Padlet and Flipped Learning in Information Skills Training (by Emma Shaw)

Emma Shaw is the Library Manager and Liaison Librarian (Medicine) at Imperial College London. I while ago I saw her tweeting about the use of Padlet in her teaching sessions - students were using it in groups to come up with search strategies for healthcare-related databases. I like Padlet anyway, but I loved this use of it - so immediately beneficial, practical, and indeed stealable! So I asked Emma to write a guest post about the whole process, and she kindly agreed. Here's an example of the use of padlet she examines below.

---

I’m a Liaison Librarian at Imperial College London supporting medicine, along with another 4 Liaisons. Amongst a heavy timetable of information skills training for undergraduates and postgraduates, we have for several years been running a couple of Library skills workshops which are embedded in the MBBS Medicine course timetable for the 1st year medical students. We were using the traditional presentation slides telling them about the Library and how to access it, along with a hands on database searching component using the PubMed database. The database searching was taught in the form of a paper based tutorial handout. The students would sit in the computer lab and work through it for 20 minutes whilst also having the opportunity to ask questions. More recently I would go away and wonder whether they would really apply what we were teaching, in the format we were using. I asked myself if it was really meaningful for them, particularly as it was all new to them and we were teaching them how to look up research on a database, when they hadn’t even started using journal articles yet.

The other reason it got me thinking was, Information literacy is not an obvious skill that screams out ‘you need me in your life’ so you therefore need to convey it to the students in a way that makes them realise that they do. Especially when they have other priorities and a timetable jam packed with medical training. I’ve learned and observed over the years of teaching information skills that, in order for them to understand its direct use, to see its value and engage, they need to see it in context. When I say in context, I mean actually directly relating what they are learning in front of them, to a specific area in their coursework or even clinical practice. Rather than just telling them this is stuff they need to know now and in the future. This led me to question if, our presentation slides and paper tutorial were engaging and putting it in context enough. Could there be a better way of delivering the content so they engage with us, and see its direct value?

Feedback from the students about how we could develop the session included comments like:

“Maybe have an example of an assignment similar to what we would have this year and show how we might use online resources for researching that assignment.”

“Interactively doing it together with the students instead of following instructions on a page.”

This made it apparent that we were right to question this, and that it was a good time to reconsider the delivery of our training. We could see why PowerPoint slides were just not cutting it anymore, they needed interaction and context to stay engaged. On top of this, in the MBBS Medicine course, they were already being presented with e-learning modules, and using different teaching methods and technology. I could then see that very shortly our presentation slides and paper based database tutorial was not going to be enough anymore, and that our sessions were in danger of becoming irrelevant. We needed a fresh and new approach.

I had various sources of inspiration for revamping the workshops. We just so happened to have a visit from Caroline Pang, Director of the Medical Library at Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Singapore. One of Imperial College London’s partners. She demonstrated what library training they offered for Medical students. This consisted of initial training on the Library and database searching. They were then given a clinical question from the course tutors, and had to work together in groups to form the best search strategy to answer it. She had a whole day dedicated to this project as well as the presence of the tutors. This looked like a really good approach, not only was it more engaging by getting the students to actively search for a given question, but it was also relevant to the course content so they could directly see its value. If we wanted to do something similar however, the problem we faced was we only had 1.5 hours for each session!

It was then one day at a meeting with tutors from the MBBS Medicine course that, the idea of Flipped learning was presented to me. I won’t go in to too much detail about it as you can find a very good definition here by Professor Dilip Barad (Ph.D.). It’s essentially where work is given to the students to be done before the session e.g. a video lecture, or tutorial to work through. The session is then dedicated to applying the knowledge they have learnt from the pre-sessional work, through activities and group work and allowing them to ask questions. In this way it becomes student centred learning as opposed to trainer centred.

To be honest the flipped learning approach initially filled me with dread! There was the worry of giving them pre-sessional work to do with the risk of them not doing it.  It also seemed like a lot of work and preparation, as well as the fear of having to get the students in to groups and managing them. Also having many other duties aside from training, it’s very easy to just slip in to the habit of repeating the same old slides each year. It’s easy, it’s safe. However, if it would improve engagement it was worth a try, and I thought this would be an excellent model for our teaching. It would allow us to save some time in the session by getting the students to do the straight forward PubMed tutorial before the session. This would then allow us to try out the database searching exercise in groups, which we didn’t think we would have time for. We could dedicate time in the session to getting them to do real searches on PubMed, using related topics in up and coming assessments, with the trainers feeding back to the groups as they did the searches. This would allow for more engagement and they would directly see the use of searching a database, by pulling up relevant articles that could be of use for their assessments.

