December 3, 2010

Good Afternoon Instructors,

It is hard to believe it is already December and we have only 3 weeks left in the quarter! As you are looking at ways to freshen up your courses and end on a really strong note, I encourage you to consider connecting "face-to-face" with your students, at least in a virtual fashion :) There is a great tool called "Eyejot" that can allow you to do just this.

Eyejot is a free online video messaging platform that does not require any software download. You simply need a webcam and to have registered on their site...it truly is as simple as that. Unfortunately Eyejot video messages are housed within your Eyejot account so are not directly connected to your school email account or to Blackboard, but I still believe it could be a very beneficial tool as another way to connect with your students or for your students to connect with one another, especially if they are working on a group project.

The intent of Eyejot is to leave messages with one another much like voice mail messages, but it adds in the visual component voice mail doesn't allow. The addition of nonverbal communication can now help to clarify any confusion that may be experienced through a simple email or voice mail message. (It is important to note: Senders and recipients all need to have their own Eyejot account to log into to send and receive messages.)

I can see many Eyejot opportunities within the online classroom:

• Offer feedback to students individually on large projects in a way that you can truly emphasize certain points you want to get across that may otherwise be lost in written feedback;
• Deepen weekly discussion boards through shared Eyejot messages to really simulate an actual verbal discussion;
• Offer another medium for students to connect and work together on group projects;
• And the list can go on.

I encourage you to check Eyejot out by clicking here and watching some of the sample videos and even setting up an account for yourself. If this is something you find you'd like to try in your own classes and would like some assistance creating tutorials to share with your students on how to use Eyejot, please just let me know. I'd be happy to work with you on this!

And as with any enhancement, if you do give this a try, please let me know what you think and what your students think of it!

Have a great weekend!

Heather Thomton-Stockman
Online Instructional Specialist

November 19, 2010

Good Morning Instructors,

Are you looking for a new way to show your students a course trend? Or maybe there is a discussion board topic where a select group of words is highly repeated by many students, which could offer strong insight into the importance of these words or the course concepts being explored? Would a visual image help to convey the significance of certain words or concepts? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you may be interested in checking out what Wordle could do for you.

What is Wordle you ask? Well, according to Wordle's website (http://www.wordle.net/) "Wordle is a toy for generating 'word clouds' from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text." Understanding what Wordle truly is makes more sense when you actually see it though - after all it is a visual representation - so I encourage you to click here to check it out!

Diane Maki, one of our MBA instructors, created a Wordle in one of her discussion boards this quarter and shared the image with her students, which spurred even more critical thinking, discussion, and insights. She shared with me that students responded very positively to her use of Wordle, and I could see it really helping to drive home the point of the importance of certain words and concepts for students. Click here to check it out for yourself and see some samples in the gallery.

If you have any questions or you give this a try and have some feedback, please let me know.

Due to the Thanksgiving holiday, I won't be posting to my blog next week. My next post will be on Friday, December 3rd. And just as Diane shared this tool with me to share with the rest of you (THANKS DIANE!) please be sure to let me know of any great resources you may be using in your courses that could benefit others as well.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday! In addition to celebrating Thanksgiving, my family will also be celebrating my son's birthday as he turns 2 on Thanksgiving - so we'll be having pie AND cake at my house! Once again, have a great Thanksgiving!

Thanks!
Heather Thomton-Stockman
Online Instructional Specialist

November 12, 2010

Good Morning Instructors!

I hope you are enjoying the various in-service sessions today. In the break-out session I facilitated we explored a cool new interactive presentation tool called Prezi. If you weren't able to attend the session but are curious about what it is, please check out the Elluminate presentation session and/or the PowerPoint for the presentation in the faculty course once they become available. And if you have any questions on this fun tool, let me know.

You can also check out Prezi here; and Kelly Schmidt has graciously shared with us a sample Prezi she used this quarter in her classes as part of her Meet Your Instructor profile.

Check these out and let me know what you think!

Have a great weekend!

Heather Thomton-Stockman
Online Instructional Specialist

November 5, 2010

Good Afternoon Instructors,

With mid-quarter upon us, I thought this would be a great opportunity to bring up the benefits of Grading Rubrics. Grading Rubrics are an excellent tool to help increase grading consistency and student-to-student fairness, and is a solid mechanism to hurdle over the grading inflation obstacle we are often faced with. By clearly and directly breaking down the point system for assignments, exams, and even discussion boards, you as the instructor are sharing with your students what the assignment/exam/discussion board expectations are, and you then have a set criteria to base your evaluation of off. This allows you and your students to be on the same page.

