April / May workshops please book here.
Written by Dominic Pates, Jorge Freire and Santanu Vasant (Learning Spaces Theme)
During February LEaD staff delivered a series of workshops aimed at introducing staff to large and small group teaching activities and showcasing the new learning spaces at City.
This short article provides highlights from these workshops and details of new available dates for staff to attend.
In addition to offering workshops LEaD have produced a short film to highlight some of the features of City’s flexible learning spaces and to encourage staff to consider the affordances of these rooms when thinking about where they will teach in 2015/16. There are a wide range of new spaces including more flexible learning spaces at the lower ground level of Drysdale, Level 3 of Tait and the new Franklin building on Goswell Road. For details of these new spaces please visit https://intranet.city.ac.uk/staff/paf/paf/timetabling/room-information.html
Extending Teaching through the use of Multimedia. This session primarily focused on making use of video resources within teaching. The workshop looked at considerations around flipped learning, activities for building on lecture capture materials, video creation projects run at City in partnership with academics, and provided an introduction to screencasting techniques. It was a well attended session with plenty of discussion generated.
Small Group Teaching in Flexible Spaces. This workshop demonstrated a selection of small group teaching activities to encourage active learning such as rounds, a mix and match activity of descriptions and room configurations and a mind mapping activity. Staff were introduced to the range of new flexible learning spaces at City such as C306 or C307, that allow for easy reconfiguration of the space to support different activities. Following the session staff provided feedback;
“You illustrated small group teaching techniques by actually employing them. This worked very well.”
“Introduced me to new ideas for small group teaching that I could take away and immediately implement.”
“Chance to hear about some different techniques and network with other staff.”
Engaging Large Groups in Flexible Spaces with Voting Tools. The final workshop was on effective strategies and tools to teach large groups. Following a hands-on approach, staff saw how to book and use available flexible learning spaces, such as BLG07; how to use classroom management and engagement strategies, such as active, collaborative and peer learning. Staff learned how to use Poll Everywhere, a student-response system that allows learners to answer quiz questions using their own devices. Staff developed challenging quiz questions and discussed how to best use them with large groups, before running them using Poll Everywhere. Following the session staff provided feedback;
“There’s more to Poll Everywhere than meets the eye – needs to be used sparingly, but nicely demonstrated to the group! Writing effective questions – thought that would make a really interesting workshop.”
“The main take-away point for me was how quickly it is to set up and, having used it, how impactful it could be in a classroom.”
Missed Last Time and want to attend the next one?
We are running these workshops again next month, the dates are below. Please sign up here.
Small Group Teaching in Flexible Spaces
- Gain inspiration for innovative pedagogical practice within City’s teaching spaces according to learning aims and student needs.
- Discover classroom management strategies to lecture effectively to large groups.
- Learn how to ask students questions and set quizzes with City’s interactive online voting system – Poll Everywhere.
23rd April, 11.00-12.15
24th April, 14.00-15.15
Extending Teaching Through Multimedia
- Be aware of different rich media approaches useful for extending teaching outside of the classroom, including flipped learning and lecture capture.
- Produce a short and simple screencast to practice the technique of screencasting.
- Be able to identify appropriate learning activities for building on lecture capture materials.
- An optional 30 mins of ‘supported practice’ for screencast/flipped resources creation is available from 16:00 for those attending the workshop.
29th April, 14:30-16.00 + optional 30 mins of ‘supported practice’ for screencast/flipped resources creation from 16:00
Active Learning Tools for Large Group Teaching
- Gain inspiration for innovative pedagogical practice within City’s teaching spaces according to learning aims and student needs.
- Discover classroom management strategies to lecture effectively to large groups.
- Learn how to ask students questions and set quizzes with City’s interactive online voting system – Poll Everywhere.
13th May, 14:30 – 16:00
