UCA Creative Education Network

This post was created by PGCert participants as part of their assessment for Unit 1 of the course. The brief was to choose two specific learning needs and evaluate technologies that could help students with these needs to learn more effectively.

Evernote is a note-taking, task management and organisational app which can be accessed via a mobile device and/or desktop computer.  It can be used to create, store and organise text, photos, videos, audio files including dictation and links to websites.  The cloud-based software enables the user to store and sync uploaded information across devices ensuring a certain degree of flexibility in its use.  But why is that useful for those with Dyslexia?

According to the British Dyslexia Association, Dyslexia is actually related to the processing of information. ‘Dyslexic people may have difficulty processing and remembering information they see and hear, which can affect learning and the acquisition of literacy skills’, furthermore, ‘Dyslexia can also impact on other areas such as organisational skills’.

In an article titled ‘Creative solutions to making technology work’, Price (2006) considers the data derived from several case studies which focus on the methodology employed by students with Dyslexia when using assisted technologies.  The research study is foregrounded within a conceptual framework of Vygotskian scaffolding. Price contends that, within a constructivist paradigm, assisted technology as a means of assisting could be considered a ‘technological scaffold’. However, the author also acknowledges that, as with all scaffolding techniques, the same evaluative measures need to be considered to enable its implementation to be both appropriate and effective. Continue reading →

This post was created by PGCert participants as part of their assessment for Unit 1 of the course. The brief was to choose two specific learning needs and evaluate technologies that could help students with these needs to learn more effectively.

Over 5% of the world’s population – or 466 million people – has disabling hearing loss. (who.int, 2019).

Live Transcribe is a free app made with deaf and hard-of-hearing users in mind. The app utilises Google’s Automatic Speech Recognition technology. It provides near-live transcribing from speech to text in over 70 languages and also includes descriptions of sounds such as coughing and laughing. The app saves the transcriptions for three days and offers a tool for deaf and hard-of-hearing students to better engage with learning activities.

‘Rochester Institute of Technology has found that many first-year deaf and hard of hearing students only read captions; they do not sign. And those who watch the interpreter signing have trouble taking notes and following the lecture.’ (Microsoft, 2018). Continue reading →

This post was created by PGCert participants as part of their assessment for Unit 1 of the course. The brief was to choose two specific learning needs and evaluate technologies that could help students with these needs to learn more effectively.

Individuals with dyslexia face a range of challenges during higher education courses, particularly during tasks which require intensive reading and writing. OneNote software has various functions which could be useful for some dyslexic students. Microsoft advertises the app as a ‘free organizer-productivity notebook app’, and it does have some features which certainly could help students with particular forms of dyslexia become more productive.

The immersive reader and accessibility functions responds to many of the issues highlighted by the British Dyslexia Association (BDA, 2018) as challenges for those with dyslexia, including producing:

• Readable fonts (e.g. spacing between letters, avoiding ‘visual crowding’)
• Easy addition of headings and sub-headings
• Appropriate colour contrasts

Continue reading →

The university has recently introduced a new personal development policy across all UCA courses, but why have we introduced this, what does this mean for the student experience and how are we going to implement this?

Why have we introduced Personal Development Tutoring?

At UCA, we annually monitor student retention data, reporting on patterns of interruption and withdrawal across the student lifecycle.  These studies have revealed particular attrition issues around level 4, where students are at greatest risk of dropping out of their studies with us.  There may be a variety of reasons why students drop out at this stage.  Academic issues, feelings of isolation and/or not fitting in and concern about achieving future aspirations as the primary reasons why students think about leaving. In 2018, we conducted in-house research on the first year experience (Barratt, 2018) BAME student experience (Dixon-Smith, 2018) and Induction Tutoring (Allder & Fitzwater, 2018).  All of these studies reveal the value and benefit of ongoing pastoral support to enable students navigate university life and work life balance to achieve success in their studies.

So..what is personal development tutoring? Continue reading →