TeachOIT: a Blog for People Who Teach with Technology

The Fall semester is winding down as everyone scrambles to administer final exams and grade projects and papers. The Instructional Media Lab is keeping busy with a seemingly endless flurry of questions about grading in SPARK and Excel.

Our busy January workshop season is near at hand so updates to this blog may drop off some, but stay tuned to hear about some exciting projects we’ve worked on this semester. Instructors have been doing some great things this Fall with Digital Storytelling, innovative uses of PRS, building wiki with students, recording video in class with Flip cameras, and sharing links with students via Delicious.

Be well!

-Tony

SPARK popularity continues to expand at a staggering rate. Our system administrator just finished putting together final statistics about this semester:

Number of SPARK courses: 1227
Number of instructors in SPARK:  845
Departments and programs represented: 89
Number of students in SPARK:  21,348
Number of student “seats”:  66,614  (the average student has SPARK for several courses)
Largest course in SPARK:  799 students

The Office of Information Technologies (OIT) will be performing a major upgrade to our Blogs at UMass Amherst service on Wednesday, January 7, 2009. The new version of Blogs comes with big improvements to the software’s interface and a revised list of supported themes, widgets, and plugins. more…

For our last SPARK Community of Practice Lunch this semester, Mark Leckie from Geosciences and Heath Hatch from Physics joined us to discuss their uses of SPARK for managing their large lecture courses.

(more…)

Our friends in the library are offering two workshops this January that may be of interest to you:

Putting Reading Lists Online in Refshare
Thursday January 8th, 10-Noon
Learn how to use the RefShare feature in RefWorks to create reading lists you can share that link back to the library’s subscriptions and print holdings. We’ll show you how to import RefShare reading lists into SPARK courses, course blogs, Web pages and emails. Your students and colleagues can then export the reading lists into their own RefWorks accounts.

Finding Library Resources
Tuesday January 20th, 2-3:30
Tired of students referencing Wikipedia articles, blog posts and anonymous, dead-wrong Web sites? In this workshop you will hear about the vast number of credible online resources available through the library. We will also discuss ways that links to these resources can be added to SPARK, blogs and other online tools so your students will find them as easy to use as the Google search box.

To register, email instruction@library.umass.edu

Though Merlin Mann is not an academic, he writes about technology, productivity, and finding time to be creative. All in ways that I think would be of interest to any of us who do things like writing and thinking for a living. He has assembled an interesting list of the important components of an engaging blog, titled “What Makes a Good Blog”. I think this list provides a good read for those of us who have moved beyond the mechanics of setting up a blog and are mulling over how to represent one’s self via a blog, how to think about what topics will be of interest to you and your readers, and how to generally build a blog as a meaningful and expressive writing project.

[Note: Merlin's language is "colorful." I suppose that is part of his charm - Tony]

Some highlights:

(more…)

In addition to help in the libraries, you can now visit a librarian for research and reference assistance at a variety of locations across campus. Drop by to chat with your librarian and encourage your students to make use of library services for doing any research project!

(more…)

This January, Academic Computing is offering workshops for instructors on basic technologies for teaching and research, audio & video production, SPARK, emerging technologies, and copyright. Many are hands-on sessions where you can learn new technologies while working with content from your own courses.

For the workshop schedule, descriptions, and online registration, visit:
http://www.umass.edu/accoprod/workshop/register.php