The final plan for the session consisted of an online PubMed database tutorial created using Articulate software. This was essentially a series of online slides taking the students step by step through using PubMed, which we hosted on the Blackboard platform. We emailed the students a week in advance via the Medical School to ask them to do the online tutorial before the session. To encourage them to do it, we mentioned that it would be for a group exercise in the session. We then sent a reminder a couple of days before the session for good measure. Some good advice I got from an e-learning technologist was to give them an approximate time of how long the tutorial would take, so they could plan it around their schedules. We aimed for 30 minutes which we thought they would see as achievable.

For the session, we refined our slides on the Library induction section. We then did a brief summary of what they should have learnt from the PubMed tutorial and gave an opportunity for questions. There was some debate on what to do if the students didn’t do the tutorial before the session. Should we include a more detailed summary in case, or would we run the risk of disengaging the students because of the duplication of information? We decided to go with a very brief summary just confirming points from the tutorial. We would then play it by ear and adapt the session if necessary. We then presented them with a search question related to a future assessment and arranged the students in to small groups and asked them to come up with a search strategy for that question. To provide the students with more feedback in the session and to give it a competitive edge (another bit of advice from a tutor that they liked competition!), we added some blended learning in to the mix. We used an online tool known as Padlet for the groups to add their search strategy to, for which we could then feedback to all the students how they all got on with the task. An example from one session is below.

An example of a Padlet board, used by the students to detail search strategies

The first sessions we ran in 2016 went very well and we had over 80% of the 320 students do the pre-session tutorial. As it was successful we ran it again last year in 2017 and over 90% of the students did the pre-session tutorial. The group exercises went well, and we could really see the students engaging with the task and coming up with good search strategies.

The feedback was mainly positive and gave the impression that our new teaching method was working. The following comments were from 2016:

“Clear explanations; the delivery was concise. The activities helped us put the skills into practice.”

“It's really nice to practice searching in class and in group and it really helps when comparing different searching methods within groups.”

Some Feedback from 2017:

“Expanded on the pre reading material and explained things more clearly and gave sufficient exercises to ensure I actually understood the methods of searching databases”

“Learnt new and useful techniques for searching up articles. The session was interactive and fun. Everything was explained well and thoroughly.”

In terms of negative comments, in 2016 we had a few to do with some of the session’s content repeating parts of the pre-session tutorial. As these were our first sessions, we hadn’t yet got the balance right in terms of summarising the tutorial, so we then adapted this for the sessions in 2017 to avoid this. For the 2017 sessions, a few comments said it was a bit rushed, and they wanted more searching examples. They also struggled with some of the concepts like Subject Heading searching, and found it too advanced. This could potentially be because some of the students did not do the tutorial beforehand, but I think we perhaps also need to consider more about those students who learn at different speeds. This is a challenge when teaching 45+ students per session and with the time constraint. However, this is something to bear in mind for the next sessions, and to perhaps offer opportunities for optional follow up training on a 1-2-1 basis for those who require it.

Overall it’s been a real success. Not only do I put this down to the hard work by the Liaison team but, also down to the fact we had really good support from the tutors from the Medical School who always ensure to make it clear to students that information literacy is a crucial part of the curriculum. For anyone wanting to try Flipped learning, I would therefore always recommend getting the faculty on board. Despite all the preparation work, we also enjoyed delivering the session. It was a really good experience actually going around the room and engaging with the students and giving feedback, instead of mainly stood in front of PowerPoint slides and answering questions.

For anyone interested in looking at the session content, such as the online PubMed tutorial please feel free to get in touch.

Using screencapture software to make next-level PowerPoint presentations

I normally record talks I give at conferences, using my phone in my jacket pocket. I have a strict 'no critiquing myself during the talk itself' rule, so the recording allows me to listen back afterwards and pick up on things that I'd want to do differently next time, or things that worked well etc.

In the past I've also put a video up on YouTube, using Camtasia to record me moving the slides along with the audio of my talk at the LIASA conference in Cape Town. I don't think this worked that well because there was simply too many long periods where nothing changed on the screen - in real life that was fine because the audience looks at the speaker, but in a video - a visual medium after all - it just feels a little inert and uninteresting.

