January 6, 2011

Happy New Year! And welcome to a new quarter! I hope everyone is having a great start to the new year and new quarter.

This quarter I will be offering two instructor trainings - both as Blackboard courses facilitated asynchronously just like the courses you facilitate. If you are interested in participating in either of the trainings, please just drop me an email as soon as possible. The training topics and dates are:

1. eFolio Training Course: February 7 - February 20
2. Jing: February 21 - March 6

Upon 100% completion of each of these training courses (and yes, you can sign up for both if you are interested) you will earn 2 hours of professional development compensation and certification.

Both are excellent tools we can use to help our students be even more successful.

If you are already familiar with Jing and use it on a regular basis, that is great! I'd now like to share another great screencast audio and video capable recording tool that you may also want to try out. Screencast-o-matic is very similar to Jing and offers a few additional resources. Three things in particular that I really like about Screencast-o-matic are:

• Screencast-o-matic allows recordings of up to 15 minutes in length (Jing allows recordings up to 5 minutes in length);
  
• If you have a Webcam you can do Webcam recordings quickly and easily; and
• No software is required to be downloaded onto your computer system; rather, you simply click record, run, and go.

I could see this being a very useful tool in offering students various presentation assignment submission options. Students could very easily record an audio or even video presentation to submit for grading through the use of Screencast-o-matic.

I encourage you to click here to check out screencast-o-matic for yourself and let me know if you have any questions.

Have a great rest of week 1!

Heather Thomton-Stockman
Online Instructional Specialist