Picture Exchange Communication System

Picture Exchange Communication System

The Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) is a term I often hear people using any time they are talking about using picture icons and visual supports (such as Picture Communication Symbols, known as PCS, which is used in the software program Boardmaker) in their classrooms to support students. PECS is a specific system for teaching communication, it is not a visual support system using icons.

This is worth repeating: The use of picture icons in visual supports is not PECS. 
 
The Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) is a type of augmentative alternative communication (AAC) originally developed for children with autism. The primary purpose of PECS is to teach individuals to initiate communication and to learn requesting. Individuals are taught to initiate by handing a picture to a communication partner in exchange for a desired item. 

PECS is a system for instructing students to initiate communication through the use of pictures/symbols in place of words.  Students physically exchange a picture to request an item, and may move toward commenting on or describing something, and eventually to having a conversation.  

PECS encourages and models speech along with the picture exchange when used in conjunction with an aided language system where the model of speech comes from the adults around the child.  

There are so many misconception about PECS, so if you plan to dabble, take the time to learn a little more about this program. A video worth watching: A Clear Picture: The Use and Benefits of PECS.  "This video includes a synopsis of the six training phases of PECS, a discussions of the myths and facts associated with PECS as well as an overview of the research related to PECS. Please note this video is an overview only and is not intended as a training workshop. "

Why learn and use PECS? 

PECS allows individuals to communicate by using pictures instead of, or in conjunction with, speech. PECS can provide a beginning level of expression for individuals with complex communication needs. The important thing to remember is that it is used to initiate conversation and to communicate wants or needs to another person. It is not meant to be "the" system forever but would be more of a stepping stone to the next system. It may be used with young children but has also successfully been taught to adults with similar communication needs. 

When should I use PECS?

If an individual needs to be taught how powerful communication can be, this is a good introduction. If they are not found to initiate language, this is a good introduction. PECS is mainly a system to make requests. It is a beginning process of teaching communication. It is a good place to start but not a place to stop.  

How does PECS work? 

After being taught the phase six system, an individual using PECS chooses a picture from a variety of pictures available then gives the picture to a communication partner. Knowing the individual's request, the partner can then provide the desired item or fulfill a desired need. (It is important to remember that PECS does not allow for rejecting, commenting, socializing and other important components of communicating. Again, it is mainly a starting point.) 

Digital Storytelling

Storytelling is one of the oldest methods of teaching and learning. Digital storytelling is a modern take on storytelling. Digital storytelling is a blend of video, audio, images, and text to convey stories, information, and ideas. It’s the more exciting way of demonstrating knowledge beyond a presentation tool, such as PowerPoint. Digital storytelling can teach important literacy concepts using digital content. For example, the creation of a digital story can teach characters, setting, and plot in a highly visual and interactive way.

Teachers who use digital storytelling with their students have watched them gain proficiency in writing and research, visual literacy, critical thinking, and collaboration.  All of this is taking place while students are integrating a wide range of learning styles in the process while using technology naturally.  Digital storytelling can be the ultimate UDL approach in any classroom.

A digital story is a series of images connected with text and/or a narrated soundtrack, captured by a digital device such as an iPad, Chromebook or any other computer/smart device, that tells a story. It can be fiction, non-fiction, narrative, biographical, expository, or even poetry. It can be a way for students to demonstrate their knowledge in any area of the curricula. Because of its multimedia approach and appealing blend of text, color, movement, sound, and images, it has fast become one of the most popular writing exercises in schools. Kids love it (and as a visual learner, so do I!) And best of all, assistive technology tools blend beautifully into the process.

Digital storytelling can be a dynamic and compelling way to communicate for all students, including those with special needs who might not have been successful when using traditional narrative writing. This interactive component involved in digital storytelling will enhance learning for all students who learn in different ways. Not only is digital storytelling great as a UDL approach but also a great activity for collaboration. Digital storytelling is the perfect platform for project-based learning.