So for a recent talk I decided to try and make a version of the slides that would work as a proper video. I spoke at the CILIP PPRG Conference in January (more on that in a previous post) about our UoYTips marketing campaign - York won a Bronze Marketing Award which I was picking up at the event. I delivered the slides and recorded the talk in the usual way, but then set about creating a new version of the slides that had much more going on visually. The actual slides are here, if you're interested, and here is how they evolved for the video I came up with:

Now I've done this, I'm wondering why I can't just do more visually exciting slides anyway? This doesn't have to be just for YouTube. I've always wanted to use video in presentations more, and it's surprisingly easy to do as it turns out.

The tools

To make the video above I used three bits of software. PowerPoint, obviously, for the slides. Audacity to edit and play the audio (this is free). And Screencastomatic for both the screen-capture videos within the slides, and the overall screen-capture of slides plus audio you can view above. Screencastomatic is a great tool, which I found much easier to use than Camtasia. It's quick and intuitive. It can be used for free, but in order to record videos of more than 15 minutes, and record PC audio, you need the pro subscription - this costs 12 quid year which is pretty great value, I reckon.

Here's what the Screencast-o-matic interface looks like:

It's very easy to redraw the box around the exact part of the screen (or all the screen) that you want to record. You can pause and restart. You can also record PC audio as you go, or narrate into a mic. As you can see it gives you the option of recording from webcam at the same time if you wish, which happens in a smallish box at the top right of the screen.

It's really easy to use.

The techniques

In the video above there are a number of techniques (perhaps that's too grand a word!) employed to suit different types of information.

• Actual video recorded on my phone. (This happens about 25 seconds in.) I recorded a video in the usual way, emailed it to myself, and went to Insert Video in PPT. You can make it full screen, or you can overlay the branding / visual identity from your PPT over the top. I think this is crucial to how easy this is to do - the video can effectively be the background of the slide, just like an image can. You then overlay it with text, shapes, images etc as normal.

• Screencasting Google Earth. I really like this one, which happens here. How to have something dynamic on screen while I talk about the University of York? Type it into Google Earth then press record on the screencasting software, and return on Google Earth. It zooms all the way in and then, delightfully, spins round the building you've chosen for a bit. I'm going to use this in library induction sessions in the future, for sure.

• Using gifs. There's a couple of examples of this, but here's the most interesting one. It starts off as a regular full-screen image, and then I used animation to first of all drop the text on top of the image at the appropriate time, and secondly to trigger the gif video beginning (having downloaded the gif from a gif site, and saved it as a video).

• Regular PowerPoint animations and transitions. There's a few moments where things are added onto the screen one-by-one as I mention them, and there's this very long fade transition between two slides

• Videos of websites instead of screengrabs of websites. There's an example here, and another example here. In the talk I just showed a screenshot of the thing I was talking about, but here it's a 15 second video of the site being used, which is much more interesting. I'm definitely going to reuse this technique.

The drawbacks

Really the only two drawbacks are that it takes time, and it takes space.

Of course, recording a clip on a website in use takes more time than just a screenshot, but it becomes surprisingly quick. Perhaps a minute to set-up, record and save / export 20 seconds' worth of screen-capture, so not too bad at all.

In terms of space - the videos are MP4 files and pleasingly small. Most brief captures were under 1 meg. The 22 second-long Google Earth zoom right at the start of the video was 12 meg. The overall final file - a 20 minute video capturing the whole thing, was 99MB. Video files are so huge, I think this is pretty reasonable.

So, I'd recommend giving this a try. And if you create a presentation with video and upload it anywhere (or you've already done this in the past) leave me a link in the comments...

The key to good library marketing is *campaigns*

The title of this blog post is the opposite of click-bait: it says everything. It's the tl;dr not just of this post, but of successful library marketing per se.

One-off marketing almost never works, because people seldom act on a piece of marketing the first time they see it. When you see an ad, even a good one, you don't rush out and buy / do the thing right away. If you have Netflix for example, think about when you got it. Was it the first time you saw an ad? Or did you become more and more aware over time, and then eventually circumstances were right and you signed up?

In Library marketing terms we have to try and achieve the same thing. Build awareness over time of relevant services. Appeal to people at the right time. If we just push out lots of different messages all the time, this is too much information and its too dispersed - there's nothing for anyone to hold on to, and think 'this is for ME'. So 9 times out of 10 (at least) the successful marketing, the things which have impact and make a tangible difference to the Library, are in the form of campaigns. What does this mean in practice?

