What I have learn at the college

As of October 2014, I have left the North Warwickshire and Hinckley College. Just before that, I was approached by a colleague from another college to share my ideas on the college library service development. This is my reply which I have edited slightly. Though it is not a well-polished text, I believe it may be of use to a reflection on what a good college library should or may look like.

The library has to be an integral part of the college. If the college management don't see the library as the key service for developing digital literacy or promoting use of ILT/ICT in teaching and learning, there won't be much librarians can do about it. If e-learning isn't explicitly planted into the LRS structure, the best way of moving forward would be developing partnerships; for example, introducing blogging into learning practice, bidding for funding for purchasing iPads etc. Partnerships allow involving others into the library's concerns, making them co-responsible, as well as benefiting from successes.

Over the years, I have increasingly started valuing working with tutors. Certainly, there is a scope for direct involvement with students, but my experience suggests that unless such involvement relates to the course content directly, students are reluctant to make use of our best offers. To make our work relevant, we have to work with tutors.

More on iPads in the Library and Across the College

Last Friday, I contributed to a webinar of the use of mobile devices in education organised by JISC. I spoke on the library's iPad project. The slides are here. Some notes - edited for the presentation, rather than for a blog post as such - are below and interim reflections on the project were published on this blog a couple of months ago.

Our iPad project was born out of many conversations with art tutors and their stories of what amazing things creative folk do with them. David Hockney’s exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art prompted us to put together a bid to the college’s Innovation Fund for funding. We were awarded £2,500 to develop the project specifically aimed at art tutors. Six iPads 2 were purchased plus accessories and App Store vouchers. Why iPads? – They are the creative industries' standard.

We contacted Apple, they were sufficiently helpful to make sense of the licences and technology implications. We attempted managing iPads with iTunes, however the application’s functionality was partially disabled on the college network; no Apple Configurator, therefore. Each iPad is linked with its own iTunes account. Email aliases are used for that; physically, all emails from iTunes come to one live email account.

iPads in the Library: Interim Observations

This is my article written for the college Staff Bulletin.

Last spring, the college library, supported by the College’s innovation fund, started a project of introducing tablet devices for supporting classroom-based and independent learning in the college. Tablets are a new kind of technology and it is not yet clear what are the best ways of using them in education. The purpose of the project is to learn what tutors and learners will do with the tablets; then evaluate their appropriateness for teaching and learning, as well as to identify the barriers and problems related to their use.

The six iPads purchased for the project have become the most used resource offered by the library. Within the first two months alone they had been borrowed 170 times, with 85% of overall loans by students and 15% by tutors.

The iPads are mostly used in classrooms for research where learning involves a lot of interaction and change of activities. For example, Performing Arts students very quickly switched from laptops to iPads for use in their studio. Students have been using tablets for taking photos, making videos, editing photo and video content, and taking interviews for their research projects.

Staff have discovered how convenient iPads are for video recording the evidence of students’ work in a classroom; how easy is transferring those videos to Dropbox, sharing them with the whole group, linking to Moodle and embedding them into PowerPoint documents.

Also, staff from support areas use tablets in their work. Kelly C. promotes the Job Shop to learners who enquire about the career development opportunities (on the photo).

John T., Engineering, has been using tablets with his level 1 learners for four days every week. In his opinion, tablets allow more flexibility and enhanced interaction in the classroom: they can be easily shared, passed around or placed in the centre of a group of students working on the same project.

His students reported that they preferred working with tablets to textbooks: they liked an easy access to a lot of information and the whole experience of using a physical touch. For the majority of learners this was the only occasion when they used iPads; in spite of that, they quickly learned the basics and showed each other their discoveries.

Among the difficulties, learners mentioned occasionally unstable wi-fi in their classroom and inability to easily transfer their writings over to their personal computers. This should be rectified when Microsoft apps for iPad are released next year. Surprisingly few tutors requested apps to be downloaded to the devices; it seems the concept of apps is more complex than the devices themselves.

The library has already had to deal with the first e-safety incident taken place when a learner was using one of the iPads.

These are only interim observations; they are encouraging – there is incredible buzz about iPads in the library: learners love using tablets in the classroom and outside. As this technology and our experience of using it develops, tablets will successfully compete with PCs for the place in education; and it will happen very soon.