Blog wrangling.... a guide for beginners

Ok so this isn't actually going to teach you anything about blogging (or cattle wrangling come to that).... rather it's an account of how I have been getting on with constructing a class blog.

In the past couple of years I have set my final year students a task of conveying their reflections on leadership values through the medium of interpretive dance the photostory. This year I decided not to repeat that exercise (as this particular cohort had already done something similar in their first year) but instead asked them to write a blog post - working in small groups -  about what leadership means to them.

I was inspired to do this by a colleague who had dome something similar with his class the previous year: however, in his case, he had asked his students to develop their ideas in a Word Document which he had then uploaded to a blog he'd created. (Sensible chap it turns out).

Naturally that wasn't complicated enough for me; no, I decided to create a multi author blog which the students could edit themselves. I figured that learning to blog was a useful 21st century skill in itself, so, heck - why not?

I tried to smooth the process along by creating a couple of screen cast videos to show them how to post, step by step, and this has worked well in the majority of cases, but a few are still struggling to create and publish their first post. However, that is understandable. What is surprising (as always) are the unforeseen "challenges" of a multi author blog composed of almost complete blog novices.

So - first problem: I send out invites to the blog to the students' Uni emails and they then set up a Blogger account using a different ID (particularly if they have created a multi-access account/password), so it's quite tricky (but not impossible with a little lateral thinking) to work out who is who.....

Then because they are working in groups I have to set up a spreadsheet that records who is working with whom. Again, not too difficult as they email me with the details, but a bit of extra work.

The real doozy is how they then seem to get lost somewhere between setting up a Blogger ID and accepting my invitation and end up creating a completely separate blog !?!?! I have managed to guide most of them back to the correct site - and one student decided she liked hers so much she is going to carry on using it as her reflective space for the remainder of the year - but I really didn't see that coming.

I have had some positive feedback from students: some have really enjoyed learning a new skill, especially, the older students in the group who worried they weren't cut out to handle this "internet technology thingy". There are also some really creative, fun, engaging and reflective posts being published, so the exercise is achieving its main aim. But I am left wondering what if anything I could do to make things run a little more smoothly next year - short of asking them to send me a word document which I upload....

And maybe some of the learning that comes out of these missteps will actually prove valuable: one student told me that she had previously been asked to write blog posts for the charity she works for - but only in a Word Document and never actually posting and editing on line herself. She was really pleased that she had now had this experience of actually contributing to a "live" blog - and indeed of setting up her own (which, naturally, she did by accident!).

The next stage is to try and get the students to leave comments for one another (I admit, I am going to moderate these!) and I will give each group feedback in the form of comments too. Once everyone is happy with the finished product, I am going to ask their permission to publish the blog so that they can see their efforts out there in the public sphere.

*UPDATE* here's the link: https://leadingteams2016.blogspot.co.uk/

Office Mix is Awesome

Had a very frustrating day yesterday trying to edit and upload a short screencast video to show my students how to post to a blog. I used ScreenCastOMatic (works just fine!) but then really struggled to edit it in Movie Maker (admittedly an old version that really doesn't work well with Windows 10). Adding an audio track also proved impossible as the Windows 10-provided Voice Recorder kept crashing on me. So I tried downloading other recommended Windows movie maker apps but found them too irritating with in app purchases and ads etc.

Next I uploaded the video to old favourite WeVideo online platform: all went smoothly but couldn't for some reason manage to publish it with an audio track (it's never failed me before.... I'm beginning to dislike Windows 10......)

I ended up doing a second screencast of my screen cast (!!!!) this time with audio, editing the video also using ScreenCastOMatic and then finally publishing that to YouTube. I know I could have done a voiceover from the get-go but there were reasons why I couldn't that I won't bore you with.

Anyway, a relatively happy ending.

But then today I remembered someone mentioning Office Mix. So - I downloaded it, watched the introductory tutorial videos, created a screen recording within a slide, with audio, uploaded it to Office Mix online, copied the link into my learning room and "Voila!!"  I think it took about 20 minutes.

Oh - and it's free!

So happy am I that I am going to recommend this to my students as the number one tool for creating their digital stories next term :)

In the meantime, the students are about to embark on creating a class blog about leadership values. I decided to move away from the simple photostory we had done in the previous two years, partly because this cohort already did that in Year 1. And because I think writing for an audience is a useful skill which is a little more taxing at this level than a simple photo +caption artefact.

More on this in my next post :)

Professional values and attitudes

http://hee.nhs.uk/wp-content/blogs.dir/321/files/2014/10/VBR-Framework.pdf

I have now begun a bit of work comparing the first year and final year responses to the professional values exercise  (I have so far analysed 10 presentations in each year, representing the work of around 70 students. I am about 1/3 of the way through) and there are some interesting differences emerging.

It appears for instance that the mentions of Social Justice are considerably more frequent in the final year students' work than in that of the first years' - 61 mentions in this category as opposed to 26. The other categories are noticeably more evenly balanced, although the "attitudes" section gets around 50% more mentions overall amongst the final year students.

For the final year students, the order in which categories feature is: social justice, attitudes of the care giver, skills of the care giver, outcomes for the service user, management and teamwork. The first years' focus, in order, is on skills then attitudes of the care giver, followed by the outcomes for the service user, social justice and finally management and teamwork.

The most frequently mentioned values out of all the categories in the first year are (in order of number of times referred to) Equality and Diversity, Respect, Supportiveness, Teamwork and Relationships. For the final year students these are: Equality and Diversity, Respect, Person Centredness, respecting the service user's  individuality and Empowerment. Although Equality and Diversity are top in each year, this aspect is mentioned twice as many times by the final year students as it is by the first years.

