TeachOIT: a Blog for People Who Teach with Technology

I had the opportunity to attend the Center for Teaching Event “Working Well with TAs” last week. It was the first in a series of workshops on teaching large classes. Linguistics professor John McCarthy and his teaching assistants Wendell Kimper and Kathryn Pruitt discussed the strategies they use in Linguistics 101, a large lecture, general education course. They shared a great deal of advice they have compiled into a handbook for future teaching assistants that addresses a spectrum of topics ranging from how to stay organized and how to lead discussion sections to what to wear (!). The Center for Teaching has the PDF of the complete handbook posted online. 

On the technology side, Professor McCarthy discussed his use of several SPARK features that he finds useful for keeping a 300-person class with regular assignments running smoothly. Students regularly submit writing assignments via SPARK. The teaching assistants then grade and provide feedback using the Grading Form tool in SPARK. The idea is that using grading forms will provide consistency of grading between teaching assistants. Said McCarthy: “grading forms gave uniformity of grading and saved time for TAs. They can even repeat comments when appropriate by copy/pasting.” Grades from these assignments, as well as in class exams are recorded in the SPARK Grade Book.

This was an interesting and useful event. Make sure to check out the Center for Teaching’s schedule for the other upcoming workshops this Spring.

Confused about how to get your teaching assistant, co-instructor, instructional staff, or a guest speaker into SPARK? Check out our freshly revised website about SPARK access so you will know the necessary steps for getting these people into your SPARK course as well as what level of access they will have. 

http://www.oit.umass.edu/spark/access/index.html

Questions about the process? Contact the Instructional Media Lab (545-2823) or the Academic Scheduling Representative in your department.

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

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.

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StudyMate™ is a Windows-based product that allows instructors to create Flash-based learning activities and games based on the material for your course. Using Studymate you can build flash cards, multiple choice quizzes, matching, and even crossword style activities. Instructors who use SPARK may be particularly interested in StudyMate as a tool to build study materials based on quiz or exam questions you have previously built in SPARK. Several instructors using SPARK have tried out this tool and found it to be a valuable addition to their class that helps student prepare for exams and quizzes.

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If you use the SPARK Grade Book to manage your students’ grades, consider attending one of Academic Computing’s upcoming Grade Book Management workshops. These 50-minute sessions will focus specifically on calculating final grades and preparing for SPARK to SPIRE Grade Upload. Bring your assignment weights or grading scheme, and leave with columns ready to do the final grade calculations for you!

• Tuesday November 18th 11:15am – 12:05pm
• Friday November 21st 1:25pm – 2:15pm
• Wednesday December 3rd 10:10am – 11:00am

Register online at: http://www.umass.edu/accoprod/workshop/register.php

TAs welcome!

Need help but none of the scheduled times work for you? Schedule a one-on-one consultation with our Instructional Media Lab (545-2823 | instruct@oit.umass.edu).

For our first SPARK Community of Practice lunch of the semester Ellen Pader, Associate Professor in Landscape Architecture and regional planning, and Michael Young, graduate instructor in the English department, joined us to present on their use of the communication tools in SPARK.

Professor Pader discussed how her use of the discussion tools has not only brought her closer to her students but has made the class more dynamic. “The students are responsive in ways they had not been before.” She found that students use discussions to get to know each other better and have become more invested in both in-class and online discussions. Using the Journal tool in SPARK, Pader is able to have private discussions with each student and invites comments, concerns, and criticisms on any topic.

Michael Young felt that SPARK works so well because it is enables excitement. His students come together in class to share their interest in writing and SPARK helps to sustain the excitement past the 50 minute class. Students are able to take advantage of “not looking at anyone” when sharing their writing online to “interact on a more useful level”. They love the ability to read discussions at their leisure and the less formal atmosphere that Michael has created engenders a sense of community.

Many thanks to our presenters from this session! Be sure to check out our next SPARK Community of Practice lunch on November 19th that focuses on strategies for using SPARK in large classes. Register Online

SPARK popularity continues to grow with even more instructors using it for Fall 2008. There are currently 772 instructors using SPARK  this semester, up from 532 in Spring 2008. Also exciting to note is that 81 departments represented  (we’ve been seeing a lot of new faces in the Instructional Media Lab and our SPARK workshops!)

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Academic Computing is offering many short, hands-on workshops this September that will get you started with your technology of choice and also fit your busy schedule.

Topics include:

• Managing Student Grades in Excel
• Getting Setup with SPARK for posting course materials online
• Managing the SPARK Grade book
• Advanced features in SPARK (discussion, quizzes, assignments)

To view the schedule and register for workshops online, please visit:
http://www.umass.edu/accoprod/workshop/register.php

Interested in training but none of the scheduled times work for you? Contact our Instructional Media Lab at 545-2823 to set up a one-on-one consultation.

Starting today, August 6, 2008, you can request SPARK courses and sign up for SPARK to SPIRE Grade Upload directly in SPIRE. This replaces the SPARK Course Request Form previously available on the OIT Web site.

If you haven’t requested your SPARK course(s) for Fall 2008, you can now use SPIRE to submit your request. If you have already requested your SPARK courses via the old form, use SPIRE to check the status your request.

In SPIRE, find SPARK Course Request in the left Menu,
under Faculty Home > SPARK Course Request.

The process of creating SPARK courses remains the same: you will receive a confirmation email when your SPARK course is ready to use (typically within three business days). To update or cancel a request, please contact spark@oit.umass.edu.

Detailed instructions about requesting SPARK courses in SPIRE are available at:
http://www.oit.umass.edu/spire/for_instructors/class_information/.

If you have any questions, please contact the Instructional Media Lab at 545-2823 | instruct@oit.umass.edu.

Academic Computing is offering several workshops this month on using SPARK and the UMass blogs system.

Workshop topics include:

• Building a new course from scratch in SPARK
• Working with the grade book in SPARK
• Creating a research or professional blog
• Using a blog as a course website

To view the schedule and register for workshops online, please visit: http://www.umass.edu/accoprod/workshop/register.php

Interested in training but none of the scheduled times work for you? Contact the Instructional Media Lab (545-2823) to set up a one-on-one consultation.

The WebCT CE system will be officially retired at 12:00 noon on Tuesday, July 1, 2008.

As of July 1st, all faculty accounts will be removed from the WebCT CE system and courses will no longer be accessible. If there is any course material in WebCT you wish to keep that has not already been migrated to SPARK, you must download it prior to 12:00 noon on July 1st.

Help is available! Register for a “Convert your WebCT Course to SPARK” workshop: http://www.umass.edu/accoprod/workshop/register.php

Or, contact the Instructional Media Lab: 545-2823 | instruct@oit.umass.edu

We are approaching the end of yet another semester – time to wrap up any loose ends. If you use SPARK, here are some reminders to help you out.

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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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