Recently in Technology Category

Here is the handout from the discussion on moving students away from stacks of paper and into the digital world of collecting, organizing, and sharing their work from school. We discussed the benefits of using a blog website for personal content management. StudentEportfolios.pdf

Check this out - how about automatically finding photos that are tagged for a certain topic into a single timeline? As an example, I used the Tickr application at the Dipity website (http://www.dipity.com/mashups/tickr/) and typed in Pablo Picasso. This is the result:

Funny you should ask...here are the options:

There is a lot of attention these days on using ePortfolios for students to post their work, track their progress, and even implement as part of an assessment strategy. I know at least a few of you are interested in such a concept, and the education department has all their students doing some type of portfolio, so what I'd like to know is how many of you would like to engage in a discussion on how to implement eportfolios: what they are, what they could look like, how they might work, what tools you would use to create and maintain them, how they relate to students' courses, degree programs, and/or life at the college overall. I think this is a highly relevant topic that we should pursue, so send me a line to share your thoughts.

If you did not attend the workshop on using blog websites, here's the handout. The last slide includes addresses to websites I showed and can get you started with ideas. Again, my primary purpose for this topic is to help faculty get started with their own website, begin posting rich content that can be used in class or in collaboration with other people, and then begin to think creatively about how this technology can dramatically enhance what we do at the college. One step at a time, but I'm looking to get interested people together to brainstorm ideas. Here are two example sites: a very simple one I'm using now, and one demo site I put together for the presentation.

I spent some time this summer converting all my websites over to Wordpress. What's that mean? The old sites were the typical html pages that I had to update by editing files in Dreamweaver, uploading via FTP, forever fixing broken links, trying to remember the code for videos, etc. What a nightmare, and so I began experimenting with both Wordpress and Moveable Type this past spring. I actually ended up asking Mike Fry to install a server copy of Moveable Type for me to run the CETL website - so that's what's running this post you're reading. For my other stuff I decided on Wordpress, and I like it a lot. These are both blog-based

Here are the presentation and notes documents used by Fry, Duffy, Kline, and Hill during their CETL presentation April 3. We touched on many ideas and technologies, so don't try to absorb it all at once. Contact any of us and we can show you through any of the items we showed, such as using a wiki in class, setting up a blog-based website for class or portfolio using Wordpress (running my mental model assessment site) or Epsilen (New York Times portfolio site Jim showed). Lots of possibilities--but chew one bit at a time. Once you get the hang of these we'll jump into Twitter mode down the road...

Wikis are typically used to collaboratively write documents, but I used a wiki page in class today to compile a list of websites as students found them on their laptops. I had pairs of students search for certain types of sites, and when they found something they liked, they copy/pasted the URL into the wiki page--all right there in class. Simple and effective, and now we have a master list for everyone to reference as they continue through the class project we're working on.

Don't slap me - a wiki is simply a web-based document that all invited participants can edit collaboratively. It's much easier than emailing updated versions of a Word document, for example, and works great for group (or committee) projects. I'm trying it this semester - more details later.