 Well welcome to the afternoon session of day three of LC 2021. I'm delighted to welcome Suzanne Faulkner, Mia Graham and David Tate and they're going to provide us with a, I expected a very interesting presentation on bridging the digital and physical space with Snapchat. So Susan, David, Mia, thank you very much. Okay, so we can flip on to the next slide, it's a very long title slide, so thank you for that. And I just want to bring to your attention that Mia and David are actually first year students now progressing into second year students, so be kind. So I started using Snapchat in 2018 with my students, but obviously coronavirus brought with it additional and new problems in the past academic year. So Snapchat really came into its own with creating a community and allowing our students to learn at home. Next slide please. So when it comes to our students study prosthetics and orthotics, and there's a lot of hands on practical activity required in that course, and we do a lot of student demonstrations. Now not only did we have the added issue of coronavirus, but typically in a normal year, we're demonstrating patient assessment techniques to students. They're taking notes on the techniques, invariably they miss some of the demonstration because they're taking notes. So next slide please. So the solution that we came up with was actually to record lots of short videos and thankfully we did this last year pre-pandemic and we had this fantastic resource of lots of different patient assessment videos to share with our students, meaning that they could actually conduct patient assessment on family and friends at home. Next slide please. So I'm sure many of you who are attending conference today will know what Padlet is, but just in case you don't, I like to describe it as an electronic pin board where students and staff can collaborate together. It's interactive and you can pin various resources such as videos, text documents and audio as well and it can be password protected. Next slide please. So originally when I created the Padlet with all these videos there was no structure or rhyme or reason to it, it was just all put together on a Padlet and the students very much appreciated having this resource to go back over and to look at when they were at home but given that we had very limited clinical contact this year due to contact it meant that the students were actually able to look at the videos and practice these techniques on family members. Next slide please. So as I said previously there was no rhyme or reason or no structure to the way that these videos were put together on the Padlet and I got feedback from students, I'm always asking for feedback, what can we do better? And I was told I would have liked it if the patient assessment videos were set up more clearly and in a set order. So if you can choose the next slide please Mia. So what I did was I changed the format of the Padlet and made it much more structured so the patient assessment videos were in different columns related to whether it was muscle, ligament testing and different parts of the foot and ankle. Next slide please. So this meant it was much more structured. Now I want to talk about the fact that the Padlets we shared the Padlet on the University of Yele but we also shared on our class Snapchat group and we'll talk a bit more about that in just a second but feedback from the students is that they like the instant feedback they get whether they're on campus or on Snapchat and they find it much easier than sending emails. Next slide Mia, sorry. One of the advantages as well that we have and the fact that we are sharing these resources on Snapchat and not necessarily just on the University of Yele, it means that students can access them easily anytime anywhere in a time where students were commuting to campus they could look at these resources on the bus on the train or they could even look at them on the sofa. They don't have to go through the process of logging into the University of Yele, finding the class and finding the resources on Snapchat. These resources are there instantly for them. Mia, did you want to say a bit about how you find it useful? Yeah so I find it really useful being able to access the Padlets and stuff through Snapchat whilst we were outside of like working hours. So for me I commuted quite a bit so it was great being able to look at the stuff on the train or on the bus whenever I was traveling and even just when I was going between work shifts and things it was a good way of just revising over the day and seeing what was on there and what I needed to look at. Thank you Mia and we were actually very lucky in that we were one of the few courses who did actually manage to get some time on campus so Mia was able to look at these resources on the go. Next slide please. So going back to Snapchat, what is Snapchat? Snapchat gets a bit of a bad reputation due to the fact that it has been and can be used inappropriately and I don't think I need to explain to anybody what the image is on the screen refers to. People have and do send nudes or etc on Snapchat relying on the fact that these messages disappear within five or ten seconds so I am delighted to assure you that we don't do that in our class Snapchat group. We actually use the group function in Snapchat if you're just using the app normally the messages do disappear within five or ten seconds. Using the group function the messages appear and if you press on the message it can stay there indefinitely if not it disappears after 24 hours so I make sure on our group Snapchat groups that the communication is maintained by pressing on the message. Next slide please and I'll say one of the reasons that I prefer Snapchat to WhatsApp they've got similar functionality. With Snapchat the students can join using the snap code which means we don't have to share mobile