If it wasn’t for the passion and generosity of our PebblePad community of educators, learning technologists and educational designers, PebblePad would not be the platform it is today. This was demonstrated yet again at our most recent community event in Perth, Australia. Following on from the success of the June MiniBash in Birmingham, UK, – you can see the videos from that event here – we’re having a round of MiniBash events Down Under in Perth, Brisbane and Melbourne. With so much fantastic practice on display, we wanted to share the highlights from the first event while we gear up for the next two.
Setting the scene – Future Readiness
The beautiful Joondalup campus of Edith Cowan University provided the setting for our first 2022 Australian event in Perth. The day started with an expert conversation between Professor Denise Jackson from ECU, a renowned Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) authority, and PebblePad CEO Shane Sutherland. The key themes they spoke about included equity in WIL, noting the difficulties for some students who work to support themselves as well as committing to study – and then needing to factor in unpaid WIL, which makes it harder for some students to engage. They also touched on the different notions of ‘employability’, job/career readiness, and future readiness, including taking into account the student perspective – something we often talk about here at PebblePad, and was the subject of one of our recent popular webinars.
The Expert Practitioner Sessions – Wowed by the Wonderful West Coast
There’s a reason we refer to our community as ‘trailblazers.’ It’s always exciting to see how PebblePad is being used in so many different ways – including uses we’ve never seen before, or in new discipline areas, or at an impressive scale we’ve not previously seen. Our community is exceedingly generous in sharing their ideas and practice and it was no different at this event. There were so many great examples, which makes it impossible to go into sufficient detail here, but we can at least provide a snapshot of the practice presented:
- Dr Zoe Bradfield is a senior midwifery practitioner and researcher from Curtin University, where she and her colleagues are doing amazing work with very complex uses of PebblePad collections – and almost every other PebblePad feature in the box.
- Dr Veronica Gardiner, from Education at Murdoch University, showed a powerful use of templates to record reflections on interactions in a virtual teaching simulation. Ronnie talked about a PebblePad workbook being ‘an anchor’ for the learning, evidence and experiences of students within and beyond the course.
- Heather Pate, a longstanding PebblePad user, showed a brilliant workbook design for helping students connect their learning across time and across modules, all leading to being able to produce a portfolio that showcases their employability.
- Helen Dugmore from Murdoch University showed quite possibly the most integrated, fully embedded use of PebblePad anywhere on the planet! It’s used by every nursing student on every module, placement and simulation – and more besides.
- Dr Sten Langmann – a relatively new user who provided a compelling and entertaining presentation on how he utilises the power of the workbook in a Business course.
- Our very own Jacqui Patten, (in bedazzling footwear) took us through ECU’s shift from BlackBoard to Canvas, and the (mainly) pro’s and cons of the shift and how to make the most of the PebblePad/Canvas integration. (If you’re interested in finding out more on this topic, we have a handy guide chock-full of info.)
- Bringing up the last of the guest speakers we had Jo Lines and Dr Ruth Wallace from ECU who use a portfolio approach where students bring together all of their workbooks into a cohesive whole from their myriad possible pathways.
Our CEO (aka CMM, Chief Mischief Maker) Shane Sutherland rounded out the day by sharing a little of our vision, talking about Enterprise-wide and Experience-wide Implementations of PebblePad. He reminded us of the PebblePad mission: To change the way learning is designed, experienced and assessed, which resonated deeply after seeing so many ways in which our community is using PebblePad to support their own visions of excellent learning and assessment design.
All in all, a fabulous day, that promised to send people home with heads full of ideas about how to tweak or add to their own practice. Great ideas to support student learning and success shared across all three events.