In terms of the care giver's personal attitudes, the top five in each year are remarkably similar :
Respectful, Compassionate, Enthusiastic and Committed and Approachable, are in the top five for each year. The final year students then have Genuineness and Honesty whilst the first years have Supportiveness.

There were however some interesting issues raised by the first year students which did not appear on the final year students' agenda at all. An awareness of isolation and loneliness, particularly amongst the elderly, and of the need for service users (again mainly the elderly) to be cared for within their own communities, stood out for me. The other main difference is that the first year students seem to emphasise the building of a trusting and supportive relationship where the care giver is enriching lives whilst final year students celebrate the individuality of the service user, aim to empower them and encourage independence whist identifying the care giver's most important qualities as empathy, committment and genuineness.

So how do these emerging attitudes and values compare with what health and social care organisations require of their staff? The link below explains the NHS' Values Based Recruitment programme:
http://hee.nhs.uk/wp-content/blogs.dir/321/files/2014/10/VBR-Framework.pdf with its emphasis on compassion, respect and dignity and improving lives.

Here also is BASWs values and ethics code http://cdn.basw.co.uk/upload/basw_112315-7.pdf focusing on human rights and social justice.

There is a greater overlap between the BASW values and the final year students' whilst the NHS values are wholly embraced by both years. Those BASW values which appear very little in either groups' work are the more political goals of redistribution of resources and working in solidarity.

One way of looking at the students' values statements is to assume they reflect their growing knowledge and experience and in particular their developing understanding of professional practice and the evidence base for effective interventions.

They may, for example, represent the difference between an understandable naivety (in a good sense) on the part of the first year students who, lacking both work experience and knowledge base, enter the course with an as yet undefined urge to help, care for and support others. This was noticeable in an unembarrassed use of the words love and passion in some groups' work as well as the expression of a desire to serve others and to make a change in the world. 

After three years of study, having had opportunities to work in the health and social care field, and with a more nuanced understanding of the needs of service users, values around empowerment, personal responsibility, advocacy and removing stigma are foregrounded by final year students.

Another interpretation is that the values expressed echo the social and psychological stage of the students themselves - from a more dependent, relationship-based perspective which perhaps reflects the first year student's need for belonging, to a more self-confident, independent and individual identity, which mirrors the final year undergraduate's readiness to "fly the nest" and embark on their career. Obvioulsy that is a bit of a generalisation especially as we have a number of mature students with existing health and social care careers behind them - but it's certainly worth considering.

Clearly there is more to be done - firstly to finish the analysis to see if the differences really are as marked as they currently appear and then perhaps to follow up on this through further dialogue with the students themselves and a review of their final reflective assessments.

Professional Identities - analysing the data

The values held by future health and social care professionals are something about which we should all care deeply. We may one day be very grateful if we or our partners, parents, or children find ourselves in the hands of people who have a keen sense of social justice and a compassionate nature.

Values are certainly at the heart of current  NHS quality improvement programmes  - see this interesting project involving "values based interviewing": The Health Foundation.

When I started on the Photopeach project I had some preconceptions about the sort of values our health and social care students would portray in their videos.... even after assessing them, I tended to have the impression that the number of different categories of values was very few and had been often repeated. If pressed I would have said Respect, Dignity, Caring would come out on top as key values (as ones we had actually discussed in class). Respect did indeed come joint top (along with with tolerance) but second was valuing the uniqueness of the individual.

Half way through the analysis of the videos, I have been surprised at the diversity of values, skills, professional attitudes and knowledge that the students have selected.

There are over 70 individual values mentioned and I have grouped these into five main categories: Social Justice, Personal Qualities, Professional Skills, Teamwork and Management, and the Desired state of the Service User.

Under Social Justice, such issues as anti-discriminatory practice, promotion of human rights, liberation from oppression and promoting the service user's voice are prominent (this category actually comes top with 47 mentions) whilst the desired state of the service user (comfort, happiness, dignity, independence etc) gets 30 mentions. Leadership and Teamwork gets 22 mentions (fulfilling goals, multidisciplinary working, accountability, leadership, co-ordination etc) which given that the module is called Leading Teams is unsurprising (in fact I'd have been disappointed if these had not materialised).

The two biggest categories (most values mentioned) are Personal Qualities and Professional Skills.
Qualities include attitudes such as altruism, compassion, responsibility and sensitivity, which I would have expected. Surprises included creativity, optimism, honesty and loyalty.

The inclusion of these values or qualities leads me to conclude that students had given this exercise quite a bit of thought and were not simply replicating what they could find on the NHS or SCIE websites that we looked at.

Professional Skills included safeguarding, problem-solving, being an advocate, ethical and reflective practice and managing relationships with service users. Confidentiality was actually the most mentioned attitude in this category.

I guess this demonstrates on one level that we have been doing something right as teachers for the past three years if our soon-to-be graduates are able to articulate these values and qualities so clearly. I think though it also highlights the type of student who comes on the course. I did the exact same exercise with first year students just a few weeks into their studies and the results are not a million miles away from these - a little less diverse perhaps but certainly demonstrating that students come on to the course already espousing beliefs in social justice and the importance of respect and dignity in the care of vulnerable people.

This in turn reflects the diversity of our student body - one third of our incoming students are over 21, 20% over 25. A number of these have already worked in the care sector. Around 10% of our students originate from outside Europe - some of these are refugees. Over half have not come to University straight from school but through a mixture of FE/access routes. We don't have the exact figures but I know anecdotally that a good number of our students are carers already - for children, parents and other family members - or themselves have a disability or chronic illness.

Concern for social justice and compassion appear to be well formed in our students even before they arrive. Developing knowledge of the subject area, engagement with the sociological and philosophical arguments presented on the course  - and of course, work experience - do the rest. Its good to know we'll be safe in their hands.