phone numbers like we would have to if we were joining on WhatsApp but why use Snapchat it's where my students are and if you look at the statistics here 77% of those between the age of 18 and 24 are Snapchat users and I did this because the students weren't engaging in the chats and forums on the VLE and when I asked them why they said it was too much too many steps to get there. Next slide please so David over to you. David I'd just like to say I'm a mature student so I was keen to get David's input. Thank you Suzanne. Hi everyone so what I would like to say is that initially Snapchat wouldn't have been my first choice for a sort of education portal if you will. I remember downloading Snapchat back in 2014 and probably bleating it after two months I think because it was just nonsense and it was a place for my friends and other people to be silly and I didn't really sort of buy into all so being a mature student am I coming through okay sorry just yeah I can hear you. Yeah so being a mature student when Suzanne prompted the idea for Snapchat as an education tool I thought oh my goodness not again what am I getting myself in for so but I was pleasantly surprised to see that it has changed a lot as an app and the group function that we use it for is a great aid to myself and my fellow students. Fantastic next slide please Mia. So this is just the first snap that I sent out to students in 2018 it was I think it was about nine o'clock or something on a Saturday night and I got lots of engagement which made me think actually there's something in this next slide Mia please. Bitmojis we use bitmojis to communicate as well as just text through the use of Snapchat and I can use that to encourage students to congratulate them when they get stuff right. Mia do you want to mention something about that? Yeah so Suzanne quite often uses bitmojis when she's on Snapchat in our group chat and it's quite nice because obviously we just use it for texting it's more like typed words that we don't take photos or anything unless we're doing like photos of like we're doing a patient assessment or something and so it's nice just to be able to see more like her expression I guess it gives more depth to our message you can then like see how she's feeling and it feels nice getting that from her. Fantastic next slide please thank you. Okay so when I ask students about what they like about Snapchat they'll say that it's less stressful than emailing I'm going to ask Mia to say something more about that in just a second but they found it very beneficial on their own up to exams the Snapchat group gets very busy and students find it's a more relaxed way of asking questions and also at the bottom here it says we can see when you're available so your avatar essentially pops up the students know when I go on to Snapchat I'm there because I've got time to communicate with them and one of the significant benefits to me is that it allows the students to interact with each other and me at the same time so rather than one student emailing me and getting an answer to that question the student sends my message in Snapchat and everyone can benefit from those those interactions next slide please Mia. So there are pros and cons to the use of Snapchat and I can see there's a question just come up here just now what do students think about you being in their space and I guess maybe David and Mia do you want to have a respond to that briefly just now what do you think about having me there is that something you welcome or not? Yeah so having you your space sorry sorry David thank you I'll let you go after it's not too like personal like it's nice because we get to know Suzanne through the chats and obviously we get to communicate with her a lot faster but one of the good features about Snapchat and things are that I can have Suzanne blocked my stories so she doesn't have to see like all the stuff I'm doing in my life or what I'm posting and so I'm just like all she sees is why I put in the group chat so it's not like she's in our personal space it's quite good. And what about you David what do you think? Just to sort of elaborate on what Mia said I think the Snapchat we use as purely university stuff we have our own group chat on Facebook where it's just the students there's no lecturers involved so we do have our own space outside of that as well yeah I don't think we feel that there's always a lecture sort of blooming in the in the chat so. Awesome thanks David thank you Mia and I've mentioned before the pros are that I can communicate with many students at one time and without a doubt the engagement I've had with the class skyrocketed when I started using Snapchat compared to the forums where I literally got zero engagement and that allows students to learn on the go. With regards to the cons when I started using Snapchat it was a group size maximum of 32 it's now up to 63 and that works perfectly our whole year group sizes rarely exceed 50 so our whole year group can be on the one chat. It is important that you manage the expectations of the students with regards to when you're going to be available. Another potential downside is that it is increasing the use of social media both of staff and students and we have to think about that and it does require extra time I do communicate with our students out with normal office hours because our students tend to be in nine to five every day if I restricted my use of Snapchat to just those office hours then it wouldn't be of much use. Next slide please Mia. Okay David over to you you're going to talk about from the student perspective the pros and cons of using Snapchat as a tutorial too. Yeah thank you Suzanne so the I think one of the wonderful things about having Snapchat on your phone is you can take screenshots of really anything that's been talked about in the chat so if somebody asks a question you