//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. Continue reading “Integrating Moodle and WordPress”
//
What: Clickers (personal polling devices) in a large lecture class
Who: Catherine Combelles, Assistant Professor of Biology
Class: BIOL0145 Cell Biology and Genetics
Technology Used: Personal Polling Devices (Clickers)
Number of students: approx. 70
Learning objective: To monitor the students’ understanding of concepts covered in lecture and promote peer learning and discussion.
Description of use: Catherine used the clickers for every lecture from day 1 to the last day of classes, and throughout the duration of each lecture. At the beginning of each lecure, she started with a question that tested their understanding of concepts from the past lecture or on their readings for the day. She would then pose between 3-4 more questions depending on the lecture content that day. Continue reading “Clickers in a large lecture class – Catherine Combelles”
//
What: Authoring and editing Wikipedia entries as an assignment in a senior elective courseWho: Jeff Byers, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Class: CHEM0442, Advanced Organic Chemistry. This is a special topics course taken mostly by seniors, with some juniors, most of whom are chemistry or biochemistry majors.
Number of students: 9
Reason for using the technology: Most Senior Elective courses in the sciences culminate with some sort of final paper or project. This project typically involves each student writing a detailed review paper on an interesting and advanced topic of their choice. This is a worthwhile exercise, as each student learns an astonishing amount of detail on one specific topic. These papers do not, in any way, reflect the important collaborative nature of science. Jeff also believes that a senior elective course should also generate content of use to the entire chemistry community, unlike research papers which, after grading, rarely surface again. Continue reading “Wikipedia for Chemistry – Jeff Byers”
//Prof. Kyoko Davis has never been fully satisfied with the audio resources included with any of the textbooks used by the Japanese dept. The Japanese dept currently uses Genki, An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese. To supplement the audio resources that accompany this textbook, Prof. Davis has recorded additional audio material for students, some of this audio contains material from the textbook that is not in the accompanying resources, some contain alternative versions that are presented at a faster and/or slower pace and some contain supplementary material.
One area of study that Prof. Kyoko has focused on is vocabulary instruction. She has worked with Media Services to record hundreds of vocabulary items and used a spreadsheet to document all the metadata for each item including Hiragana, Katagana and Kanji representations of a given word, its English translation, grammatical categorization and information about lessons it appears in. All of this information was then imported into a database that was accessed by a web application she helped design for vocabulary study that allows students to specify items they know and don’t know, tracks their study habits and generates quizzes customized to their particular knowledge of the items studied.
Uses » Audio » Record/edit/format audio, Share audio on the web
Tools » Audacity, Voice Recorders, Microphones, iPods