Hint: Be sure to explore the tools you use carefully as apps for digital storytelling can range from extremely simple to more complex. Be sure to choose apps that match each student's abilities and needs and then let the creativity flow!

Elements to Consider:

According to Center for Digital Storytelling, there are 7 elements critical to a good digital story. This is a great guideline to get you started:

1. Point of View — What is the perspective of the author?
2. Dramatic Question — A key question that keeps the viewer’s attention and will be answered by the end of the story.
3. Emotional Content — Serious issues that come alive in a personal and powerful way and connects the audience to the story.
4. Voice — personalize the story with the author’s unique writing style to help the audience understand the context.
5. Soundtrack — Music or other sounds that support and embellish the story.
6. Economy — Using just enough content to tell the story without overloading the viewer.
7. Pacing — The rhythm of the story and how slowly or quickly it progresses.

This is the goal. Of course, it may not be reached by all of your students but some of the elements can be reached by some of your students.

Consider these 6 steps:

1. Research the topic to be informed on main points that you want to cover.
2. Develop a concept map or write a script, a storyboard, or a timeline of the desired process/components.
3. Start collecting the multi-media parts — text, images, audio, video, oral selfies, and more.
4. Combine it all into an exciting story.
5. Share, reflect, proof and add your final touches to the completed story.
6. Present!

These 6 steps are stepping stones for beginners and critical to experienced storytellers. Remember, digital storytelling is still writing. Whether it is a multi-day project or a storyboard created in ten minutes, the process for digital storytelling is the same as any other writing project:

• Brainstorm
• Plan
• Create
• Revise
• Edit
• Publish
• Reflect

Students should be involved with every step, including the publishing stage.

Changes to MOLE Assignment Tool

NOTE: If you are providing marking and feedback using the MOLE assignment tool around the date of the upgrade (Saturday 16th December), please be aware of the below changes as the switchover could cause inconsistency in functionality and cause any feedback prior to upgrade to be permanently attached to the document.

Currently the MOLE assignment tool works in conjunction with a tool provider called Crocodoc. It works by embedding the crocodoc tool within MOLE.

The tool provides a document viewer (see below), showing the work student has submitted when accessing it in the grade centre, allowing it to be read online. It also allows you to annotate the document to give the feedback on the student's work.

The crocodoc tool is being discontinued in January so as part of the December upgrade (Taking place on Saturday 16th December) we will be moving to the new Box View. Box is the company that has acquired the crocodoc tool and will be the provider for Blackboard (MOLE). This date is something we cannot control as the tool will expire in early January.

This will bring about a few changes to the online feedback tool, these are:

The tools that surround the document viewer i.e the right hand panel (in green on the above image) will not change.

More of the functionality changes can be seen in the below presentation:

The main functionality changes are:

• Range of file types that can be submitted and displayed has increased
• Less annotation options available
• Print functionality added
• No longer able to download with annotations

Once we move over to the Box View, you will still be able to access the documents and feedback but the feedback will be ‘burnt in’ to the document i.e. it will no longer be editable or deletable.

The new Box View grading functionality is due to be added to the Blackboard

A change to the Editing Tools in Kaltura

On Sunday 14th January there will be a change in the way that we access the editing (trim and clip) tools within Kaltura. 

The new editor consolidates the 'Trim Video' and 'Create Clip' tools within an easy to use interface. To access the new editor, click on My Media and navigate to a media item. Click on the Edit button, and click Launch Editor.

The new editor interface will allow you to trim the start and end of a video, as well as saving a copy of media item. For instance, this could be useful if you wanted to share a specific section of a video with others.

Image showing how the Actions menu will change

The Interactive Video Quiz editor will also move to the new editing interface. Quizzes can be created by clicking Add New > Video Quiz, and questions are added using the new editor. 

