Internet Explorer Nine.

Microsoft's latest update of their web browser, Internet Explorer 9,  has many new useful features.  Two of these include pinning websites to the task bar to quickly launch websites you use regularly or searching from the address bar. 

One new difference is that the favorites bar is not automatically turned on.  To learn how to turn it on, and learn about other new features of IE9, explore this page from Microsoft.  The video on this site will demonstrate within the first 30 seconds how to turn on the favorites bar.   

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Getting-started-with-Internet-Explorer-9

Turn on your favorites Toolbar, or access your favorites.

Click this image to see it full size. 

Moodle Monday - HTML block

Need to Create a custom block of content in Moodle?   The HTML block will let you post any content in the block and a custom title. There are many instructional possibilities for this tool.  They include:

• posting weekly objectives to focus students on what they are expected to be learning that week
• open ended, higher level thinking questions about your content
• pre-lecture questions, help students focus on what you will be lecturing on in class that week
• related content from resources other than the textbook such as news articles, journals, youtube videos, or podcasts
• examples of work pulled from your students.   For example, in an English class you could post the best written sentence of the week.
• Test questions - prepare your students for an upcoming quiz or test by posting a question of the  day. 

Begin by adding the HTML block.
1.  turn on editing
2.  choose the HTML block
3.  it should now appear at the bottom of the right column.

Next click the edit button on the HTML block. In the new screen
1.  add a title
2.  add your content
3.  click save

The block has been created.  Move the block to any position you want to in the left or right column.  Here the block is placed at the top and right column.

It's Linky Thursday with a Literary Twist

Do you like to listen to great literature in your car or while you clean house? This week’s Linky Thursday is all about classic literature. Even better, all of these sites provide FREE audio files to download and play for your listening pleasure.

http://www.archive.org/details/librivoxaudio

If you’d like to listen to Great Expectations by Charles Dickens on your mp3 player or other mobile device, visit this site. This collection includes public domain texts read by volunteers and available as free downloads. There are many other podcasts here as well.

http://www.archive.org/details/globe_radio

Globe Radio Reperatory provides  classics of world literature such as Don Quixote and Madame Bovary for your listening pleasure.

http://freeclassicaudiobooks.com/

Check a few more classics off of your bucket list with this site.

http://www.openculture.com/freeaudiobooks

This site lists the titles alphabetically by author.

http://www.learnoutloud.com

http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/1

Socrative.com

This morning members of the ITC Staff were able to participate in a Webinar training about a tool called socrative.com.

"Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers to engage their classrooms through a series of educational exercises and games via smartphones, laptops, and tablets."

It's a very simply polling/quizzing tool that is free to use. Instructors create rooms for students to enter using a room number.   Once students are in the room an instructor can push out single questions on the fly, or create quizzes ahead of time to push out to students.   Students are asked to enter their name when taking a quiz.  When the quiz is finished instructors can download quiz results into an excel spreadsheet.  This tool would work well teaching in a computer lab or if know that everyone in your class has a laptop or mobile device.

If you would like assistance learning this tool or you would like to watch the webinar,  please contact the it department at it@svcc.edu.




Click on the link "Printable How to Materials" on this page for a quick training.


Here are a few screen shots taken while exploring this site.

Choices a teacher has in polling or quizzing.

 

The results screen after students have taken a quiz. 

 

 A screen shot of a student view taking a quiz on an iPhone.

Kick it up a Notch - Discussion Boards

Whether you are new to online teaching or a veteran, you know that discussion boards can be the life-blood of a course.  It is the online space where classroom discussion can happen, where you find out what your students are thinking, or what they know.   In the last interest survey IT sent out to faculty, learning more about the best practices in forum discussions was a high priority.    Today's Moodle Monday begins to address that need.  The following linked resource from Worcester Polytechnic Institute shares several instructional techniques on the effective use of discussion boards.

Improving the use of Discussion Boards
http://www.wpi.edu/Academics/ATC/Collaboratory/Idea/boards.html

Some to consider:

• "Weave student comments into your postings as a means of summarizing and subtly assessing"
• "If the discussion board supplements your in-class activities, be sure to draw a clear connection between the in-class material and the online discussions."
• "Resist the temptation to make declarative statements."
• "Provide sample postings representative of each scoring category listed in the rubric."

Create an Calendar Invitatioin while Composing an email in Gmail.

Kudos to Dave Habben for this tip.

In Gmail, under the Subject box there is a link to insert an invitation.  Clicking this link will open a pop-up that will let you create a calendar invitation.  Everyone you send the email to will receive the email as a Calendar invitation.  They will be able to reply and add the event directly to their calendar.  While the pop-up does not give you all the functionality that you can choose when making an event directly in Google Calendar, it works wonderfully for quick or single events.   See the attached screen shots for a quick over view of this process. 

Below is the pop-up window you will see.  Notice how the Subject heading of the email becomes the "what" heading for the event. 

Invite attendees to an Event in Google Calendar

We often receive emails for invitations to events for meetings, programs, or other activities on campus.   Instead of sending an email, send a Calendar invitation.   Attendees will receive an email and be able to accept, decline, or mark maybe.  The benefits are two-fold.   Attendees who choose to accept the invitation automatically have the event added to their Google Calendar.   The creator of the event will be able to see who has accepted the invitation. (so will all attendees unless you change the default settings)  This saves time for both parties. 

To learn how to do this, see the attached tutorial.   Tutorial
Learn more about Google Calender and other Google apps, see the IT department's website. http://www.svcc.edu/employees/it/index.html

Upload many files to Moodle at once - Use a Zip file.

Today's Moodle Monday will show you how to upload multiple files to your Moodle course files at once.

Place all the files you want to upload into the same folder.  Here you can see I have four different file types I want to upload.  They are in a folder titled "Unit 1".

Next, RIGHT CLICK on the folder and choose SEND TO and COMPRESSED (ZIPPED) FOLDER.

You will now have a new folder on your desktop (or in the same folder as the original) that has a zipper on the icon.

Log in to you Moodle Course.  Go to your files and upload a file just as you normally would, only select the Zipped folder you just created. The zipped folder will upload and appear with the rest of your files.  To extract the contents of this folder, choose UNZIP.

Moodle will create a new folder with the same name, but unzipped, in your files.

Open that folder an you will see all the files that were in the original folder on your computer.

Moodle Resources - Moodle Training

This week I want to highlight a training resource available to you.   It is a Moodle Course on our Moodle Site named Moodle Resources.

https://svcc.mrooms3.net/course/view.php?id=9

In this course you will find many training resources that your IT Department has created for you.  These include printable handouts, screencasts, and examples.   A few highlights to check out are:

Screencast: Creating a Book in Moodle
Handout - Introduction to Moodle Gradebook
Handout - Email Options
Handout - Creating and Using Groups and Groupings in Moodle

Take a few minutes to explore the site and look at these resources.  If you don't have access to the course, please let us know.  email: ittraining@svcc.edu