Teaching with Technology » blogs

Teaching with Social Media

Alex Chapin — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 00:26:46 +0000

This is the second screencast published on this site that is based on an interview I did with Prof. Louisa Stein from the Film and Media Culture department. In this screencast Prof. Stein discusses her course on Millennial Media. In this course, students were required to create their own blogs and to post to Twitter.

To encourage students to read each other’s work, Prof. Stein created “blog collectives” and required students to comment on the blogs of students in their collective. An additional site was set up for the course that aggregated posts from all student blogs using the FeedWordPress plugin.

Course Hub Case Studies

Alex Chapin — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 22:59:54 +0000

The Course Hub is a meta-platform for aggregating resources for a given course across a variety of platforms including WordPress and Moodle. Below is a screencast showing how the Course Hub has been used in courses this fall.

Integrating Moodle and WordPress

Alex Chapin — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 15:59:47 +0000

Louisa Stein is an assistant professor of Film and Media Culture who used both Moodle and WordPress in the spring of 2011 for a course on the “Aesthetics of the Moving Image.” Prof. Stein used WordPress for the public face of this course and Moodle for the weekly outline of readings, online discussion and assignment submissions. Watch the screencast below for more details.

Prof. Stein used WordPress for general information about the course including assignment descriptions (see: Assignments > Montage vs Long Take Wars). These assignment descriptions then contained links to Moodle assignment “activities” where students could submit their assignments. The WordPress site was also used as a place where students could blog about projects and share the videos they produced as part of their course work (see: Categories > Montage)

Prof. Stein used Moodle to distribute readings, collect assignment submissions and as a place for online discussion and used Moodle’s grading functionality to grade assignments and forum posts.

This screencast is the first in a series based on an interview Alex Chapin did with Louisa Stein in the spring of 2011.

Middlebury Trailrunner Blog – Jeff Byers

Carrie Macfarlane — Thu, 13 May 2010 15:07:54 +0000

What: Middlebury Trailrunner Blog

Who: Jeff Byers, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Technologies used: Hardware: GPS watch, digital camera. Software: Google Earth, WordPress, Garmin software (allows seamless connection to Google Earth). When posting an altitude profile, Jeff does a screen shot off of the Garmin software and pastes it into MS Word. Then he uses a shareware program called “Doc to Jpeg Converter” and crops it with Microsoft Office Picture Manager.

Assistance received: Not much was needed! Jeff figured this out by himself, while watching the Red Sox on summer evenings. He has had conversations with Joe Antonioli (Manager of Web & Interactive Digital Media Technologies), and Carrie Macfarlane (LIS liaison) about getting an analytics tool installed (technical issues are still being resolved). The Addison Independent rebroadcasts the blog from their newspaper web site.

Reason for using the technology: Personal interest

Description: Jeff created the Middlebury Trailrunner blog as a community resource for like-minded runners. Jeff and other runners felt there was a need for a local guide; he often found himself describing his routes to his friends. He also thought it would be fun to create the blog–he is a self-described “map geek.”

The blog tracks Jeff’s trail-running adventures in and around Addison County. For each run, Jeff posts a map of his route, a chart showing the altitudes he reached, photos and a written narrative.

Running is just a hobby for Jeff, but these technologies have potential curricular applications, from biology and environmental studies, to writing, to art (see for example The Big Draw of the GPS Run!).