New Quiz Editor view with the timeline zoom controls highlighted

The new editing interface will make it easier to be more precise when trimming videos and adding questions due to the ability to zoom in on the timeline - the zoom handle is circled red in the above image. 

You can hide marks from Students so they can only see the feedback - MOLE Assignment Tool

Whilst looking into something in Grade Centre, I stumbled across a way of hiding the grades from a student initially, so they can only see their feedback, and then revealing the grades at a later time.

This only works using the MOLE assignment tool, and you would need to hide the rubric scores if you were using those, but it does give you a way of allowing access to feedback whilst marks are being moderated.

Click on the link below to see the full guide

Guide on how to hide marks

Social Media for Learning in Higher Education Conference at Sheffield Hallam University.

Before Christmas myself and Pete Mella went to the Social Media for Learning in Higher Education Conference at Sheffield Hallam University.

The Conference has run for a few years but was announced it would be the last time it would be run in this format. A new format will be announced sometime in early 2018.

The morning consisted of an approach called Build your own Conference (BYOC). The idea of this was that delegates could suggest an idea for a session or better still lead it. At the beginning of the day these were assigned to group common themes and allocate rooms.

The first session we attended was around an app swap of learning and teaching. A number of apps were suggested including:

• Padlet
• Wunderlist
• Trello
• Metaverse

There was a short introduction to Raspberry PI computers and suggested that Code Club was a good place to learn more about coding for a Raspberry Pi.

We then attended a session which used Lego to convey how you personally felt about social media which birthed some weird and wonderful creations.

View image on Twitter

Alex Spiers@alexgspiers

#SocMedHE17 our joint lego build about our professional identity @Andy_Tattersall

12:46 PM - Dec 19, 2017

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In the afternoon we attended a session with a round table discussion on the idea of whether Social Media should be used in learning and teaching and what issues should be considered when using it in a learning context. This brought in a number of viewpoints but the consensus was that whilst Social media does seem to mostly have its place you need to exercise caution when using it.

Lastly we attended the TEF Crystal Maze. This used a series of challenges (or zones) to unlock a number of codes. In Turn you gain up to 3 crystals for each task. The winning team is the one with the most crystals.This was a great way to learn a little more about a topic that otherwise can be a little heavy.

View image on Twitter

Emma Gillaspy@egillaspy

Will you start the fans please.... #SocMedHE17 TEF #crystalmaze tech edition with @neilwithnell :) http://bit.ly/2AVZTg3 

6:55 PM - Dec 18, 2017

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Overall the day presented some interesting discussion around social media and its use in higher education. I look forward to seeing whats next for the conference in whichever form it decides to become.

Durham Blackboard Users Conference 2017

Last week was the annual Durham Blackboard Users Conference, and once again I was lucky enough to be able to attend. As it’s a conference organised by and for users, it is always a very useful and productive event and over the last few years I have brought back so many great ideas to build on.

My turn at the usergroup
Photo by Maria Tannant

On the day before the conference there are a number of parallel workshops running, and I attended
the Blackboard Mobile User Group meeting, which was both a face-to-face and video conference meeting as there were users attending from Europe as well as those unable to get to Durham. The user groups are set up and run by users (I set up and run the North England Group) so this is a chance to really engage in what other institutions are doing round the country, both in HE and FE. We got the chance to share what we are currently doing with mobile apps and Blackboard apps (MOLE runs on Blackboard Learn) and it was comforting to find out that we are all in pretty much the same place at the moment, as this gives us the chance to share and build on practice and influence the direction of app development as a whole community.

