TeachOIT: a Blog for People Who Teach with Technology

As we move into the last few weeks of the semester our Wednesday Web 2.0 posts will be looking at some of the more “emerging” Web 2.0 services. This means we’ll be looking as some tools that are probably not as well established as things like wikis and blogs, but you’ll get a chance to hear about some of the newer, weirder, and wackier tools out there. Some of these tools are just beginning to creep into instructional use; you may seem some of them in a classroom near you soon, others may simply be the awkward precursors to a new generation of tools that has yet to emerge.

Today’s Web 2.0 tool is Twitter, a web services that has been receiving a great deal of press coverage in the last few months.

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Isabel Espinal, our colleague in the library, has put together a great list of library resources and information literacy enhancements that will be of particular interest to faculty using SPARK, blogs, and other online learning tools.

• Add a link to the library subject research guide for your discipline. If no subject guide is available, contact your subject specialist librarian to see about creating one.

• Embed library course guides – even widgets – into SPARK, blogs, and web pages.

• Make sure students do not pay for articles found on Google and other searches that are already available to them through the Libraries’ ejournal and research databases collections.

• Work with librarians to ensure students take full advantage of the high-quality resources provided to support their learning experience.

• Integrate Ask a Librarian services (IM, phone and email services) into courses.

• Link to Library Resources from inside SPARK and course websites.

• Link to E-Reserves and Streaming Video and Audio.

• Integrate RefWorks and RefShare (Citation management and sharing software) into online course components.

• Integrate Turnitin (Plagiarism prevention and detection software) into online course components.

For more information, visit http://www.library.umass.edu/instruction/faculty.html

Download a PDF handout of this list

In the first of what we hope to be a series of video spotlights we look at the UMass Amherst Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Teaching Initiative. This group is making use of inking, screencasting, and wireless technology with the intent of improving instruction science classes with an emphasis on large lecture courses.

Check out the video to hear from Karsten Theis, principal investigator for the project, and see some shots of the technology in action in Dan Chase’s classroom.

Download this movie

For more information check out their website at: http://www.biochem.umass.edu/BMBTI/

Wikis are an increasingly popular Web 2.0 tool being used for educational purposes, but wikis are also a tool that can be difficult to understand at first. Read on to learn more about what a wiki is, how you might use a wiki in your teaching, and where you can go to setup a wiki.

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[Found via the Chronicle of Higher Education's technology blog]

A survey report by a Harvard student looks at student perceptions of usefulness of a range of instructional technologies. The report is interesting in that it looks at differing perceptions between undergraduates and graduates as well as students in different fields of study. Posting course materials and syllabi were indicated as the most useful tools by the student surveyed. An interesting significant difference in perceptions was between graduate student and undergraduate student as to the usefulness of of video recordings of lectures; which undergraduates considered more useful than graduate students.

Check out the full report here:
Instructional Technology Survey (PDF)
Berkman Center Blog Post With Commentary on Survey Results

We’ve already touched on the potentials of YouTube for locating educational materials, but a topic we have not directly addressed on this blog is the potentials of authoring your own video content, or having students author their own original video content. This week’s Web 2.0 blog post looks at incorporating video into the classroom, specifically the type of video creation referred to as “Digital Storytelling.”

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Our second and final SPARK Community of Practice Lunch of the semester will be Thursday April 24th, 11:45-1:00. For this event we will be revisiting a topic from our Fall series of events: Strategies for Using SPARK in Large Classes.

Our guest speakers will be Professors John Gerber and Susan Han, both from Plant, Soil & Insect Sciences. They will discuss how they have used SPARK in their large courses (100+ students) and what has worked well for them. Specific topics they are planning to address include: incorporating online quizzes to open up class time and using assignments and quizzes in SPARK to manage student submissions of work.

The event will include time for open discussion and a demonstration of StudyMate: a new tool for generating study guide style material such as self tests, quizzes, and simple “game-style” content for delivery via SPARK. We announced StudyMate last semester and now have some feedback from instructors who have used it we can share with you as part of this demonstration.

If you are interested in attending this event, please follow this link to the registration form:
http://www.umass.edu/accoprod/workshop/register.php?s=s08sparkcop

About the SPARK Community of Practice

“SPARK Community of Practice” is an interest group for faculty and instructors who are interested in discussing the successes, challenges and best practices they have discovered while using SPARK as well as finding out about the newest tools and features available. These sessions are intended as forums for faculty-centered discourse. If you are interested in hands-on training in these tools, we are happy to provide it through the Instructional Media Lab (instruct@oit.umass.edu or 545-2823). Faculty have priority for these sessions when seats are limited.

Library Guides (http://guides.library.umass.edu/) are Web sites created by Subject Specialist Librarians. These sites contain links and resources which help your students do research by highlighting books, databases and other resources that are most appropriate for the topic. Once a Library Guide has been created for your course, it is possible to “embed” a small, Flash-based version of the guide on a page in SPARK or any Web site (note, the embedding code will not work in a Blog).

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Google provides a variety of web based tools such as email (GMail), online mapping (Google Maps), and video sharing (YouTube), but two lesser known tools are Google Groups and Google Docs which may be of particular interest to instructors looking for more ways to collaborate with students and colleagues via the web. (more…)

Our third and final Emerging Technology and Pie event of the semester will be Thursday April 17th, 1:15-2:15. The topic for the event will be Digital Storytelling, our guest speakers are Aline Gubrium and Tom Schiff, instructors for Public Health course “Community Development in Health Education: Technological Approaches to Addressing Community Health and Social Justice.”

Digital stories are short reflective video pieces created by students that traditionally combine photos, music, and narration to tell “real-life stories.” These stories are usually short (less than 5 minutes.) Because digital storytelling is popular for telling personal stories they are often compelling and emotionally engaging.

Aline Gubrium and Tom Schiff will discuss their use of digital storytelling as part of their course. Their students utilized voice recordings, iMovie and Movemaker, Photoshop, and Web resources for photos and sound. Through this project they sought to to help students bring a personal voice to public health issues.

If you are interested in attending this event, please follow this link to the registration form:

http://www.umass.edu/accoprod/workshop/register.php?s=2008-sp-pie

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Flickr is popular web based photo sharing tool and was one of the earlier applications to be referred to as part of “Web 2.0.” Flickr allows users to upload photos to the web where they can be shared with friends or the Internet at large. If you have any interest in locating images, having your students collaborate with images, or sharing your own images, Flickr might be for you.

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