Cheap Alternative to Classroom Clickers
Posted onFebruary 4, 2010
Filed under Instructional resources, NetGen, New technology, News, Pedagogy and tagged Academic Technology, clickers, edtech, tools | 1 Comment
Classroom Response Systems (CRS) or “Clickers” have been trying to break into the mainstream of educational technology for the past decade. While they are an excellent way to increase student interaction and provide near-instantaneous feedback to the instructor, hardware costs and requirements have been the greatest barrier to widespread adoption. Now there is finally a solution that leverages both the ubiquitousness of cell phones and students’ love of texting.
Question Types
Multiple Choice: Students choose from a list of pre-set responses.
Free Text: Students send a response with any short text message.
Goal Poll: Students send a number until the specified goal is reached (commonly used for pledge donations for non-profits).
After creating a poll, Poll Everywhere provides a chart with student instructions embedded into the chart. Students can respond via SMS text message, twitter post, or the supporting website poll4.com. The chart with live results are viewed and shared in several different ways:
Download PowerPoint Slide
Downloaded PowerPoint Slides: Slides will respond instantly to votes and free text responses with no software to install. The polls can be copied and resized as needed. The colors and font sizes in the poll can be customized to match the look and feel of your presentation.
From your Poll Everywhere Account: Login to the website to see a list of your polls, then choose the one you want to display on your computer in the classroom for everyone to see.
Downloaded Results for Offline Analysis: See exactly when each vote or response was received by viewing the detailed poll results. Results can be download as CSV files for analysis in any spreadsheet application, such as Microsoft Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or Apple Numbers.
Published to a Blog or Website: Quickly publish the outcome of polls in web pages, blog posts, web forums, conference websites, courseware, digital signage, interactive art displays – pretty much anything that works in a web browser.
When Poll Everywhere receives a response, the results are automatically updated on the animated charts (for multiple choice polls) or text wall (for free text polls).
Try Poll Everywhere now!
Try it now and sign up for a free plan. If you like Poll Everywhere and need to receive more than 32 responses per poll, you can upgrade to a larger plan for the month, then downgrade back to the free plan afterwards.
–Meghan Foster
Tool Time Tuesday: URL Shorteners (Part 1)
Posted onFebruary 2, 2010
Filed under Tips, Tool Time Tuesday and tagged edtech, tools, url shorterner | Leave a Comment
Have you ever wanted to share a web address with your students only to realize that the URL has ten backslashes, hyphens, and a random question mark in the middle? Here is the URL for Texas Wesleyan University on Google Maps: http://www.google.com/places/us/fort-worth/wesleyan-st/1201/-texas-wesleyan-university?hl=en That is quite a mouthful if you want to verbally share that URL or write it on the whiteboard. Well, today is your lucky day.
URL shorteners function exactly as they sound. It takes your original URL and shrinks it as small as it can. This idea was first introduced by tinyurl.com in 2002, but has risen in popularity the past few years due to the success of Twitter and its 140 character limit.
To convert a URL, navigate to tinyurl.com, submit the URL you want to share, and immediately, you will get a brand new URL, significantly shorter, that points to the same place as your original URL. This is the result:
This is the URL generated for the link to Texas Wesleyan on Google Maps: http://tinyurl.com/yk4unjw Notice, this link goes to the same place as the long URL from before, but is now 72% shorter. However, these shorten URLs should not be used for everything. They should be considered only for informal use, such as blogs or tweets.
There are many other and each have different advantages and disadvantages. Some of the most popular are:
– bit.ly
– is.gd
– readthisurl.com
For Part 2, I will go more in-depth on the advantages of bit.ly and its site analytics.
Chris
The CETL website
Posted onFebruary 2, 2010
Filed under CETL, News | Leave a Comment
Happy Tuesday, all!
I wanted to let you know about the new look for the CETL website. We wanted to focus our website on services and resources that will help Texas Wesleyan faculty…and, hopefully, make it easier for you to find what you need. We’ll keep updating and tweaking the website with information and resources so, go ahead, bookmark the CETL website!