Malcolm Murray opens the conference
Photo by Paul Durston

Day one of the conference kicked off with a welcome from Durham and the usual humorous introduction to the conference theme (always decided by delegates at the end of the previous conference) from Malcolm Murray. This year the theme was Ticked Off: Towards Better Assessment and Feedback. The opening keynote was from Dr Susie Schofield of the University of Dundee, who runs the largest MMEd course in the world, largely online and delved in to translating evidence-based principles into improving feedback practices. Following on from that were sessions from Chris Slack of Leeds University who was returning with a follow on from last year regarding their implementation of the Enterprise Survey Tool. This showed real time and cost savings from moving these from alternative survey methods to the Blackboard Learn tool. The afternoon covered sessions from Content Collection usage from Derby University and an interesting delve into the world of gamification from Malcolm Murray of Durham. The day wrapped up with a look at the new accessibility tool that Blackboard have released called Ally, which looks a very powerful app that can convert content on the fly to a number differing accessible formats.

Day two started with a keynote from Alan Masson from Blackboard, discussing their take on assessment and feedback and how they are developing their approach to support us in this area. We also go to meet Phill Miller from Blackboard, who had some rather refreshing things to say about the company, the way things had developed over the last few years and how he wants to drive the company away from ‘Truthiness’. The rest of day two covered the ASR Database access (for those of us who are system admins) from John Langford of Edge Hill University and a meeting of the UK Usergroup Leaders, which is a regular meeting at Durham as most of us are usually there. This is one of the many examples of the excellent community network I have the pleasure of being part of, and something that brings many benefits to us. My last session of the conference was taking a look at Numbas, which is a maths assessment tool developed by the University of Newcastle. This was very timely for me, as we have recently been looking at how we can improve the difficulties of handling maths in an online environment. It was very useful to get to speak to Chris from Newcastle as we have actually started to consider this for testing. Having seen it and spoken to them, I hope we can get this in to testing soon as it’s looks very good indeed.

Of course, around all these sessions is the chance to meet people, both new faces and old friends and colleagues, and get a chance to talk about the issues we are facing, the ideas we have and the things we would like. I took the chance to talk to several people about how they are using Kaltura, as we are now embarking on that journey, and th support we have there if needed we certainly help us as we progress with this. We get to have a drink and some good food too, of course :) This is the most powerful part of any conference, particularly this one and it’s something that will continue to help us develop in to the future. It was, as ever, a very good conference.

Durham Blackboard Users Conference 2018

Durham Blackboard Users Conference 2018

The conference theme

Last week I had the pleasure of spending time in Durham for the annual Blackboard Users Conference. Now in it's 17th year, I've been lucky enough to attend over the last 7 years and it has been a great time to meet people and learn about what is happening across the UK with other Blackboard VLE institutions (MOLE runs on Blackboard Learn).

This year, I was presenting about our move to running MOLE based exams and how it has developed over the last 5 years. I got a lot of questions at the end of my session, so I'll take that as a sign that it went well :)

The conference started for me on Wednesday afternoon with the Blackboard Mobile and Collaborate User Group. This runs as a hybrid meeting, with people both in the room at Durham, and connecting in via the Blackboard Collaborate online collaborative learning platform. This gives us a chance to find out what others are doing with their mobile platforms, find out the issues and problems that arise, and how the challenges have been overcome. An update round the meeting from each institution allowed us to set the scene, and then we had members of the Blackboard Mobile team joining us from the US to present some of the new features that are coming soon, and to take feedback from us on the mobile apps. It's a good way to kick off the conference, and the discussions carried on over an meal in the evening.

Thursday morning saw the start of the conference 'properly', with a welcome from the Durham PVC for Education, and then the usual conference opening from Malcolm Murray, who heads up the Learning Technologies Team in Durham who organise and run the conference. Next up was the keynote from NUI Galway's Sharon Flynn. A long time attendee of the conference, it was great to have a keynote from the community for a change, rather than someone coming in from outside. With the conference theme of 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly' (the theme is always suggested by the attendees of the previous year) Sharon wove this into her talk about where they had been and where they were heading. Sharon was the inspiration that triggered TELFest for Farzana and myself, so it was lovely to get a mention from Sharon about this during the keynote.Unfortunately illness gave me a late change for the next session, as the presenter I had earmarked to listen to had been unable to make it, so I jumped in the session Urkund were running to show how their plagiarism detection tool has been integration into Blackboard Learn. As we are a heavy user of Turnitin, I am interested to seeing what alternatives are out there, even though there is no consideration in moving away from a service. A spot of lunch is always good as it's a chance to catch up with people as well as actually eating something. I had a number of things I wanted to talk about and these contacts are invaluable in helping us improve how we do things - this year has been no exception in providing this help for me :)

