Group items tagged

Ideas to Get You Started Here are a few basic strategies for integrating student voices into your class blog this semester. Comments – Obviously the most familiar way to add student voices to a class blog is adding comments to a post. At the beginning of the week, the instructor or TA would create a post that includes a discussion question or prompt. Then during or between classes students would stop by to add comments to the main question or reply to the comments of others. Question Queue: create a standing post where students can raise questions they would like to discuss in class. Rapid Response: ask students, individually or in pairs, to contribute a 3-4 sentence position statement they will then defend or debate. Student Posts – One way students can master new concepts is by having to teach them to others. Most blog software provides user roles for secondary contributors, so with a little preparation, students can have their own dashboard and post content as a full author to the blog. If you imagine student work more like a short essay than a single observation, then allowing students to make full posts may communicate higher expectations and value of their work. Reading Journal: ask students to post a summary of preliminary research or more formal abstract to the blog for peer comments and critique. Media Mashup: have students analyze appearances of course concepts in popular media by embedding a YouTube clip and then evaluating its relevance. Post by Email – A final feature we found in many mobile blogging tools was post by email. For students and faculty with mobile devices, this provided us a simple way to share content quickly back to the class hub. Since most native apps on the iPhone offered email sharing of photos, links, and media, post by email become the common avenue connecting mobiles to the blog. (At ACU, this feature is built on a Gmail account associated with each blog and the Postie WordPress plug-in described below.) Webliography: early in a survey course, ask students to construct a bibliography of useful study materials and web sites by emailing links with annotations to the blog. Photo Shoot: send students into the community (or out onto the web) to capture images that reflect social attitudes toward a common topic then email them to the blog for discussion. (New iPhone or iPod touch users may not know they can tap and hold on a web image to copy it before pasting it into an email. Remind them to cite the original source of the image, or better yet copy and paste the URL as well.)

WPtouch – An essential plugin for mobile blogging via WordPress is WPtouch (now standard on all WordPress.com blogs). Once installed, the plugin makes reading and commenting on mobile posts and pages easy. Simple to install and MU compatible.

CONS: essential links from sidebar widgets in a desktop theme must be added to the WPtouch menu manually.

But writing assignments are not just exercises in grammar and grading. They are exercises in learning

Psychologists and other cognitive scientists know so much about psycholinguistics, language, and memory that they should well understand the close link between composition and knowledge. Yet many view writing as only a means of assessing a students' understanding of course material, and overlook the profound impact that the writing process has on understanding itself

The act of writing is an act of thought

students need to gain experience actually participating in social media. The best way to understand the expectations of a particular medium is to participate in that medium and identify its genre expectations as they emerge.

Students need to think of their online data along the dimensions of: * accessibility* searchability* persistence

As more and more of our writing makes its way into digital form -- and as the increasing use of biometrics and other forms of behavior monitoring turns our behaviors into volumes of data -- it will become increasingly important for writers to take steps to ensure the integrity of their private data.

Because to blog is to teach yourself what you think.

Because to face one's ill conclusions, self-congratulations, petty foibles, and impolite rhetoric among peers in the public square of the blogosphere is to begin to learn to grow.

To build the module, we used a rapid e-learning authoring tool called Adobe Captivate. Some other popular programs for this kind of rapid authoring are Articulate and Lectora. Captivate is great for building interactive self-guided simulations and branching scenarios.

We created our unit in PearlTrees by adding links to all the web-based readings, videos and articles for the course and then embedded it into our LMS.

We decided used Prezi to create a Case Study Library with six categories (Health, Education, etc.) to introduce our students to the tools organizations are using to address different elements of the peacebuilding and international development spectrum.

The ability to think critically is arguably the most important skill for the 21st century person.

Instead of using the Five W’s for developing content (they’re the basics for writing a successful news piece), use the Five W’s to analyze any post/piece of writing.

This has expanded into the idea of a social presence where one is able to be seen as a real person in a virtual environment