernote and IFTTT.
You really get out what you put in when it comes to Evernote – jump in head first you might find it invaluable to your daily workflow.
One practical example is that each note that you add can be tagged with any number of terms or phrases that you can later use to sort through your notes. For example, if you were using the app to collect research for your dissertation, you could add a tag to mark every webpage, photo, article and lecture note you save, with it’s topic. Then, when you come to write down your ideas, you’ll have a list of your researched topics and their corresponding notes at your fingertips.
It works for collaborative working too – you can share notes with other Evernote users, allowing you to contribute for example in a group research project, or perhaps compare notes on a topic you have learned about in that day’s class.
If you (student or staff member) would like to dig a little deeper into the uses of Evernote, this article is an honest account of how a former Evernote skeptic makes use of the app in every walk of life.
Today we’re looking at an app for students, and one that’s important for all staff to know about: WhatsUp?. WhatsUp? is an app for University of Portsmouth students availiable on iOS and Android platforms, which provides 24/7 safeguarding, wellbeing, and emotional health support.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YENd0n2l0L4
WhatsUp? is an app which is supported by the Student Wellbeing Service, it’s an anonymous service, once you’ve signed up the data you record will only be used to identify you if staff had serious concerns that you were at risk of harming yourself or others.
Once you’ve signed up, your identifying information is kept private so you can record your thoughts & feelings anonymously in a personal journal, update your mood, or even find some inspirational quotes. The homepage provides you with a series of menu choices to access the different features of the app, it’s not complicated and is very straightforward to use. This is very much a personal app, and there is no outside contact from anyone unless you instigate it first.
The MyPort pages give a nice summary of the app, which lists the main features of the app as:
Mental health is something that is often overlooked, and it is tremendously important that you look after your own state of mind as your work through University. The WhatsUp? app is a
If you are an academic member of staff and you’re concerned about a student’s state of mind, you might find it useful to speak to the wellbeing service, but it’s also good to know about apps like this and to keep students informed of them.
Johny Cassidy
Producer at BBC Business News
Johny’s Bio – Guest-blogger Johny Cassidy is a producer at BBC Business News and masterminded the BBC Disability Works week earlier this year. He tells us how using the latest technology enables him to do his job as a journalist – Johny is blind, so technology is an essential tool. He goes on to say that with greater understanding from employers, disability shouldn’t exclude anyone from the workplace.
“It’s fair to say that technology and the fast pace at which it’s developing has been pivotal to me in my job as a BBC journalist. It’s also not an exaggeration to say, that without it, I simply wouldn’t be able to do my job to the standard expected.
I began losing my eyesight when I was in my teens. The things that the majority of people take for granted slowly began to be taken from me. The simple pleasure of reading a book or accessing information became difficult, and then impossible. That’s when I began looking around to see how technology might be able to bridge that gap, which thankfully it has been able to do.
It’s vital for me as a business and economics journalist to have access to the same information as other people. A normal day will usually start and end with Twitter, which is all accessible for me on my iPhone through the voiceover function, which reads things on the screen out loud through headphones. Apple really changed the landscape for the majority of blind people when it first introduced the iPhone with this access technology built into the operating system as standard. Up until then I had to pay for a separate piece of software which was then integrated into the phone I was using. This was, whilst a useful tool to read texts and to access simple functions on the phone, a clunky solution which wasn’t really fit for purpose. The fact it cost over £600 also meant it was out of reach for a lot of people. Apple changed all that by levelling the playing field and by understanding the need for accessibility in their devices.
By using Twitter I’ve got a direct feed into the financial markets and business publications. I follow thousands of different feeds to ensure the information I’m getting is up to date and accurate. The fact as well that the majority of newspapers and magazines are also available to me on my phone means that, by the time my train to work gets into London, I am usually up to speed with the overnight developments in the business world.
Once I’m in the office the phone is replaced by my laptop. Again this has a voiceover function which allows me to read the hundreds of emails waiting for me. I could of course do this on the train as well, but that time is usually set aside for gathering information.
Once emails have been waded through and either answered or deleted, I then start to look at what stories might be around for the next few days. As a forward planning producer I need to know what’s coming up in order to make sure the dozens of BBC programmes and outlets know what business stories they should be looking at. All these stories are held on a news diary which is, after a lot of collaboration with the developers, also accessible to me with the voiceover function on my laptop. This is perhaps one of the biggest problems I face at work. The myriad of different BBC applications, for news production, both TV and radio and online, all need to be accessible, which means it’s vital that I feed back into the developer teams if I come across any accessibility issues. All sounds pretty straightforward, but for an organisation as big as the BBC and with so many different points of contact, the process doesn’t always go as smoothly as perhaps it should.
Once stories have been identified for the next few days, it’s time to begin the meetings in order to explain to other producers and editors what they should be doing businesswise. My phone is again a really useful tool to take notes and have information I need at these meetings.
The BBC is a fantastic employer of disabled people. The fact that attitudes are finally beginning to change and that more employers are realising that disability isn’t a barrier to work means that the need for technology and solutions to problems will continue to be an ongoing battle. The biggest battle though is still trying to ensure that hiring managers understand that these solutions exist. Many disabled people have dozens of their own workarounds and socalled hacks they use every day in order to work or to simply live. The more people who know what technology as a tool can do in order to push more disabled people into employment the better.
