Crosswords, Library Bingo and Quizzes: getting more active learning into our teaching

At the University of Huddersfield we have been split into subject teams for many years and teaching practice has varied between the teams with little in the way of shared best practice. We recently set up an information skills teaching group comprising the Senior Assistant Librarians across all of the subject teams plus the Senior Assistant librarians at our satellite University Centres at Oldham and Barnsley.

The group has been tasked with sharing best practice in the delivery of information skills training; improving the delivery of inductions and information skills teaching to library users; and to increase the amount of cross team working.

Two of our specific objectives are the sharing of re-usable information literacy materials between subject teams and the trying out and evaluating of different methods and styles of delivery.

Trying to meet these two objectives have enabled and emboldened many of us to introduce more active learning techniques into our teaching. This session covers in a practical, hands on way, a range of active learning techniques that we’ve recently used in inductions and information skills sessions and shows how we have shared these amongst our group.

The techniques range from high tech Audience Response Systems (interactive handsets by Quizdom) to library bingo (low tech bits of card) and how we’ve shared experiences of these amongst ourselves. We will use an assortment of techniques in the session to give a flavour of how they may be used in practice to give an interactive and (hopefully!) enjoyable session.