We hope you have had a restful summer and are raring and ready to go for the academic year ahead. We have a really exciting programme coming up this term and are looking forward to connecting with old friends and hopefully meeting new friends as the term progresses! One of the best things about this wonderful LTHEchat community is the way in which it grows and evolves.

As well as preparing an exciting programme for you this term, we’ve decided to be creative and explore some new options for hosting our chats, you will see these pop up as the weeks progress, of course we’ll always seek your feedback on this to see how you find the experience. We’re excited to see how things evolve over time and with old technologies making way for new technologies and new ways of working, we think it’s important to explore and experiment to find a good fit, and hopefully give people different ways of engaging!

For example, the first chat this year, we are collaborating with the wonderful Edge Hill LTD team to move away from Twitter and host their chat on Padlet. We have pre-prepared the Padlet board as you’ll see, we are just putting some finishing touches to usage instructions for those of you who are new to the tool and these will be populated over the coming days.

Rather than the chat taking place on Twitter, we will share the link to the Padlet board and the questions will be released on Wednesday 13th September from 8pm on Padlet itself, we will be giving plenty of directions and instructions as this happens, don’t worry. We’re really excited for this creative experiment and trying something new and we hope that you will join us to try it out!

I (Rachelle) am back to mentor the team this term, and just in case we haven’t met before I thought I’d introduce myself!

I’m Rachelle O’Brien, I work at Durham University as a Senior Learning Designer. I’m a remote worker and actually live on the opposite side of the country right on the coast not far from Liverpool. I’m really passionate about digital education, playfulness and inclusivity and have recently been awarded an NTF for my work in this area. I’m a PhD student transitioning at the minute to Northumbria University in Newcastle where I’m researching Escape Rooms. On social networks you’ll likely find lots of pictures of my dogs Luna and Stella and me sharing my love of gardening.

More information will be shared about the organising team as the term progresses, I’m excited to be able to introduce them to you.

We can’t wait to see you on Wednesday and get stuck into a new term.