English: Diagram of technology-empowered professional development for teachers. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
My friend and fellow ed tech blogger Adam Bellow has relaunched his start-up companyeduClipper. Some of you may remember that Adam launched a private beta of the service last year. Well after a big investment from some venture capital firms and ten months of testing and revising features eduClipper is better than ever. In fact, I think it’s what teachers wish Pinterest could be. Last week Adam and I spent an hour talking about the new eduClipper in it’s current state and where it is going in the future. Let’s take a look at what will make eduClipper a very popular service amongst educators.
The thing that is obvious when you visit eduClipper is that it is a visual bookmarking tool. You can use the eduClipper bookmarklet to add “clips” (bookmarks) to your eduClipper boards. But eduClipper is much more than a visual bookmarking service. You can add PowerPoint, PDF, and image files to your boards. You can also add links to videos to your boards. You can play the videos without leaving your eduClipper board. And those of us who have Google Drive embedded into our professional lives will be happy to know that we can add Google Drive files to our eduClipper boards.
English: Title page from Sarah Trimmer’s The Guardian of Education, vol. I, 1802 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The annual ritual of the publication of the National Student Survey (NSS) results has triggered fevered data dissection at universities across the UK this week. But the analysis, and the subsequent press releases and poster campaigns, represent merely a stage in a continual cycle of NSS-driven activity.
Universities now run ongoing campaigns to solicit student feedback, review practice in line with student demands, publicise changes made, and promote completion of the survey itself, in order to rank highly for satisfaction in league tables. All this time and effort comes at some expense to institutions; just the cost of rewarding survey-completers with vouchers would cover a lecturer’s salary at many institutions.The time has come to review what students, and higher education more broadly, gains from this considerable investment.
