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Over the summer I helped out with setting up information blogs about Digital Education for the staff and students in GeoSciences.
One pattern that we needed to use several times was an index box linked to headings in sections with ‘back to top’ links, so I created a basic template that can be pasted into WordPress.
Anyone is welcome to adapt and use this: either copy and paste the top section into the Visual editor, or copy and paste the HTML section into the Text editor.
If your theme allows you to use Custom CSS (some but not all of ours do), you can use the id and class names for visually styling the elements.
Note: I have linked to line breaks above the headings rather than the headings themselves due to the variation in how the different themes we were using treat anchor links.
Here is the sample Info Box / Index links structure:
Recently I had the great opportunity of attending the Microsoft 365 Global Developers’ Bootcamp. This consisted of two workshops, each going through a series of activities around a themed task, developing applications for use with Microsoft Teams, and using the Microsoft Graph API.
The workshop for Day 1 was ‘Build an Emergency Response Solution with Teams and SharePoint’.
This workshop was run by Bob German, and it took us through a series of tasks to create a Teams app for coordinating the response to an emergency such as a natural disaster. It grew out of work done to help with the aftermath of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami in Asia.
Obviously this was one of the high points for me: there I am in second place on the podium in the Kahoot quiz!
To be fair, I did do this quiz twice…
Personally I would love to have my own working copy of the One Productivity Hub app, as it is a step better than the ‘Team of Me’ that I had put together earlier in lockdown as an attempt to bring all my notifications together. I am still a step or two short of being able to install something like that in our Office365 setup: our security does not allow for setting up the ‘ngrok’ tunnelling and I don’t know yet how to deploy the app in a more permanent way.
So at the moment I am stuck on this error when I try to install it to my personal Team: Valid domains cannot contain a tunneling site. Please remove these in your manifest. To help to ensure the security of your app and users, domains outside of your organization's control (including wildcards) and tunneling services cannot be included in the valid domains in your manifest.
But it’s been a great learning experience, so I thought I’d share my joy and thank the instructors on Twitter😎:
I’ve been having fun with Google Analytics this week😃.
Yesterday, I needed to add statistical tracking to our Digital Education Team blogs on the University’s hosted version of WordPress. This has previously been no problem (eg with this blog), but with the new blogs, it didn’t work.
I created a new Google account for the team with our non-Gmail address, and that turned out to be fine.
I set up a Google Analytics account for the team, and that all seemed to work too.
But when I tried to connect my Analytics account to the Beehive Pro statistics plugin in the blog, it couldn’t find the website listed in my account. It said there wasn’t a ViewID. I was able to authenticate the Google account with the plugin, but the plugin couldn’t find anything in my Analytics account to associate with it.
Here is a summary of the Google Analytics account structure:
Organizations: An organization is an optional way to represent a company, which lets you access your company’s product accounts (e.g., Analytics, Tag Manager, Optimize), and manage product users, permissions, and cross-product integrations.
Accounts: You need at least one account so you can have access to Analytics, and so you can identify the properties you want to track. An account can be used to manage one or more properties.
Properties: A property is a website, mobile application, or device. When you add a property to an account, Analytics generates the tracking code that you use to collect data from that property. The tracking code contains a unique ID that identifies the data from that property, and identifies it in your reports.
Views: a View is (or was) a defined view of data from a property. Users are given access to a view so they can see the reports based on that view’s data. Analytics creates one unfiltered view for each property you add, and allows you to create more defined views using filters.
So, what could have gone wrong?
The first thing I checked was the Analytics account permissions, in case my plugin, although authenticated with Google, wasn’t actually authorised to do anything. But these all appeared to be correct: I had granted the default permission set of "Edit, Collaborate, Read & Analyse, Manage Users", so all the required permissions were there.
However, looking in the Analytics account, many things did look different from the various help and instructions available. They also looked different from my own personal account:
The Tracking info option wasn’t listed under Admin > Property.