Enjoy your day! — Dr. C (Amy)
My Reflections: Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) 2010
Posted onJanuary 26, 2010
Filed under News, Pedagogy, Ramblings | 2 Comments
After attending ELI last week, I have to say that I was inspired by all the presenters and attendees. Presenters such as W. Gardner Campbell from Baylor University summed-up real collaborative learning communities with “co-location is not a community. Something else has to signal that you are a community.” I was also inspired by Penn State University’s philosophy of openness in the learning process. They began using blogs as e-portfolios for all their students. These blogs have been a great source of both program and course assessment. Over the span of a few years, the participation jumped from 100 to 18000+ individual blogs. This is astounding proof that an institution can change its culture if the right people serve as change agents.
I was most inspired by innovative professors such as Penn State’s Sam Richards (RaceRelationsProject) and The University of Mary Washington’s Steven A. Greenlaw. Richards records his lectures where he engages students in a very honest dialog about race. Immediately after the lecture, he and his staff record meta-reflections of the class discussion. These recordings are made available to all students and their parents for review, opening their own discussions on the topics. Greenlaw discussed how he instituted an alternative grading system in one of his economics courses. Students are graded on engagement and insight. First, Greenlaw initiates a discussion with his students on what constitutes engagement and insight. He then posts those discussion notes as a basis for his grading criteria. He challenges professors to focus not only on content coverage but also to develop practitioners in their respective fields.
The themes that emerged outside of the presentations were back-channel communication and open academic content (read our blog posting on the 2010 horizon report). Be assured that I will be posting on both these topics in the near future.
Arturo
The 2010 Horizon Report – what is it? what does it mean?
Posted onJanuary 26, 2010
Filed under Instructional resources, New technology, News | Leave a Comment
Last week, Arturo and I attended the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) conference in Austin. ELI is a group comprised of higher education institutions that are committed to enhancing learning through technology innovation. This group releases great literature on the effective use of technology tools for learning…perhaps you’ve seen their 7 Things You Should Know About series?
At last week’s conference, ELI released their annual Horizon Report. The Horizon Report “identifies six areas of emerging technology likely to have a significant impact on teaching and learning in higher education over the next one, three, and five years” (from ELI website). The 2010 report looks at the impact that the following six technology trends may have on education:
- mobile computing
- open content
- electronic books
- simple augmented reality
- gesture-based computing
- visual data analysis
You can download ELI’s 2010 Horizon Report here: http://www.educause.edu/ELI/2010HorizonReport/195400.
Keep an eye out for this publication every year and let the CETL know what you think. What technologies do you see on the horizon? What technologies do you think will have positive pedagogical impact on your courses? What are the key challenges facing higher education, or professors, as these new technologies emerge?
Cheers,
Dr. C (Amy)
Scaffolding with the Karate Kid
Posted onJanuary 25, 2010
Filed under Pedagogy, Scaffolding | 1 Comment
Mr. Miyagi was a brilliant teacher. I know this because he used pedagogically sound teaching practices in training Daniel-san karate, specifically scaffolding. Scaffolding is where instructors use the knowledge and experience that students bring with them as the basis for new learning. Since Daniel-san had no experience with similar tasks, Mr. Miyagi first sets his pupil to a series of “chores” to provide that experience: sand-the-floor, wax-on wax-off, paint-the-fence, etc. Then, once the pupil has become proficient and gained these basic skills, he makes minor modifications to the existing skill set. Suddenly these “chores” are transformed into full-fledged karate butt-kickery! Check out the video below to see learning magic in action.
So next time your students moan about having to complete hours of homework drudgery, just tell them: “Wax-on Daniel-san, Wax-on!”
-Meghan Foster
We’re back!
Posted onJanuary 13, 2010
Filed under CETL, News | 1 Comment
Welcome to a new semester! We are thrilled to work with you this semester and we have many great programs in store for you. The CETL Spring 2010 calendar is now available. View the calendar below or on the CETL website.