When grading student work, you want to not only use the grading rubric as a guide, but also reference it in the feedback for students directly. Rather than offer feedback and then give a general score of 41/50, for example, I encourage you to use the grading rubric categories to offer specific reference to where the student earned points directly.

For example, the 41/50 reference above may actually be reflective of:

• Essay Development: 9/10;
  
• Articulation of Course Content Comprehension: 12/15;
• Effective and Appropriate Application of Course Content: 11/15; and
• Grammar/Mechanics: 9/10

By sharing this information directly with students, in addition to specific written feedback for each section, students then know more directly the areas they did well in and the areas they need to work on and why. They also then have the original grading rubric which will be much more detailed in the break-down of expectations for each category that offers the student even more insight into the score they earned.

If you've never created a grading rubric, please do not be intimidated, the following are some great online Grading Rubric creation sites that offer you templates and guide you through the process, making it really easy:

• RubiStar
• TeacherVision
• Rubric for Online Education
  

If you have any questions on grading rubrics or how to use them in your classes, please let me know. And if you already have or create a rubric that works really well for a particular assignment, please let us know, it may be something to add to the master course shell for all sections to benefit from.

Have a great weekend!

Heather Thomton-Stockman
Online Instructional Specialist

October 22, 2010

Good morning instructors,

Building off of last week's blog post, I'd like to share one additional tip with you if you are using the Download/Upload Excel document grading feature within Blackboard's Grade Center. If you find that you need to alter a score that you have already uploaded for a student via an Excel document, you will need to modify it using the Modify Override option rather than via the View Details tab. To view a demonstration on how to do this, please click here.

My hope with these various tips and tricks is to help you streamline your grading process so that you can focus on the student content rather than the grading process. Next week I will be moving on to a different topic, but if you have any questions on the grade center at any time, please don't hesitate to let me know.

Thanks and have a great weekend!

Heather

October 15, 2010

Good morning instructors,

Previously I used the following Screencast (click here to view) to demonstrate how to grade multiple assignments as well as enter scores and feedback to multiple students in an efficient and easy manner within Blackboard's grade center. I continue to recommend this approach as it is a great way to streamline your grading process. However, if a student has not submitted an assignment and you need to enter a score of zero, simply entering that score on the spreadsheet to then upload will NOT block students from being able to submit the assignment at a later date, which can lead to a great deal of confusion and miscommunication between instructor and student.

Click here to view the steps you will need to take to enter zeros into the grade center for non-submitted assignments so that it is calculated in the running total as well as blocking late submissions (remember it is important to enter a score for every assignment/discussion board/exam for every student so the running total calculates accurately). This demonstration of entering zeros for non-submitted assignments using the grade details view is needed regardless of the grading approach you use.

If you have any questions on how to most effectively and completely use the grade center, please let me know.

Have a great rest of the day and a great weekend!

Thanks,
Heather

October 8, 2010

Good Afternoon Instructors,

It is an absolutely gorgeous fall day here in Minnesota! I hope it is just as beautiful where ever you are, and that you are able to enjoy some fun, fall activities as we close out the first week of a new fall quarter.

As you are getting into the full swing of things with a new quarter, I encourage you to think of ways to help your students connect with the course material on an even deeper level. A great way to do this, particularly in online courses, is through audio and video lecture implementation. There are many ways you can record lectures or presentations to share with your students, and I'd be happy to work with you individually on any you'd like to do. But there are also some great audio/video lecture resources readily available to us to simply add in to our courses. The following is a list of some great online resources I encourage you to check out for possible course implementation. These resources offer you the opportunity to bring into your courses expert guest lecturers without your students even needing to leave the comfort of their homes (or where ever it may be that they complete their coursework).

Stanford University's Entrepreneurship Corner
TED
Khan Academy
UC Berkeley Webcasts
Academic Earth
World Lecture Hall
LearnersTV
TeacherTube

If you do locate and choose to add a lecture to your course from one of the resources listed, please remember to select the "Open in New Window" option so as to comply with Internet copyright regulations. Also, let me know how the lecture is received by your students. It may be a lecture we'd want to add to the master course shell for all future sections to benefit from.

If you have any questions on searching within any of these resources or adding a resource to your course, please let me know.

Have a great rest of the day and an enjoyable fall weekend!

Thanks!
Heather