A post from Jenny Hall

This week I was privileged to be selected to present at the triennial International Confederation of midwives Congress taking place in Toronto, Canada, as part of a symposium with a colleague from Scotland and another from Canada.  We were discussing Spirituality and childbirth (and able to mention our edited book on this subject coming out in the autumn, but that’s another story). Unfortunately, I was not able to attend, so was thus presented a dilemma: cancel the whole thing, as my colleagues had been accepted, or find another way?  The result was I was able to play with Panopto, and create a video presentation (with some help from the wonderful Learning technology team to save the thing and send to Canada). This was shown by my colleagues and then I was able to use Skype to be in the room and answer questions from the audience, and at the same time I was Tweeting!  It all went pretty well. For an ‘old’ educator, who used to use real blackboards and OHP (overhead projectors for the young…) when I started teaching, that wasn’t bad and I am quite proud of myself as you can tell.

But my point of sharing this is, if I can do it then so can you. There are so many fun new tools on the TEL toolkit, plus the new Brightspace platform, that can open new possibilities for education and improving student experience. I would just like to encourage you to try. I would not have done this without being pushed into it by circumstances, but I am pleased I have. And don’t forget to use your learning technology and developing team, who really are doing a wonderful job, and can help improve all our education practices if we ask them.