Campaign marketing consists of delivering the same message, tailored across different platforms, for a sustained period of time.

So your users see the message once, and they register it. They see it again somewhere else and they decide to act on it. And then perhaps a week later they see it again and that's when they change their behaviour, and do something they weren't going to do before. You need a week or two of focus on the same message to make that change happen.

Examples of great campaign marketing

I was at the PPRG Marketing Awards Conference last month, and the one thing which united virtually all the award winners was campaign marketing. You can see all the presentations on the PPRG website but here's some key examples.

Hampshire Library Services. Hampshire undertook a really comprehensive campaign to promote the free digital magazines service they had, which wasn't being used enough. You can view their Prezi here - it's well worth a look. Here's an example of their campaign visuals:

Hampshire Library Services campaign visuals, taken from their Prezi linked above

The key thing about these four ads is the visual style is so striking, you'd easily associate one with the other if you saw them seperately. So again, perhaps the first time you see the ad you think 'oh that's great, free magazines at the library!' but that still isn't enough for you to ACT. Then you see the second one and it reminds you of the first one, you associate the two, and it's the second push you need to go and actually download an e-magazine.

And downloading e-magazines is exactly what people did based on this campaign. Here's a key stat:

That's the thing about campign marketing: it really, really works.

Another great example was from Islington Library and Heritage Services. Take a look at the #islington50s slides here. They had a one-month campaign, with a set number of social media outputs each day, a clearly defined set of objectives, and both a library-user and non-library-user audience in mind.

Here's the slide on the impact it had:

Click the pic to open the entire presentation in a new window

I love the details that their Local History Centre was rushed of its feet as the impact of the campaign spread through the community!

The final example is local to me - York won a bronze award for our UoYTips marketing campaign. We ran our academic induction as a marketing campaign in 2016, and it worked so well we've built upon it for 2017. There are all sorts of reasons why we did this and why it worked - but again the key thing is, it was a campaign. Key messages over a concerted period of time. Here's a video I made that has the audio from my talk, plus a more video-friendly version of the slides:

Or if you'd prefer, just the original slides...

Running Academic Library induction as a marketing campaign from Ned Potter

Next steps

If you want to run a campaign, here are some things to think about.

1. Your campaign needs to be the primary focus of your comms for a concerted period of time. It doesn't mean you don't talk about anything else, just that you keep talking about the subject of the campaign
2. The same message needs to go out across multiple platforms, but it may work better when tailored for each - you wouldn't neccessarily use the same phrases, words or images for twitter, an email, a poster on the Digital Screens, and Facebook
3. A strong call to action is important. It's not enough just to pique people's interest - they need to know how to easily take the next step to engage with your campaign (visit a website, come to an event, fill in a form, whatever it might be)
4. Don't just measure outputs (tweets, posters etc) but outcomes - what happens as a result of your campaign? This takes time but it's worth it because you can build on what works

What makes you act on a piece of marketing?

The title of this post is something I often ask delegates in marketing workshops. It's rhetorical, usually - I'm trying to get people to think about how seldom marketing makes them change their behaviour. Think about how hard it is for marketing to get YOU to do something you weren't already going to do, and you see the scale of the challenge we face when marketing libraries.

That's why putting up a poster and sending a tweet doesn't constitute having 'marketed' something. If seeing a nice poster and a tweet about how good something is would not be enough to get you to take a (new) action, then chances are you users won't act either.

For this post though I'm keen on exploring this issue non-rhetorically. I want to hear your answers. I've set up a google form because I figure people may be more comfortable doing this anonymously. I'm interested in what makes you act on a piece of marketing. If you did something you weren't going to do because of an ad or a campaign or anything else, what did you do and why did you do it? From the results I hope to learn things we can apply to library marketing.

Here's the form. I'm aware it's really inelegantly phrased, there's probably a much more succint way of putting all this... (If you'd like to share the question with anyone, the link is https://goo.gl/forms/IxalsAl2swfME5v52)

Thanks in advance to those who fill this in, I appreciate it. I'll come back and anaylse the results in a future post.

A guide to the best free sites for cc0 art and stock photography

Tweet

I recently wrote a guide for my library's blog on the best sites for high quality, free, and public domain images. I've recreated part of it below.

These sites are hugely useful for marketing purposes, as you can use them in websites, posters, slides, on social media (but NOT insta! That needs your own photos on...) and so on, completely legally and without shelling out any cash.

