Forestry Students Stunning, Informative & Collaborative LO1 Sway Presentations

Collaborating within Microsoft Sway

With the request of the Digital Classroom team and the Certificate in Forestry students at Barony Campus, the SRUC IS department kindly provided a laptop for each table in order to assist the students with research and development of their LO1 Microsoft Sway presentations.

This was a huge benefit to the sessions as the forestry students were finding it difficult in developing their Sway presentations using their own Smartphones. These laptops will also benefit future students using the Digital Classroom. From the project staff (Andrew Treadaway and Ali Hastie) and the students, a big thank you goes out to Belinda Haig (SRUC’s Information and Digital Systems Group Manager) and David McEwan (SRUC’s IS Support Analyst).

With the delivery of Learning Outcome 1 of the Tree Identification completed within the Kirkmichael Digital Classroom, a student from each team were tasked in creating a new Microsoft Sway using their SRUC Office365 account and provided editing access to their fellow team members. With this, the students are able to edit their team’s Sway presentation anytime from anywhere.

Though, very quickly what we had found with these particular students was that they required more development time for their LO1 presentations within the Digital Classroom rather than off Campus.

Within the short video clip below, we can clearly see the students truly engaging and working as teams in researching (using their Smartphones and Tablets) and collaboratively developing their LO1 Sway presentations within the Digital Classroom. Andrew Treadaway also provided the teams with guidance concerning the LO1 criteria. The video also shows that the students have synced the laptops and their Smart devices using the Via Kramer App to their Teammate screens:

‘Stunning’ and Informative LO1 Team Sway Presentations

On Thursday 11th of October 2018, the four teams (Yellow Team, Blue Team, Green Team and Purple Team) presented their collaborative LO1 Sway presentations within the Kirkmichael Digital Classroom.

Once each team had taken their turn in presenting their thoroughly researched and informative Sway presentation, a Socrative poll was displayed around the screens for the three other teams to make their vote using an Android Tablet and the Socrative App on questions surrounding:

  • Had the team fully identified and outlined the distinction of whether their tree was either a Gymnosperm or Angiosperm?
  • Had the team correctly identified and outlined the type of floral characteristics of their tree?
  • Had the team correctly identified and outlined the generic stem and wood structure of their tree?
  • What score (out of 9 points) would you give the team for the format and style of their Sway presentation?

The teams were tasked in provide a formative score for each question element, which does not contribute to the students final Tree Identification grade.

Starting with the Yellow Team LO1 Presentation, who were covering the characteristics of the Yew tree:

Next team to present their LO1 Sway presentation was the Blue Team, who covered the characteristics of the Horse Chestnut:

Short video below of the Socrative poll for the Blue Team’s presentation:

Next up was the Green Team who covered the characteristics of the Larch tree:

Final but not least, the Purple Team covered their Sway presentation on the characteristics of the Wild Cherry tree:

Image gallery of the team’s presentations:

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Who is the winning team? We will let you know within our next Blog post and will provide links to their stunning LO1 presentations.

Next up surrounding the Tree Identification Unit using the Digital Classroom is the interactive delivery of Learning Outcomes 2 and 3.

For LO2 and LO3 of the Tree ID Unit, the same teams will produce an e-Portfolio of the identification of the trees provided to them within a collaborative Microsoft Sway e-Portfolio. The team’s Sway e-Portfolios will be submitted to Moodle using the Workshop activity (Peer-Assessment and Self-Assessment tool) where another team will peer review their Sway e-Portfolios according to criterion provided to them.

Also, further developments within other curriculum areas will include an HNC Animal Care team-based project covering Animal Husbandry. More news on this coming soon!


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