CTC Ed Tech News September 18, 2014

Thoughts for the week

Atomic Learning

Here's a tutorial from Academic Innovations and eLearning on adding Atomic Learning modules to Blackboard.  Just remember, if you want to view the modules, login to Blackboard in a different browser with your student account.

Student Evaluations

You don't have to wait until the end of the semester to collect feedback from your students.  Robert Talbert shares his strategies, approaches, and reasons for collecting more frequent feedback from students.  His questions are simple and he explains to the students what he's doing or not doing based on the feedback. Student feedback is a great source of information on how to improve teaching. 

Passwords- Again

The recent hacking of Gmail accounts shows the importance of having strong, unique passwords.  This article from Computer World explains it all very well.  So, for you readers, this means that your UAA password has to be unique. If you use your UAA email address to create an account on, say, Dropbox, use a new password.  Do not use your UAA password on any other system anywhere. Period. I use Keeper to keep track of my passwords. LastPass has also been recommended to me as a way to keep track of passwords.  Yes, I wrote about this last spring. I'll probably write about it again. 

Design for eLearning

This blog post summarizes the research by Clark and Mayer on how to make eLearning more effective. It gives 10 guidelines on design that help maximize learning. I admit, I have Clark and Mayer's book E-learning and the Science of Instruction by my computer.

CTC Ed Tech News September 11, 2014

A few items for your review this week:

Instructional Videos

This article from Educause summarizes a study on the use of instructional videos in classes. Two key takeaways for me:  The average viewing time was 4 minutes and students were more engaged with videos that had a human dimension – the instructor used humor or wit.  Yes, even online, instructor presence makes a difference!  Next week, I'll discuss some easy screencast options available to you. 

Atomic Learning – in Blackboard!

Last week I wrote about using Atomic Learning for your personal learning about technology.  It's a website with 1000's of videos, tutorials and tips on technology and online learning.  There is also an Atomic Learning plugin in Blackboard – with it you can add Atomic Learning videos to your Blackboard shell.  One professor, for instance, embedded a playlist of videos on APA format in her English class.  Log in to Atomic Learning and search for Blackboard Atomic Learning to find the tutorials on how to add Atomic Learning to Blackboard. 

My Blackboard Discovery

I learned a new thing (for me!) about Blackboard this week. One can set up a discussion board so that the students don't see the posts from the other students until after they post. To set this option, when creating the forum, in section 3, click the radio button "Participants must create a thread in order to view other threads in this forum."

So if you want students to post original work, this may be the route to use.  When this option is selected, Blackboard gives you and your students notice about it.  Here is a student's view when clicking the forum link.  After the student submits, she can see the other post(s)

Commit to Your Calendar

This article on time management from Prof Hacker suggests blocking out time in your calendar for important things- research, planning, etc., rather than letting them happen haphazardly (or not, unfortunately) in your day. You can use our Exchange/Outlook calendar to track your appointments. You can access this calendar on your smart phone, computer, iPad, etc.  Here's one more plug for Atomic Learning.  Learn about it in Atomic Learning.  

CTC Ed Tech News September 4 2014

Thoughts for you this week: 

Add/Drop Deadline 5 pm Friday September 5

Tomorrow is the deadline for adding and dropping all full semester courses. The registrar offers the following options for manual processing by students:

·         Students may submit forms at the University Center between 8-5 p.m.
·         Students may also utilize the kiosk on the top floor of the Student Union between 9-4. 

Instructors can also choose to drop students who have not showed up for class. Use the online form to withdraw him/her from the class. If you do it before 5 pm Friday September 5, the student will receive a tuition refund. 

A Faculty Initiated Withdrawal of the students during the first two weeks of the semester will give them a 100% tuition refund. This not only saves students money but also saves headaches for Student Services when the student comes back asking for refunds for a course they didn't know they were signed up for. You could choose to do nothing and then give the students a grade of NB or F at the end of the semester and that would be okay too, as students are adults who have signed up for the course and if it costs them their tuition (and likely late fees, etc), then so be it (From Paula Martin at KPC).

Sometimes, no technology is best

I love technology; I use it all the time… A colleague introduced me to the new student worker in our suite as the one who never takes notes on paper… my laptop goes to most meetings with me (I do turn email off during the meetings). Technology is a tool, though, to help us meet our goals. I found a couple interesting article about instructors opting to not use technology for thoughtful, pedagogical reasons:

Why I'm asking you not to use laptops - a professor explains her no laptop policy for her classes. She has sound reasons that she tells the students. Two of the reasons are: 

·      It's easy to be distracted and read email or go to Facebook and multitasking is a fallacy

·      It distracts the students around the laptop user and lessens their learning

She has a couple other reasons mentioned in the article, too. And, if a student feels really compelled to use a laptop, he/she can talk with the professor and get permission.

The comments after the article have some interesting points, too. In particular, some students who experience disabilities (for instance, dysgraphia) need to type rather than write. How does a professor make sure that they don't feel singled out?

Don't Email Me – a professor bans email from students except to schedule an appointment with her. "Its purpose was twofold: teaching students to be more self-reliant by making them read assignments and the syllabus more closely, and freeing up time for conversations in the classroom and during office hours." (from the article)

Thank you, Kelly Donnelly for sharing this with me. 

One idea from both these articles is to make sure that the technology serves the learning, rather than distracts from it. In a distance class, if I went for a no email policy, I'd probably provide a discussion board that students can post questions to.

Always Learning

We have a great resource for quick tutorials on lots of topics: Atomic Learning. You have to login with your UAA username and password, and then a world of 1-3 minute video tutorials is at your fingertips.

Bookmark the UAA Atomic Learning page or Google the words uaa atomic learning to find it. My challenge to you is go to the Blackboard instructor tutorials and learn something new about the Grade Center. We are using Blackboard Learn 9.1, SP (Service Pack) 13, but the grade center tutorials are generic for Learn 9.1. Let me know what you find out!

I was asked about PowerPoint Master Slides at the CTC Inservice a few weeks ago. Had I not known an answer, I could have said, login to Atomic Learning and search for PowerPoint Master Slide.  I did this later. In the list that came up, I selected my version of PowerPoint and there was a whole section of 11 short videos on slide masters. Nice. Let me know what you find on Atomic Learning.