We hope that you have a wonderful semester!
The CETL team
Free eBook resources
Posted onDecember 14, 2009
Filed under CETL, Instructional resources, Tips | Leave a Comment
Recently, a faculty member asked me about free electronic book resources. At the time, I knew of only a couple of resources but, since then, the CETL staff has aggregated several helpful resources. Manyof the free books predate 1930 (i.e., public domain) and are considered to be “classics.” However, occasionally you can find newer books.
Here is what we found:
Lit2Go: From Florida’s Educational Technology Clearinghouse, this is a great resource for finding free mp3 files of classical literature. Bonus find: the seminal work by W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk.
Google Books: After a court battle, Google’s settlement with publishers left a handful of free books available through Google. There are many many titles via Google Books, but they may not be completely available for free.
Flat World Knowledge: Flat World offers free textbooks online. Most of the textbooks offered have been “published” recently (within the last 3 years) and cover a range of topics.
Project Gutenberg: We apologize for the lack of “pretty” on this website…but it does have several free e-books.
Open Educational Resources: Though you will find free books (using refined searches) on this website, don’t stop there. The wealth of open educational resources on this website can help you to enrich your course with learning activities and other engaging artifacts, created and shared by other educators. Consider sharing your own learning objects and join the open education movement!
Connexions: Similar to OER (above), Connexions provides a variety of free learning objects, including textbooks. All of the Connexions materials are free to use under the Creative Commons licensing (find out more about CC here).
So, those are a few of the resources we found. Have you found any? What do you think about these resources?
Check it out: Edublog Awards
Posted onDecember 10, 2009
Filed under Instructional resources, New technology | Leave a Comment
Each year, blog host Edublogs distributes awards to top-rated educational blogs. Check out the Edublog Awards website to see the categories for awards and who has been nominated.
I always love Edublog Award time because it allows me to see the best and the brightest educational blogs on the web. If you are looking for new resources and what other educators are doing, I highly recommend that you check out the Edublog Award nominees and past winners.
Here are some of the blogs that I discovered through the Edublog Awards:
Dy/Dan
Math instructors rejoice! Dan Meyer’s blog is a fantastic resource for Math instructors who want math to be meaningful to their students. Dan has great ideas on creating real-world math problems for students to solve…and he also posts on trends in education and new approaches to teaching.
Don’t Waste Your Time
David Hopkin’s blog is a resource gem! I have learned a lot about new teaching tools and how teachers are using them from David’s blog. Keep those gems coming!
Classroom 2.0
I joined this network of teachers, learning technologists, and other instructional support personnel and I promptly forgot about becoming involved in it. Then <poof!>, out of the blue, they forced me to start paying attention with an engaging series of webinars on web 2.0 in the classroom, sponsored by PBS. The webinars feature innovative teachers using great tools to engage learners.
So, check out the Edublog Awards nominees…and share your favorite online resources with us in the comments section of this post. We look forward to reading your “nominations.”
Warm regards on this cold Thursday,
Amy (Dr. C)
“Prezi”tations for Learning
Posted onDecember 9, 2009
Filed under Instructional resources, New technology, Tips | Leave a Comment
I wanted to share an instructional tool that is really neat for those who may want some more visually-appealing presentation items for online or web-assisted courses. Prezi will allow you to create visually stimulating presentations by allowing you to coordinate how the “camera view” moves and zooms in a huge presentation area. It allows you to be creative with your presentations. Once you go through the tutorials, it is very easy to use and it is free (as long as you don’t mind your presentations being public). I know my explanation is not doing it justice so I will show you my example below; the course organizer for my online course.
As you can see, Prezi is a really cool tool that can be used in a variety of ways with different applications. You can even ask your students to create these presentations. Prezi has several tutorials and I found some additional ones on the excellent Learning Telecollaboratively wiki. Here are some additional examples on this Teaching with Video Blog created by students. Enjoy!
Arturo