There were no Views listed in the Admin panel, and I couldn’t see any way of adding one.
I noticed that the tracking code for my web property began with 'G-' instead of the usual 'UA-'.
There were a lot more interactions available for tracking
US President Donald Trump: He’s hacked, but is he fired?
I have no idea how the election will go, and I don’t want to comment on politics here, but I’ve just read a very interesting article about the Trump campaign site being hacked.
One of the unexpected but nice parts of my job lately has been editing the automated subtitles on some of our teaching videos.
This is a requirement for our course materials, to ensure our videos are more accessible for, for example:
Deaf students
Students with other hearing difficulties, for whom subtitles can help with comprehension of fast spoken or unclear dialogue, perhaps spoken with unfamiliar accents, mumbling, or with background noise
Foreign language speakers, for whom the subtitles might help with translation and following along with the spoken text
Students with learning disabilities, attention deficits, or autism, who may find subtitles help them to maintain their concentration on the videos
Students who need to study in a place where they can’t play sound
Students who need to see the spelling of proper nouns, such as full names, brand names, or technical terms
Students who just prefer to watch videos with subtitles as a habit
According to research by Ofcom in 2006, 7.5 million people in the UK (18% of the population) used closed captions, and of these, only 1.5 million were deaf or hard of hearing. 80% of those who preferred to watch with subtitles used them for other reasons.
Since we moved to hybrid learning, we have more and more teaching videos to work on, so that is an occasional silver lining to social distancing for me, as subtitling is a nice, quiet and absorbing task, and our videos are often very interesting 🙂
How does what we have learned in these first two modules impact your own teaching? If it doesn’t, discuss why.
How does engaged teaching online complicate what we do as a university?
Comments
This comment makes a fair point about the need for some degree of standardisation across different instances of what is meant to be the same course:
What I learnt in Module 2
discussion posted 3 months ago by FumiKitagawa
I have been teaching ‘on-line’ over the last four academic years. This Module was particularly useful to learn about how other academic staff do use the technologies and how to make choices. In particular it was interesting to hear some of them saying assyncronised mode works well. My students are mixture of ‘on-campus’ students across different Schools and ‘online distance’ learners. One size does not fit all, of course, but the teacher has to make a conscious choice to make the teaching experiences consistent across different coho
This comment raises important points about teachers and other university staff needing to become competent with the many forms of technology involved in online teaching, and also the expectations of students who are paying large sums of money for their education:
Looking back
discussion posted 3 months ago by vdavey
I am new to post and have yet to teach but the course has given me an excellent grounding and reassuringly it has dealt with a number of concerns that I have. I found the transactional distance and time management components particularly useful although the creativity discussions were less relevant for me; I have to get the basics right first. It is clear that my digital/IT skills are far behind where they should be but I knew that already!
As regards complicating the work of a University, as mentioned previously staff may feel pressure to be available for students and may struggle to switch off which will invite dissatisfaction and burnout. Universities may also struggle with their technological capabilities; Online students who commit to courses and pay hefty course fees may well become frustrated if an Institution’s IT systems fail to deliver and their earning experience suffers. Finally, in the rush to deliver on-line programmes quality may be diluted.
I also particularly liked this comment by one of my coursemates:
Reflection
discussion posted 3 months ago by anonymous
This course has been very interesting and I only wish I had more time to engage. As my first online course I have learnt a lot and/ or rather I also have many more questions on how things are done/ could be done. So it has helped guide me to think more about it and how I might try and incorporate a range of activities into online teaching but also be very aware of presence and inclusivity. The only complication I can imagine is with regards to workload and time… one video mentioned for every 1 hr in class on campus this equates to 4 hours online. Its a lot of work and that’s daunting.
I agree that to me, this module has really brought home the importance of teacher presence, and of the many considerations involved in inclusivity, and it has also been eye-opening about the potential risk of a lot more time being involved.
