#BYOD4L: What will your story be?

By Dr Chris P. Jobling

January 13, 2017

It’s new year. Winter seems to be coming. The students are busy. Time for some useful CPD?

On Monday 16 January 2017, the five day short online course Bring Your Own Device for Learning (#BYOD4L) starts its fifth run.

Structured around the five Cs: connecting, communicating, curating, collaborating and creating, this course aims to provide you with practical experience and ideas of how you and your students might exploit your mobile devices in your teaching to enhance your students’ learning. The course was conceived, created and originally facilitated by Chrissi Nerantzi (@chrissinerantzi) of Manchester Metropolitan University and Sue Beckingham of Sheffield Hallam (@suebecks). After 3 runs it has become a community facilitated event that gets bigger every time.

The course is free, informal, and fun. I should know, this will be my fourth time! It takes place on-line in Wordpress, Twitter (hashtag #BYOD4L), and Google+, and any other pop-up on-line communities that the participants might establish. Every morning the topic of the day is published (follow @BYOD4L or, if you prefer an email notification, subscribe to the BYOD4L web site). Every evening, at 8:00 pm GMT, there’s a fast and frenetic Tweetchat (think ‘Tw’eminar) on the topic of the day which you can join in by using hashtag #BYOD4Lchat.

Best of all, you can collect open badges for participation gather evidence of CPD that you can bring to your PGCertHE, HEA fellowship (initial application or evidence of good standing) and PDR. Mindful of this, for this run the organizers are encouraging us to share the stories of our experiences. So, to get your thinking, here’s one of mine.

I’ll be helping the facilitators Neil Withnell (@neilwithnell), Sheila McNeill (@sheilamcn), and Alex Spiers (@alexgspiers) as a volunteer mentor along with my SALT colleague Debbie Baff (@debbaff). LTEC will also be retweeting interesting snippets throughout the event as @sultec4.

Hope to see you there.