After lunch I went to listen to how Edinburgh approached gathering meaningful data on their student experience. Ross Ward talked about how they had done this and gave me some food for thought on how we can continue to improve our 'UX' since the course refresh. Next up was Dave McArthur from Glasgow Caledonian, who definitely gave the most entertaining presentation of the conference, with much laughter in the room, talking about how they reworked existing content for use in a distance learning programme.The afternoon continued with Jonny Crook and Andrew Gold from Manchester Uni talking about their experiences of using standard course structure, again something that is of interest as we have just been able to introduce course templates for departments this year. Day one finished in Blackboards session on the impact of accessibility. With their new Ally tool looking very interesting, this is an area I think we need to explore in more detail, and with their research findings that around 80% of images did not contain alt descriptions and 1/3 of document had contrast issues in VLE content, it's clear work is needed.

The evening was more time to talk to people over the conference dinner, in the wonderful setting of the great hall in Durham castle. Having been for a few years, I know a lot of the attendees quite well and it's always good to meet up again, and have some fun as well as talk work.

Day two began with the Blackboard keynote from Katie Blot, who gave us an insight into her time with the company and where things are heading. Next up was an interesting presentation from Candice Nolan-Grant from Durham about how then have used a course within Blackboard to offer new users self-guided training. This is something I've been considering, so it was good to see how they had done it, and be able to ask some questions about their successes and failures. Watch this space!Next up was Derby talking about their academic led EMA project, and it was amazing to see how big a project it was. Over lunch I had a Blackboard Usergroup Leaders meeting, which is a very useful time to get together face to face and discuss some of the things we have been trying to do over the previous year, and where we would like to be heading. I run the North England usergroup (NEBUG), which has been around for a few years now and is a very useful addition to the conferences throughout the year. After lunch I was up at the front. The final sessions were a useful insight into the tendering process from John Usher of Blackboard and Jonathan Knight from Keele talking about something we've just begun to implement, and that is the devolving of administration access using hierarchies, which is getting very system admin technical, so I'll not go into any more detail.

What to Say When a Colleagues' Family Member Dies

This is fairly off topic for this blog, but this is something that's come up several times recently for me, and I've struggled with it each time. This morning I received a note from a colleague to tell me that their mother died last night and that they couldn't do our scheduled call. I'm always at a loss as to what to say ... 

I honestly sat in front of the email this morning trying to figure out what I should be saying. And I rewrote the email a bunch of times. I never felt the words in the email were the right words. 

I'm generally okay with saying something about being sorry for their loss (and I truly am). If I know them well enough to know whether they are religious, I will sometimes say that they are in my family's prayers (and they truly are). I wish there was a non-religious way to say the same thing, but I don't know the equivalent.

But those one or two sentences seem inappropriately short given the magnitude of the situation. Maybe it's good to be short? Still it feels hollow.

And I struggled even more with whether to say and what to say about the work / scheduled call. Do you mention anything about it? I wanted to say that our discussions could hold until ???? But it seems wrong to even include that message in the same note. It felt like a rounding error on the important part of the message.

And if you do say something about holding, what's the end of that sentence?

Until you get back? <- Not quite right. It could hold longer if they need it.

Until things return to normal? <- Ouch. No. That's definitely not right.

Until ???

I'm sure that many other people face this same issue. I would appreciate any suggestions, especially sample emails / wording that you would or have used in this kind of situation.