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Kate Blackham

Collaborative anonymity in the plenary using drawing tools

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I attended a training workshop on incorporating activities in tutorials using Adobe Connect's draw tools last week and want to get my thoughts down here before I forget it all.

For those reading, the OU doen't use Skype, or Zoom or Microsoft Teams, but Adobe Connect. This means we can do collaborative exercises in our tutorials via drawing tools that are enabled for all the users.

They suggest including:

  • completing grids and tables
  • drag and drop
  • linking activities
  • collaborative writing ideas

I've been given access to lots of useful template slides. Most of the activities work best with a few students and with really short answers. Right now I can see that a number of the ideas would work really well with my personal tutor group especially in my first tutorial with them. I think including these activities in the module-wide tutorials would be harder - with 40ish students sometimes.

I've noticed, because I generally start by asking students what they've done before in termss of preparation for the tutorial and the study week, and most students turn up not knowing the content at all. This is why so many of the SM123 tutorials (I've seen many of my peers over the three years I've been here, so I'm not just talking about my own) end up being more like interactive lectures, because you can't set the students loose on questions without background as they haven't done the prep work. If I was having the same students every time I could set the norm for what is expected. But each time I run a tutorial I get a completely different cohort - there are 650 students in SM123 and any one of them can turn up to a tutorial of mine (or any other of the SM123 tutorials). This also affects what I can do.



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