Just a little bit to reflect on how good I felt after delivering a hands-on session at our Institute of Health and Allied Professions (IHAP) department away day on 8th July. It's not often I feel like this after public speaking type activities, so I deserve to congratulate myself. I wasn't dreading it but I was conscious/overthinking it, as I do. So in the spirit of capturing the feel good moment, just like the last part of my blog post 'Facing my frequency' - "Reflection on a good training session – come back to this after a ‘feel bad’ session", here I go.
So I planned an agenda item to deliver a practical hands-on H5P session 'Creating an online interactive asynchronous learning activity with H5P'. I introduced H5P and walked through, as a group step by step, on how to create a Drag and Drop activity, through the use of a online activity template accessible within the VLE. Which draws inspiration from my favourite asynchronous learning design framework; Gilly Salmon’s E-Tivity invitation. Not to make it instantly usable, but to get staff on that journey of development. I prepped a folder in our department Microsoft Teams space with some pre-prepared images for them to use.
I did the usual: introduced myself and my role; described what asynchronous means in the context of online learning; listed some benefits of asynchronous learning (the why); then got straight into NOW, our Virtual Learning Environment, and began the guided tour with those that brought laptops as requested, which were pretty much all of the lecturers - the target audience.
I was stopped for some lecturers to ask questions, of which were things I was about to cover, so I am glad we were all in sync! Two of which I were going to bring up at the end of my session which led to an extended discussion: writing retreat day style H5P workshop in two specific parts, which I asked for their thoughts on, then the shared IHAP H5P collaboration space, which already exists and I previously communicated about, so I took the opportunity to re-promote and discuss the idea of a public H5P production list; some future digital development and support ambitions. Dr Anne Felton, the head of IHAP, concluded my session my summarising the former two as actions. I will share these ideas and more in a future blog post.
Afterwards, I saw that Anne Tweeted what I did with an image - "IHAP @NTUParamedic @PublicHealthNTU @NTUNursing staff development day. Kicking off this afternoon with @_Daniel_Scott helping team to build their digital education content using H5P."
Maybe it went really well because I was confident with what I was going to say, H5P enthusiast and expertise, the walkthrough was mapped out mentally and textually, and I was comfortable with the people in the room - I wasn't feeling nervous, but safe, respected and wanted to be listened to - and at times seeing some heads nod in agreement. I felt in control of my session and commanded the room well. BUT I must remember to print off my session outline as that also proved helpful to glance at times! Yes I prepared and revisited and re-edited a fair bit, and even cut out quite a bit that I felt was good to mention, but I had to be tight with my time and hold folks attention.
I will certainly be doing more things like this, which I already do with individuals some course groups, but it's important I continue to take this platform so that I don't get labelled as just 'technical support'. But as a digital education leader and developer.
Another rewarding aspect was hearing my name and digital throughout the subsequent away day sessions, including our new professor's, as well as some ad hoc conversations during break times. Including how evaluating learning technologies is one of the biggest challenges as there's a lot choice and knowing what's appropriate and approved in an organisation. So what I said and did was noticeably impactful.
P.S. It was also great to see my cat Theo (as a kitten) and my book 'Digital Learning, Teaching and Assessment for HE and FE Practitioners' make an appearance in Anne's opening review of the last 12 months.
