If you're interested in learning something new, this article is for you. Broken down by subject and/or category, here are several top-notch self-education resources I have bookmarked online over the past few years.
technocentrism and pedagogical dogmatism.
If the goals of technology integration are separated from the goals of educational reform, teacher educators are faced with an important choice. Should we, as educational technology leaders, concentrate our efforts upon developing, testing, and disseminating a wide range of educational technology uses that support a broad spectrum of pedagogical approaches? Or should we recommit-and state publicly-our intention to help schools change the nature of teaching and learning through particular applications of digital technologies?
The following video does an excellent job of exploring this idea, answering the following questions:
1. What is visual recording?
2. What tools (and apps) are available to make it work?
3. What do you need to understand to be able to do it?
4. Post-production, what do you do with the recordings when you've finished?
It is also honest, offering the pros and cons of each app, and of the iPad itself in various learning domains.
Participants will collaboratively build a set of shared online resources as they gain knowledge and skills to help faculty integrate technology. In each activity, groups will develop materials as Google Docs that will be immediately available to all. Participants don't need to be wizards but should be familiar with digital learning tools. Each participant must bring a laptop and should be able to create and edit Google Docs. The intended audience includes instructional technologists and technology integration specialists.
Multiple Submission Quirk - and Work-Around
We've learned recently that there is a quirk with Crocodoc when there are multiple submissions. When a student submits more than one assignment attempt, you can choose which to grade from SpeedGrader. If you grade an earlier attempt and provide feedback via Crocodoc on the assignment, the student can only view the latest submission, thereby missing any feedback you provide. There is no way for the student to choose which assignment submission to view. As a workaround, you can annotate on Crocodoc and then download the annotated document to attach to your comment. A PDF version of the assignment file (with annotations) can be downloaded by both student and instructor.
"You can use CC-licensed materials as long as you follow the license conditions. One condition of all CC licenses is attribution. Here are some good (and not so good) examples of attribution. Note: If you want to learn how to mark your own material with a CC license go here."
A new program will give grants to a variety of high-tech teaching projects, with the hope of helping low-income students better succeed in their studies.
Next Gen Learning Challenges, led by Educause, a nonprofit that supports education technology, is designed to find technology-based approaches to improve college readiness and completion among low-income students.
CloudCourse is a course scheduling system.
Built entirely on App Engine, CloudCourse allows anyone to create and track learning activities. It also offers calendaring, waitlist management and approval features.
CloudCourse is fully integrated with Google Calendar and can be further customized for your organization with the following service provider interfaces (replaceable components):
* Sync service - to sync CloudCourse data with your internal systems
* Room info service - to schedule classes in your locations
* User info service - to look up user profile (employee title, picture, etc)
CloudCourse has been developed in Python, using the Django web application framework and the Closure Javascript library.
"Retrieving legacy files
As the old dropbox knew no separation of files by assignment (one of its major limitations), it was not possible to move these files into assignments during the upgrade, and there is no storage area facility available into which they could have been moved, so they are not directly accessible within the application after an upgrade or in courses restored from earlier versions. The old dropbox code used Perl, which has been completely removed from the web application in release 9, so the dropbox cannot be accessed anymore to retrieve the legacy files. A rudimentary Java-based interface is being provided to enable each user individually to download any legacy files they may wish to retrieve. These files can then be submitted in newly created assignments as desired or stored in one's Virtual Hard Drive inside the Blackboard Content System, if that is licensed by the institution and enabled by the system administrator.
Unfortunately this interface is not exposed via any link in the application. System administrators or helpdesk staff can however make available such a link to their users, either assisting them with file retrieval on an individual basis or by publishing the download link to their users, e.g. in a system announcement.
Community Engagement license holders may also wish to add an HTML portal module with this link, thus simplifying the download process, or add it as external link to the tool panel (in the portal menu column). The location of this interface (relative to your server root) is:
/webapps/blackboard/execute/ddb
It is important to note that this is not a file system location. You actually have to access the URL via a web browser!
Sample HTML for a portal module named something like "Digital Dropbox Download":
Download your digital dropbox files here
When a user accesses this link, he will either see a message that no files were found for him, or a list of courses in w