Cross-posted from the LTEC Blog. 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.

In advance of the fifth run of bring your own device for learning (#BYOD4L) and inspired by Sheila McNeil’s post “#BYOD4L A story of personal and professional needs and wants”, I thought that I too would reflect on my experience of my last three #BYOD4Ls. Looking back at my Twitter Archive, I find that my first #BYOD4L contribution was a retweet on 14th July 2014: https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/488631919609790466 I’m struggling to find any blog posts from what was then the 2nd run of #BYOD4L (the first looks to have been in January 2014) so I probably only engaged via Twitter and Google+.

Kate Soper reflects on her team’s year of introducing new ideas for technology enhanced learning 1 minute at a time. Source: A magic minute? Reflections on a year of 1minuteCPD

My contribution to #101 Creative Ideas

Back in January for its fifth run is the excellent Bring Your Own Device for Learning (#BYOD4L) online CPD-fest. Covering the 5Cs, Connecting, Communicating, Curating, Collaborating and Creating, this “course” aims to share great ideas and build communities. Concentrating on portable educational technology that you can use with yourself, your colleagues and your students, you’re guaranteed to discover something that will enable you and them to be more effective. And at the same time you’ll find yourself becoming part of a growing community of like-minded souls.

The Learning Enhancement and Development team at City University London (@CityUniLEaD]) is publishing a learning enhancement and development suggestion every day up until Christmas using the twitter hashtag #eventcityunilead. https://twitter.com/CityUniLEaD/status/804032901348261888 Here they are, automatically updated as they are published: [twitter-timeline id=806119016851013633]

One of my first findings while looking at the first app of 12 apps for Christmas is that the content viewer in the BB Student App doesn’t display Blackboard Learn’s own content very well: https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/804293517493338112 I wondered why so I did an experiment with Chrome for iPhone, and the content displays fine. https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/804296889629872128 In a follow up to my tweets, Sue Tucker (@sueinasp) pointed out that even the basic rich text handling is inferior.

An unexpected consequence of moving from my self-hosted WordPress blog to WordPress.com was that my embedded Storifys stopped working, I lost some images, and several mysterious links to twitter javascript had appeared. A few minutes with the documentation confirmed what I guessed to be true that WordPress.com (for good security reasons) doesn’t allow arbitrary embedded HTML and JavaScripts to be included in posts and pages delivered from the hosted service.

It’s the first of December and in the Learning Technology world this means the launch of multiple open courses promising to introduce busy academics to 12 Apps of Christmas. I’m enrolled on the Regent’s University of London course which is being hosted on the Blackboard Open Courses platform. I’m recommending 12 Apps of Christmas to my colleagues for two reasons. Firstly because it provides useful introductions to mobile apps that they can use with students.

This blog was self-hosted on digital ocean until today. Unfortunately, issues with the database was preventing the blog appearing for some of my readers and I don’t have time at the moment to be a Sysadmin and trace the fault. Rebooting the server when I notice it’s down is not a solution either. So, I’ve forked out the £30 a year to have a site with a custom domain hosted on Wordpress.

There are some interesting events coming up over the next two months. In Swansea, the library team will again be running 7 Days of Twitter #SU7DoT. This time over the period 2nd-12th December. See the announcement and sign up here!. The team at Regent’s University London will again be running 12 Apps of Christmas (#12AoC) starting on 1st December on the Blackboard Open Learning Platform. They won’t be alone! The Association for Learning Technology will be running the third ALT Winter Conference (#altc) online from 6-8 December.

Another record breaking #LTHEChat was hosted on Wednesday 16th November by @digisim Simon Thomson. The Storify was curated by @ladyculottes Haley Atkinson who had to slim down the 1500 or so tweets, side conversations and spam posts to extract the essential essence. View the story “#LTHEchat 68: What motivates us to use digital tools for learning and teaching?” on Storify Once you’ve read the story, you may like to answer this question in the comments.