Do you find yourself typing the same thing over and over?


Do those fingers and wrists hurt after typing the same comment on every student paper?


I’ve got a solution for you!  It doesn’t matter if you are a Mac or a PC, you can find a program to create shorter statements for you to type and have your computer input the entire comment for you.

aText logo
aText logo

For Mac users, aText ($5 after free trial) allows you to create a typed code of your choice in order to input a longer statement.  For example, you choose to type “zzchoice” and the program would put in “I like your choice of voice here.  I can hear that you have thought about the content and used the knowledge in order to form your response.”  This allows you to give expanded feedback to students in their papers without typing that same statement 30 times.  This program runs in all applications as well, making email responses quick as lightning too!

Just think of the possibilities for the time you can save with a text expander program!


Text expansion demo:  http://screencast.com/t/vaEiu5q7kEi

aText:  http://www.trankynam.com/atext/

For PC users, please see this previous post:

http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/inspire/2011/07/21/shortkeys/

 

Are you looking for a new way to engage your online students without leaving your Blackboard course site?  Consider using a wiki, blog, or journal!  Wikis allow your students to collaborate on a single document within Blackboard and you are able to track their participation.  This is a great tool for brainstorming, collecting research, or producing a student-created FAQ or glossary.

A blog is meant to be a place where students can post their opinions or climb on a ‘virtual soapbox’ and deliver a message.  There are opportunities for others to comment, but the focus is on the initial posts and what the student had to say.

A journal is usually intended to be used as a private space for reflection.  It is a space that can only be ‘written’ on by the student and the instructor, although you can control whether the rest of the class can read each others’ journals or not.

Sometimes using a different tool for a week or two gives the students a break from the traditional discussion board routine – -and that in itself can improve student engagement in a class.  Instructions for setting up a wiki, blog, or journal are found here.

Are you looking for a webtool your students can use to create multimedia presentations? Look no farther than Smore! Smore is a tool used to create online flyers, but it has a lot of potential in the world of online education. With its drag and drop editor, themes, the ability to embed videos, documents, individual photos and galleries, and even maps, students can create quickly great looking media projects just like this one in no time flat! Do you have 75 seconds to spare? Watch the video below to see for yourself how easy it is! The only thing students have to do to submit their project is copy/paste the link. How can a class project get any easier than that? View Video on Smore.

Note: This technology does not yet meet accessibility requirements, so we don’t recommend it for presenting content, instructor to student. However, it is a tool students can use to demonstrate that they are meeting course objectives.

the title screen

Often an instructor will bring us media (like a collection of photographs) and ask if we could help create some sort of interactive exercise  (like a microscope simulation, to explore their photographs). We’re happy to do what you ask, but when time and interest permit – we like to push a little further. Sometimes we will ask if it’s all right to make a game.

This past term in Botany 350, we created an anime-themed adventure game, Plant Detective, which let students collect clues and present their findings to a humorous  caricature of their instructor. You can play it here, and I’ll discuss how we made it after the break.
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Some instructors are surprised when they first hear that they should begin preparing for a recorded lecture by writing a script. Some instructors believe that writing a script will take a lot of time, and that using a script will make the finished recording sound like they are reading, and that they should approach their online lectures the same way they do the on-campus ones – without a script.

Preparing a script for an online lecture is an essential step, however, that actually helps to save time and create a higher quality finished lecture.

So why script your lectures?

  1. To Save Time
      You will be surprised how much time and frustration you will save yourself when you are recording lectures. You won’t have as many flubs-ups or wonder if you actually covered everything you were planning on covering only to discover you didn’t. If you do mess up, it’s easier to re-record.
  2. To Keep Online Lectures at an Ideal Length and Quality
      A script will also help you keep track of time. We recommend that online lecture be no longer than 20 minutes (and shorter is better!). This time limit is very hard to achieve when you don’t know how long you plan on talking, or if you go off on a tangent.
      One trick you can do so you don’t sound like you are reading a script is writing your script in a less formal manner. How will you know if it’s less formal? Read it out loud after you write it! If you find yourself getting stuck on words or just find it hard to read, try restating the sentence as though you are just talking with a friend or a student in your office. Also, practice reading your script two or three times before you record; this will make the whole recording process go more smoothly.
  3. To Make Lectures Accessible
      An added bonus to scripting your lectures is that it would be transcribed for students with documented disabilities, or for those for whom English is a second language.

On-campus and online courses meet the same learning outcomes, but the online learning environment is different from the face-to-face environment. Writing a script as the first step in creating your online lecture content is a great way to help you create content that will be effective for online students.

A great example of a lecture that was recorded with a script was done by Julia Goodwin for her HST 104 course World History I: Ancient Civilizations, here is her lecture for week 8

Every term a group of OSU faculty participate in the hybrid faculty learning community.  Group members each redesign a classroom course for hybrid (a.k.a. blended) delivery in which a substantial portion of the course learning activity takes place online, and face-to-face meeting time is typically cut in half.

Beyond individual hybrid courses on the Corvallis and Cascades campuses, some entire OSU graduate programs are offered in a hybrid format through Ecampus, such as the College of Education’s doctoral program in Adult and Higher Education.

In what ways are hybrid and online course pedagogy the same?  In what ways are they different?  For more information about hybrid course design and delivery, visit the Hybrid Course Initiative.  And, if you’re interested in participating in the hybrid faculty learning community, see the Request for Proposals for the Fall ’13 program; the proposal deadline is April 30.

Part 1 and 2 are both only 1 slide long, however they exemplify the change in the design. These were created after I found the Oregon State style guides, so they were created with official colors and a more streamlined layout. These allow students to practice identifying kids that might need alternative learning options. These don’t feature any groundbreaking changes, however they do show how I’ve become more layer oriented with a cleaner display.

Experience Part 1 or Part 2 of the storyline yourself.

This storyline project was created for CS 325 on General Recurrence. Katie Hughes the developer has this to say bout her experience:

While this is a seemingly simple project, I really consider it the turning point in my Storyline experience. On one slide, the instructor wanted the student to input a text response, and if that response contained a certain word it would be considered correct. Storyline has nothing supported that does any sort of text comparisons, so this is the project I learned how to integrate JavaScript. Learning JavaScript and how it works in Storyline really opened up a lot of options for other projects after this one. Also, this series of CS 325 lectures is really the first one where I began using a consistent layout for each Storyline project.

Click here, If you would like to experience the storyline yourself.