Finding my feet

I have taken some annual leave this week and next week to ensure <cough> that I try and bring together my research.  But before I do, I wanted to record what I have been doing around other areas of my work.  This last week was rather exciting as we had some iPad training from Apple Distinguished Educator, Joe Moretti.  The training was arranged by Apple (Lawrence Stephenson) and I organised who would attend, where it is held and coordinated the booking/registration.  They said that it would be Higher Education teaching focussed and wondered if I could get 15 people together.  Hmm, 15?  I mentioned that we have an iPad (& Other Devices) Coffee Club and so suggested that we could get more than 15 academic related colleagues together.  So we settled on the maximum, 3 days of training for 15 people each day.  Great.  So I got together 15 for each day, we used Eventbrite for the registrations and the idea was that I would use the ‘invitation only’ function, which worked really well.  As it turned out Joe brought with him 21 devices.  So after the first day, I contacted those who I thought would like to have attended but couldn’t because of the limited places.  In all we had about 55 people attend.  Joe brought with him iPads and the Minis as well.  It was hugely successful, I attended all three days and loved each one.  There was some much that we could do for interactive classrooms, everyone who attended was extremely inspired and motivated to do more.  It was interesting because we don’t have a iPad policy at the University and yet 85% of the people that attended had their own iPads for their work, and some of the people that came along had bought or had decided already to buy, iPads for their cohorts for teaching.  This will be interesting.

I created a Storify about the three days and we hope that Joe will be able to come back and show us iTunes Course Builder and iBooks Author.  We just couldn’t get through everything in the time we had (there was a #implodingbrain at one point!)

There is more information on the CITE Blog and I will be arranging more Coffee Clubs and training via a monthly workshop for the next academic year.

Now, back to reviewing the case studies and looking at the questions for my MOOC research.