I read a statistic recently which said that around 65% of the jobs our children will be doing when they reach working age don’t even exist yet. That’s a huge concept to try and understand, but it proves how fast technology is moving and the fact that we can’t stand still. We need to be constantly looking around for more innovative ways of harnessing technology in order to be able to do our jobs, whatever they may be.”
Image credit: BBC News
Twitter: @johnycassidy
‘Disability Works: Breaking down barriers in business’ – article by Johny:
www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38962050
‘Tech Tent: Making tech work for everyone’ – article featuring Johny:
www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-39077592
‘Disability Works Special’ – Tech Tent radio programme featuring Johny:
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04t4kcm
JAWS screen reader software:
www.freedomscientific.com/Content/Documents/ProductFlyers/JAWS_Flyer.pdf
‘Sit Down with Johny Cassidy’ – article featuring Johny:
http://towerproject.org.uk/sit-down-with-johny-cassidy/
Today’s app is WiseDrinking, a free health and fitness app which encourages responsible drinking. Available in 37 languages, both on IOS and Android. Developed by Pernod Ricard a french company that produces distilled beverages.
When you first log into the app you are asked to select your country, enter some details about yourself and then you are asked to add some information on your most recent meal, along with (obviously) what you’ve had to drink with it!
You can enter the type of drink and the units consumed from the following options:
Once you’ve added this info for a few different meals you’ll start to build up a picture of your drinking. At any point during the day you can check how many units you’ve consumed to see how close you are to your limit. One nice feature of this app is that you can keep a diary of the amount of alcohol you consume on a daily/weekly basis, which is a great way to keep track of how many units of alcohol you consume over the course of a week, which can sometimes be a surprise! There are also drink related quizzes, advice on what wise drinking is and facts about alcohol metabolism.
The app contains a ‘Get me Home’ section which features a GPS location tracker showing you whereabouts you are, call options to search and phone friends and relatives, a 999 option for emergency services and a transport tracker to show taxis and public transport in your area.
WiseDrinking is a great app for monitoring your alcohol consumption, although, like many health and fitness apps it relies on user input. However once you get into the habit of recording your intake it provides guidance, particularly if you are a little worse for wear and helps you stay aware of how much you are drinking – which could be helpful particularly during the festive season when we all tend to over-indulge!
The University of Portsmouth uses the Turnitin service to provide facilities for plagiarism detection, online marking and as a development tool for academic writing, although most users are interesting in one thing – a number.
Contained within the Originality Report is a Similarity Score out of 100, which many users wrongly believe to a be plagiarism score with a magic number, at which in can be conclusively determined whether plagiarism has or has not occurred. The problem is, this figure can be manipulated, there will also be mitigating circumstances and lastly let us not forget the system is not perfect either – there will be some margin for error.
Crudely speaking the Similarity Score number is a percentage of the words in your document which matched text from other documents that Turnitin searched against. For shorter assignments with a direct question and consequently a more concise correct answer may well therefore see higher score when compared to a longer assignment with more scope to include to include diverse material.
The number of students in your class and whether the assignment has been set in previous years (or at different institutions) may limit the scope for truly original material, that’s not to say a very high score is necessarily acceptable however it does mean that the latest content may not be unique for genuine reasons. An assignment based upon group work is also a recipe for a higher than usual Similarity Score since students are likely to be working from the same research, data and figures so will in all likelihood draw the same conclusions.
What does Turnitin check an assignment against? There are stored student papers in both a global central repository and the University of Portsmouth own repository (where we might store more sensitive documents). Turnitin also searches against material found on the internet and can check journals, periodicals and publications. Personally I would check against everything, if the service is available, use it.
Turnitin offers several filters which may be toggled, for example whether to include or exclude bibliographic references. Personally I cannot think of a reason why you want to include bibliographic references in the Similarity Score as citing sources is a requirement of good academic writing. That said if the assignment were a lab report and references were not expected then it might be safer to include bibliographic references just in case the Turnitin software incorrectly identified a bibliography and consequently excluded all of the text that followed. You can also toggle quoted material, quotes would not normally be considered within a plagiarism report although the volume of them may indicate a lack of original content from the author. Where quoted material is excluded from the Originality Report, Turnitin helpfully points out when more than 15% of the paper is quoted material. The final filter is for small matches, usually matches of 3-4 words are rather inconsequential, you may also have longer phrases that appear repeatedly throughout the assignment – you can exclude this from being repeatedly matched and skewing the Similarity Score using the ‘exclude small matches’ filter. Personally I use all the filters, excluding bibliographic references, quoted material and small matches – I can always turn them back on later when reviewing a paper if I am suspicious.
So after searching against all of the available material, excluding bibliographic references, quoted material and small matches, what is the magic number? Well, the magic number is… the number at which you become suspicious of course!
Finally, to wrap up this post, and just in case a concerned student has stumbled across this blog post, I would like to emphasise that if they know they have not deliberately plagiarised then they have nothing to worry about. If they are concerned that they have used another source and may not have referenced it properly, then guidance is available from the Academic Skills Unit (https://kb.myport.ac.uk/Article/Index/12/4?id=2747)
Email: academicskills@port.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)23 9284 3462
Or, visit the Academic Skills Unit in person during our opening hours:
Third floor Reception, The Nuffield Centre
St Michael’s Road
Portsmouth
PO1 2ED
© 2025 Tel Tales
Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑
