Written for Leicester Medical School students who are learning medicine with the help of iPads — and for anyone interested in mobile learning and medical education
I have had many Leicester Medical students ask me about more question banks to study with. Well, after you have gone through all of your Examplify quizzes and everything on TeachMeAnatomy and SimpleMed, you might want to have a look at this free MCQ question bank: Medguide.uk.
It comes from Warwick Medical School, and is certainly worth a try!
Terese Bird
Leicester Medical School Educational Designer
Is your Notability acting up?
If yes, your iPad might be filling up. When your iPad storage fills up, there is not enough room to accommodate all your notes. So what do you do?
To check, go into Settings on your iPad, then General, then to the right, click on iPad Storage. It will look like the image above. In the upper right corner, you can see the storage situation. If you have less than 2 or 3 GB free, you may have Notability problems like those I have described.
The easiest way to test if this is the problem is to delete some apps. Get rid of a few large apps. Just press and hold, and select ‘Delete this app’. You can definitely get them back for free later. Now, restart your iPad. Once restarted, launch Notability to see if there is any improvement. If yes, you have discovered that a filled-up iPad caused these problems.
Under the iPad Storage visualisation in the image above, note there are some ‘Recommendations.’ Try whichever of these makes the most sense to you; they will help to keep your iPad storage at a reasonable level.
Finally, do make sure that your Notability is backing up to either Google Drive or One Drive. Note that only recently has it been possible to back up to One Drive. These are true Notability backups, whereas iCloud is not a true backup of Notability (although iCloud is definitely the correct and necessary way for you to back up your iPad and keep everything safe). How to set this up? Launch Notability. At the bottom left corner, you will see a cog wheel. Touch that, and you will see Auto-Backup. Touch that, and at the right, select whichever ‘Service’ you prefer — I recommend either Google Drive or OneDrive. OneDrive is bigger than Google Drive, but the negative is when you graduate you cannot take it with you unless you start paying Microsoft. Google Drive remains free.
As usual, contact me on tmb10@le.ac.uk if you get stuck with any of the above.
Terese Bird, Leicester Medical School Educational Designer
Learning anatomy is a particular art. Learning musculoskeletal (MSK) anatomy is seen by many medical students as an extra-difficult topic. Some time ago, student Prabodhinee Joygiya, who freely identifies as one who has struggled with MSK, wrote this presentation to help students currently studying MSK anatomy. Prabodhinee’s tips are born of experience, and will give current students lots of food for thought (sorry – must be the hamburger pic above) and practical ways of structuring the concepts in anatomy study and specifically in MSK. Download the presentation here.
Terese Bird, Leicester Medical School Educational Designer
The student society MedRIFT (Medical Research into Future Technologies) has created many such scenarios in the form of 360-degree videos. These are available on the Leicester Medical School YouTube channel. Please note that these are not created as official assessment training videos, but are simply the product of creative students committing to film what they understand, for the benefit of other students to watch and listen and think about.
The playlists which might be most helpful:
Deteriorating Patients — https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsG1slxCGA4jYgkqq_tQ3oa-6PIPK4KRP
GP – Primary Care — https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsG1slxCGA4gsPdmAa50vJbAVURawnH5i
General Playlist of all 360 degree videos created by MedRIFT – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsG1slxCGA4jzw1FkBA8dNV8m0ibBf1Z0
If watching these on a computer browser, please use Chrome. If on a handheld device, use the YouTube app. If you have a Google Cardboard device, you can watch these on your phone in the Google Cardboard for a fully immersive experience.
If you have other ideas for videos which could be helpful in medical study and revision, do get in touch!
Terese Bird, Leicester Medical School Educational Designer
Every year, at around this time in March, Open Education Week (#OEWeek on Twitter) celebrates those in education who work to make learning more open, accessible and within the reach of all. The Open Education Special Interest Group in ALT (Association for Learning Technology) conducts sessions throughout the year on this topic. The SIG is currently headed up by one my personal Sheroes of Open, Dr Teresa MacKinnon. Some weeks ago the SIG welcomed many to a multi-layered meeting in the Wonder.Me platform, discussing issues around open education endeavours in higher education and other teaching realms. It was a really encouraging set of discussions, and Wonder.Me was better than I expected at the whole ‘bridging the gap to the actual human’ thing (which I need to write about in another post, at some point).
In Medicine, there seems to be a culture of sharing learning materials as much as we can, as long as consent and other considerations are settled. I remember some years ago finding out about #FOAMed – Free Open Access Medical educational material – through Dr Rakesh Patel and Dr Damian Roland. As Healthcare Twitter grew, practitioners discussed and shared what they could. One of my colleagues, Dr Vikas Shah, continues to share radiology learning and images on Twitter, Instagram, and Radiopaedia.org.
Natalie Lafferty, Head of Centre for Technology & Innovation in Learning at the University of Dundee, is another of my Sheroes of Open. Natalie headed up Dundee medical school’s learning technology with amazing and creative innovation, and shared as much as possible. While my own student MedRIFT society is creating 3D printed items for anatomy learning, Natalie’s team is creating 3D anatomical images and sharing them freely on Sketchfab. The bowel anatomy image at the top of this post is an example — all labeled up and everything.
Getting back to Leicester Medical School students and their own #FOAMed endeavours, I am very proud of SimpleMed, a website of medical learning articles and quizzes, and TeachMeAnatomy, both written in language that first-year medical students feel comfortable with. That was the original reason for the birth of these sites — medical students struggling with the language in traditional medical texts, and realising that the time had come for texts that early-years students can easily understand. They got their friends together, started writing and posting online, other medics joined in and raised the quality. Making healthcare learning open!
Terese Bird, Leicester Medical School Educational Designer
Your Study Group (Belbin Group) has its own Collaborate Session which you can use anytime. This might be useful if you or anyone in your study group decides to self-isolate, but would like to connect into the face-to-face groupwork discussion.
Terese Bird, Leicester Medical School Educational Designer
When you study dermatology – and you cover it over all years of Leicester Med – you need images that are authentic and genuine images of the condition. You need to see the conditions in different skin colours. You need images that are vetted by national experts.
The Medical Student: Dermatology app by the British Association of Dermatologists is highly recommended for these reasons. It’s free and runs on both iPhones and Android phones, as well as iPads. Among its developers is dermatology consultant for Leicester Medical School Dr Ingrid Helbling. Dr Helbling refers to the app in teaching.
Another excellent resource which focuses on dermatological images featuring black and brown skin is Mind The Gap. Mind the Gap was spearheaded by medical student Malone Mukwende. Together with Senior Lecturer Margot Turner and Clinical Lecturer Dr Peter Tamony, he developed the Mind the Gap handbook. They have now opened up the project to contributions from others, so that together we can bridge the gap of representing various skins that were previously excluded from representation. Maybe you can add to the project! Mind the Gap can be found here: https://www.blackandbrownskin.co.uk/mindthegap.
Terese Bird, Leicester Medical School Educational Designer
Leicester Medical School is changing over to a new e-portfolio. This will happen March 2022. The School intends to move students’ data over from the old system to the new one, but as a ‘belts-and-braces’ measure, we recommend that students download particularly anything they uploaded themselves i.e. certificates, awards, etc. Our recommendation is you save these somewhere such as Google Drive and also on your own computer and/or USB stick. Then when the new e-portfolio system is ready, you can re-upload your items into it, and the new system will follow you even after you graduate.
Follow the instructions here. As always, if anything doesn’t work, contact Terese on t.bird@le.ac.uk.
Welcome to a new academic term at Leicester Medical School! Whether you are just beginning with us, or returning after summer, we hope you have a fulfilling next phase of your med-learning journey!
This term, Autumn 2021, we are launching a new method for Year 1 and 2 students to collect and view tutor reports and clinical skills signoffs. It is called MyProgress. You can access it using a browser and going to:
https://leicester.epads.mkmapps.com/
Don’t put in a Username; rather: click below the Sign In button, and you will be able to put in your ordinary University username and password, as the image below:
More details will be forthcoming as we move further into using this new tool. Students in years 3, 4, and 5 will begin to use it in early 2022.
If you have any issues logging in, or issues seeing anything in your account, please email: mkmadmin@le.ac.uk.
Terese Bird, Leicester Medical School Educational Designer
The Good Digital Doctor 