take a screenshot of the question and then you can benefit from the answer by screenshotting it as well and these tend to be saved in your phone library so you can reflect on them at any point in the future for studying and it's instantaneous as long as you've got your phone with you you have access to these photos but I think one of the major downsides to that is if you are an avid phone user you use your phone camera a lot you then run the risk of losing the screenshot in your your phone's library so I think you need to really manage where you are storing these pictures these screenshots and maybe dedicate an entire album to say Snapchat and per subject and and dedicating the sort of space to that that way you can really understand and know where it is when you need it and I think the the drawback I think sometimes if there's lots of short answers you end up with tons of screenshots if there's a long format answer you end up with three screenshots that's all the same answer you know so again it all sort of plays into if you lose one of those photos you've lost pretty much part of the conversation so that's that's all. Thank you David okay and over to you Mia now please. Right so I'm going to talk about silent learning benefits so silent learners are people students kind of like myself I sometimes find it hard to ask questions to lecturers during class times just for like confidence reasons or whatever but using Snapchat is great because you can see other people's questions and the answers and there they could be questions that you weren't going to ask but somebody else has and therefore you get to see their answer which you wouldn't if they'd asked in class like at the end and you'd missed out on that so you get to see more answers and see what other kind of questions are being asked and then as David was saying you can screenshot it and save it for later and it really helps with your studies and you also get to it's easier to ask questions because it's not that sort of going up and it seems less sort of formal it makes it easier because you know they're going to reply quite quickly and quite often the questions that you're asking other students are also asking that's one thing that I found really good was I could see other students were asking similar questions to what I was thinking and it made me feel like maybe my smaller questions weren't so silly because quite often I was too worried to ask questions in case I appeared like I didn't understand the subject and I also created a great sort of support group because even if the lecturer like Suzanne wasn't available at the time so the other students then would help answer your question and you could form a relationship with them and maybe if you had more questions that they knew the answer to you can message them and it kind of created more of a sort of community with us all and we all got a bit closer. Fantastic, next slide please thanks Nia. Okay so one thing that was very sort of I struggled with was the late night messaging so Suzanne was great because she did always and she was very available especially late in the evening which is great if you have a job or if you have many things going on in the day and you want to ask questions later or even if you just want to go over things in the evening and sort of consolidate what you learned during the day but because of COVID we obviously haven't had the nine to five schedule that we usually have so therefore a lot of it's been working your own time or do this when you can so quite often I found myself working quite late into the evening just to keep up with stuff and it would be you know might have got to nine o'clock and I started making my dinner and I can hear the group chat going off and it'll be people asking questions about stuff that I haven't looked at yet or maybe a pop quiz going on which for me I found quite stressful just because you're finally relaxed and all of a sudden there's more stuff to learn but it has been great for other people who are busy during the day and then come back but we thought after feedback from our other students that maybe a curfew or like a time where it's cut off is required so then people can stop at the end of the day. Thanks Mia and that's great feedback I thought I was doing well being available to students but it's important that students know that they can switch up and also for me and my family as well next slide please Mia so we've talked about the advantages and disadvantages the students can learn anytime and anywhere and with flipped learning having availability to these resources the students can be better prepared when they come into our clinical sessions there are challenges in times of time and resources we have to also consider digital poverty and learning in isolation can be an issue however using the learning materials such as the videos with our snapchat group helped to reduce that as an issue next slide please Mia So GDPR this this chat this question always comes up what about GDPR when it comes to and there was a reason that that GDPR the slide was actually half cut off and that's because the students do have an awareness of okay I kind of know what I've heard of GDPR actually and speaking to students they've not get a great awareness really of what GDPR is and why it's there in the first place and snapchat is GDPR compliant they've got a statement in relation to GDPR but I think I need to do better and we all need to do better and having these discussions with our students about GDPR and how their data is being used and I would actually say very few people in the class actually had to to download snapchat and they all had it most of them had it on their device already and it is voluntary it's not mandatory but absolutely GDPR is something that we need to be aware of but the university is supportive in my use of snapchat as a tutorial tool