Pam's Instructional Technology Blog

Moving Beyond Wikis and Blogs

Synchronous Collaboration Tools are revolutionizing traditional faculty office hours and allowing students to redefine teamwork in virtual space.

Chat room tools, such as those included in Moodle or WebVista, work amazingly well for online office hours and students meeting online to collaborate on a class project. More advanced tools, such as the U's (Adobe) UMConnect (formerly Macromedia Breeze) include additional features -- such as screen sharing and whiteboards. Students can work together online, at any time of the day or night in these virtual spaces. Faculty are seeing much-improved results in student projects because their students are enjoying the convenience of being able to connect with their fellow classmates online at just about any time. For more information, please see, "Taking the 'A' Out of Asynchronous" in the July 2008 issue of Campus Technology http://campustechnology.com/articles/64817/

Teaching on YouTube

Alexandra Juhasz, Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College, in Claremont, CA, taught an entire semester's class on YouTube. This piece consolidates lengthier blog entries about a course she ran on YouTube, called “Learning from YouTube,�? in Fall 2007. The whole goal was to better understand this new media/cultural phenomenon, and how it can be used in the classroom. How did she set up this class? And what did she learn? Find out at:
http://www.oculture.com/2008/04/teaching_on_youtube.html

Jing

Have you tried Jing yet? Here's a link to my first try using Jing. This is a video of my screen as I am showing someone how to do the one-time setup for NetFiles.

http://screencast.com/t/LMyXAbCUZ

Then I used Jing to do a screen capture of the dirtools or myaccount page, using the Jing tools to highlight areas of the page, the arrow to point to the specific link on the page that the user must click on to set up NetFiles. Here is the result:
http://screencast.com/t/W8wVj7GBAdh

Free Online Blogging Workshop

For a limited time, Atomic Learning is offering free access to their online Blogging Workshop.

A blog is a Web site that functions as a journal, or a diary, or a place to post your thoughts and opinions pertaining to a particular subject matter. In addition to text entries, a blog may contain pictures, video, and/or audio clips. This workshop will explain the difference between various kinds of blogs, introduce you to some hosting solutions, and show you how to setup your own blog using Blogger™.

http://movies.atomiclearning.com/highed/blogging

Keep in mind, please, that the University of Minnesota hosts a fully supported, advertisement-free, blog site, and that you can set up your own blog for your department, your discipline, your class, or for yourself [or all of the above], FOR FREE.

To set up your own blog, go to: http://blog.lib.umn.edu and click on the link, "Start your own blog!"

Life in the Palaeozoic

Life in the Palaeozoic [pdf]

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=2659

The Open University in Britain is well-known for its efforts to bring higher education to persons across the world. As of late, they have also been expanding their online offerings for the general public by making course materials available on their "OpenLearn" site. This particular course will take interested parties into the world of the Palaeozoic era. Through six different topical sections, visitors will learn about the Cambrian explosion, the origins of vertebrates, and life in the Silurian sea. Along the way, visitors will be presented with questions that will test their knowledge of the material. Visitors may also wish to post comments to the online forum and offer their own reviews of the material and course offerings.

Information provided by The Internet Scout Project: The Scout Report
http://scout.wisc.edu/Reports/ScoutReport/2008/scout-080118-re.php#R&E

Biology Resources

Biology Browser: Teaching Resources

http://www.biologybrowser.org/bb/Subject/Education/Biology_Teaching_Resources/index.shtml

Thomson Scientific has created this fine site in order to provide science educators with a wide array of activities that can be used in the classroom. Currently, the site features over 190 resources related to various areas of biology. Visitors can search through the resources by subject, geography, or organism. These resources include a primer on the antlion (also known as a doodlebug) and "Bugnet" which is an online forest entomology class. Visitors can also glance over a glossary of zoology terms and look over news from the world of taxonomy.

Information provided by The Internet Scout Project: The Scout Report
http://scout.wisc.edu/Reports/ScoutReport/2008/scout-080118-re.php#R&E