Hello dear friends,

Many of you have asked if #BYOD4L will be offered again. Well, the answer is yes. BYOD4L will be back and we hope that you will be able to join us in January 2016, 11th – 15th for a week of professional development around how we can use our smart devices for learning and teaching. Thank you for all your support since January 2014 and for all of you who have been with us since then. This next iteration will be No 4 and it is very exciting for us as we are taking a new direction that will hopefully create a sustainable model to offer BYOD4L and similar courses all year round.

So what will be different?

1.Organisers wanted: We are looking for up to two organisers for January 2015 who are experienced open practitioners and would like to lead BYOD4L in January mentored by Chrissi and Sue. If you are interested, please get in touch with Chrissi or Sue by the 17th of December the latest. See also January 2016 team page for more information regarding this exciting opportunity.

2.Support system: We will be reaching out to you for help and seek community moderators who would like to join the organising team. If you would like to be one of them, please register your interest in the BYOD4L community. If you are interested, what this would mean is that you participate in discussions in the community throughout the week, without overpowering conversations (using questioning techniques really helps!) and helping when and where needed if there are learners who experience difficulties.

3. Tweetchats, every day 8pm UK time: Yes, they will be back, but the main feature will be Question Showers. What this means is that the questions will be generated by the community and each day will be linked to the daily theme, one of the 5Cs. It will be mad but also very useful as this will give us the opportunity to problem solve collaboratively. On Wednesday we will be joining with the #LTHEchat so this will be a bit different and a great opportunity to join up the two communities.

3. New stories: We are looking for new mini stories linked to the 5Cs (connecting, communicating, curating, collaborating and creating). If you would like to contribute yours as a short film, please share the link to your clips so that we can consider this before going live in January. It would be wonderful to use some of your stories. For example take a look at the connecting student and staff scenarios.

During the week, there will be loads of opportunities to engage asynchronously and synchronously. What hasn’t changed is our inquiry-based approach which will help you contextualise the themes we will be exploring together and consider changes to our practices.

image source http://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/01/65/29/1652955_5078fab5.jpg

We wish you a lovely festive break and a healthy, happy and creative New Year.

See you in the New Year 😉

Chrissi and Sue, the BYOD4L developers

BYOD4Learning by Chrissi Nerantzi (MMU) & Sue Beckingham (SHU)  is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.