next slide please just very just bring it all back together again it absolutely did bridge formal and informal learning it it created a safe space for the students to be able to ask questions that perhaps they wouldn't do in class or find it too stressful to find an email it absolutely resulted in enhanced participation and helped us to develop a learning community and this is a quote I got from a student on the chat the other day saying that this chat helped us to get to know you more than any other lecturer last year it was so important for me that the students felt that they had someone that you could communicate with particularly and develop a relationship with specifically when we were not on campus okay next slide please okay so there's a reference slide after this but we can leave it on this this is a class of 2021 who graduated and using their bitmojis I was able to create a graduation picture for them which was something we couldn't do on campus as we normally would I just really like to thank David and Mia for giving up their time and doing so brilliantly to present an academic conference when you're just going to your second year so thank you both very much and we'd love to answer any questions thank you very much Suzanne David and Mia we've had quite a few questions come in but you've also answered the questions as we've gone along I just wanted to pick pick one up here for me and David is um Anna Armstrong asked how easy is it to manage your learning when you have materials in different places and I know Susan you mentioned the BLE the snapchat how do you manage that divide if I go to David first yeah no problem um with a lot of care and attention I think I think it's the same with any university course I think even if you're in a pandemic I think you really need to be on top of where your notes are and where you're putting your information so I think having everything online and knowing that it's there it helps so much because you know you you know you can go back to at any point you really only have to take care of your screenshots as I talked about and the notes you've made say during lectures so I think having everything on the BLE helps a tremendous deal especially for well it works different for me because I'm a mature student and I like to think I'm more organised than I probably am I think for the younger students I think it's a big jump coming from school into university and all of a sudden you're in a completely different environment for organisation so I find that I found that uh no no different to my day-to-day life but maybe because I'm already um Mia you're you're a little quiet there David and Mia for yourself how did how did you feel the you know did you find things were in different places all your communication is sort of distributed you know where you're going each time for the first place you go to look for something um yeah so at first as David was saying for I went straight from school so at first I was a bit of a shock to the system trying to find everything but it's actually pretty well laid out quite a lot of our like all our stuff is on one website and then we have our Snapchat group obviously um but it's quite easy to find your stuff and even if you get lost that's the joy of the Snapchat group is you can ask do you guys know where this lecture is or something and someone can help you and I think sorry about I knew I get other members of staff the student the staff that I want to know the students will respond on Snapchat so if they just want an answer from students or they need to get a message to students they'll say to me oh can you can you put a message out on Snapchat they might not necessarily want to participate in doing this themselves but they know they know what the message gets gets to the students um and Suzanne just um wrapping a couple of questions up from the chat room there about wanting to replicate this in another tool um is there anything else you can recommend this there's places like mine where I couldn't get Snapchat through the door because security and GDPR it's a real challenge at the moment with some of those sort of tools yeah and other features in Snapchat that are missing that maybe somebody else could pick up them somebody mentioned you know could you do this in teams or somewhere else yeah so I think um when we look at the use of social media and learning and teaching in higher education all the literature always focuses on Twitter it focuses on Facebook groups uh and sometimes WhatsApp WhatsApp does the same things but I think I highlighted earlier in order to communicate with students on Snapchat I would have to have their mobile phone numbers and they would have to have mine Snapchat we join with the snap code so there's no sharing of that that private information with each other thinking about tools where I guess use of social media is not encouraged within within institutions um I'm just having a think about I'm not 100% sure we'd have to give some more thought to that to be honest I'm just gonna say I'm sorry we are running out of time but I was going to say that the questions that have been asked are on the YouTube recording so I'm looking at my other screen here in the chat room there so there's some other questions there so so maybe we can pick that up in that area and and continue on discord because we are running out of time now for this session but yeah there's a lot of questions there so I'll ask the audience as well to pop back and and have a look at your answers on the recording because that'll stay live for a while so um Suzanne, David and Mia thank you very much really interesting um and uh successful project you've run and hopefully you can you know continue this next year into the next academic year so thank you very much three of you thank you very much and thank you very much David and Mia Superstar as well done