Finnberry does Ed-Tech

There was a moment, just one moment, during my Master's study, when I encountered something that was alien to me at the time. It wasn't just something new... there was lots of new learning. It was a concept that I'd not encountered before. It was storyboarding. I thought that was something that was associated with video production. Even having worked across different educational sectors, I had never heard of it in connection with learning. This should have been my first clue that education and instructional design, though both about learning and development, are two completely different worlds. My next clue was that, in spite of having over 20 years' experience in education, I was seen as having no experience in learning and development. I found this baffling, as I thought they must surely have the same underpinning skills. In education, there are many theories about how people - children and adults - learn, and why they sometimes fail to learn. Throughout my Master...

One of the things I love about Edtech is that I'm constantly learning new things. Even when I already know something, there's always more to learn. This week, I've been revisiting the issue of assistive technologies, and trying to improve the accessibility of our Learning Management System (LMS) for our clients. To improve it, I wanted to do two things: Make the focus boxes more visible, so that users who use keyboard navigation can see where they are on the page more easily; Provide a way to bypass all the menus and skip straight to the main content, if the user wants to. It's the latter of these that I learnt some things from. I will start by saying that this blog has a 'skip to main content' option and I had never seen it. Do you want to try it out? Keyboard Navigation Instead of using your mouse to get around the page, only use your keyboard. You can refresh the page by hitting F5. Then you can move from item to item by pressing the 'TAB...