The sites listed below contain images which have been made Creative Commons Zero (also known as CCO) by their creators, are available to use by anyone, however they like. The images are in the Public Domain and can be reproduced, incorporated into other works, modified, and reused, without needing permission and in most cases without even needing to credit the author.

Free to use stock photography

Pexels

Pexels is the CC0 site I go to first when creating slides or websites. It's good on technology particularly, but covers loads of areas well, with stock photography that is far above the average stock shots. It has tens of thousands of pictures, including the ability to search by colour, and also has a sister site dedicated to CC0 video.

A selection of images found using pexels.com's colour browsing facility

Stocksnap

Once you start using CC0 image sites you get used to seeing the same stock photography appearing on many of them (it comes with the territory, as the fact that the copyright has no restrictions means any site can pick them up and use them - you could start an image bank right now using CC0 images if you wanted to), but Stocksnap seems to have a few more pictures which are unique to it. Thanks to Hilary and Luke who showed me this at the PPRG conference. Here's the 'recently added images' from today:

The most recent additons to StockSnap.io

nappy.co

Nappy describes itself as “Beautiful, high-res photos of black and brown people. For free” and this is a rare thing: stock photography is often VERY white. Thank you to @AgentK23 for giving me the heads-up about this site.

Photos from the ‘Work’ category of nappy.co

finda.photo

finda.photo (that's the actual URL as well as the name) searches through lots of other CC0 sites in one go, including the excellent UnSplash. As well searching by keyword you can browse by colour, collection, or original source.

Images from the 'Glare' category of finda.photo

Interestingly after I tweeted this, Unsplash got in touch with a reply, and pointed out that finda.photo only searches a relatively small percentage of their photos:

Just a heads up, though, that https://t.co/0uq5XGIu1p only offers ~8,000 of our pre-Unsplash License photos and not the other 400,000+ from the Unsplash Library 😉

— Unsplash (@unsplash) January 25, 2018

I had no idea this was the case! So, worth going direct to Unsplash.com too.

Gratisography

For some pictures that are about as far away from tired stock photography cliches as it is possible to get, head over to Gratisography. Quirky, odd images, of extremely high resolution and quality, free to use in any way you see fit. There's really nothing quite like it.

Gratisography. Not your average stock photography site

RawPixel

A new site for me is RawPixel. They got in touch after reading an earlier version of this guide and I'm happy to include them - if you work in design this site must be a godsend. There's a real variety here, not just in terms of the images but the way they're grouped and organised - check out the Boards section to see what I mean. Just for this image alone I will be using their site again - images of teaching seem to be almost impossible to find!

Finally a decent image of 'teaching' happening! And they've ever-so-helpfully left a lovely big copyspace on the board for you to write in whatever you like...

UKBlackTech

These aren't cc0 - they're Creative Commons Attribution - but I wanted to include them because they're a set of tech-focussed images focusing on BAME protagonists. It's great that UKBlackTech have made these available for free.

Download these images at ukblacktech.com

Free to use art and artwork imagery

An absolute ruddy masterpiece, from 1565, available to you, reader, to do with as you please, thanks to The Met

• New York Met

  375,000 images of artworks from The Met's collection to use, share, and remix without restriction. And it's the New York Met, so they have some of the most famous paintings in the world, like Bruegel's The Harvestors from 1565. 

• Walters Art Museum

  Because the Walters owns or has jurisdiction over the objects in its collection and owns or customarily obtains the rights to any imaging of its collection objects, it has adopted the Creative Commons Zero: No Rights Reserved or CC0 license to waive copyright and allow for unrestricted use of digital images and metadata by any person, for any purpose.

• Riks Museum Amsterdam

  The Dutch Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam has opened its collection to the public with the majority of its photographed artwork being released under a CC0+ license that requires attribution. You must create a free account in order to download.

• Getty Museum

  Thousands of images of artworks are available for download, without charge, under the Getty's Open Content Program. Look for the Download button under the image.

• Yale Center for British Art

  The Center provides free and open access to images of works in the public domain and certain other materials, and hopes to encourage further the use and reuse of its public domain resources by all who may have access to them.

• Europeana Collections

  Europeana provides an extraordinary 8 million images which are completely free to re-use, covering the areas of Art, Fashion, Maps & Geography, Migration, Natural History, Music and others.

---

You’ll find details of my Presentation Skills or PowerPoint workshops here: you can book an all-day or half-day session for your organisation, online or in person. We look at a lot of great CC0 image sites and talk about how to find the right images for your presentations and social media.