July 2009 Archives

On Wednesday and Thursday, July 29-30, 2009, the TLT Center hosted its weekly Summer Series event. This week's event was entitled "Electronic Survey Research Days" and involved hands-on workshops on creating an electronic survey in Asset, the online survey creation tool available at SHU. During the first day, participants learned about some of the features of Asset and other online survey tools. Dr. Wendiann Sethi, director of Developmental Math, also provided some tips and best practices for creating electronic surveys, including question types, survey methods, sample considerations, and question content. Participants were given the opportunity to create their own electronic survey in Asset, and share it with others. Finally, participants were led through the process of exporting their data from Asset into Excel and SPSS for further statistical analysis.

The second day of this week's event was focused on analyzing survey data using Excel and SPSS. Dr. Wendiann Sethi led the session and guided participants through the process of using SPSS to conduct statistical analyses with data collected through Asset or another survey research tool. We hope you will join us next week for a session on DyKnow, a software tool that fosters interaction through collaborative note taking, student response tools, content replay, and anywhere, anytime access to course content.
Resources used in the Electronic Survey Research Days event:

Asset User's Manual

Asset Quick Start Guide

In MS Outlook 2007, we all use the Global Address List to help us address our emails with the correct names. For some of us, however, the default address book is not set correctly within our individual system, so there is an extra step to perform.

Perform the following procedure to set the Global Address List as your default address book.
1. from the menu, select Tools - Address Book
2. on the dialog box menu, select Tools - Options
3. on the Addressing dialog box, in the first field select Global Address List
4. click Apply, then Ok

From now on, when you need an address for an email, the Global Address List will be the default.

Remember, when working with the Global Address List, it's best to have the More Columns button clicked to obtain an efficient search.

A recent analysis from The United States Department of Education on online learning shed light on some very interesting elements in online teaching and learning. First, teachers always have and will remain a critical element in the success of student learning whether classes are online, hybrid or face to face. Second, the findings released this July, "found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction." To find out more of what was in the report, it is available on the MVU Web site .

Coutesey of MVUAbout MVU
MVU is a private, nonprofit Michigan corporation established in 1998 by the State of Michigan to serve as a champion for online learning. It is the parent organization of the Michigan Virtual School(TM) and Michigan LearnPort(R), an online learning portal that delivers professional development opportunities and more to the Michigan education community.)

Take advantage of the training opportunities available though the TLT Center to learn how to use the new features of Blackboard 9. Please visit our current workshop schedule for available training dates and times. To accommodate your schedule both instructor led and on-line sessions are available.

The topic for the TLTC Technology Summer Series today was Facilitating Assessment thru Technology. One speaker who was not able to make it was Dr. Rosemary Skeele, Director of the Graduate Studies and Special Programs in the College of Education and Human Services. One of her special interests is Peer Assessment and I had the wonderful opportunity to see how she uses peer assessment in her courses this summer. I have to admit that when I first heard about peer assessment I was mildly interested however I am now hooked on the topic.

Peer Assessment is a type of formative assessment meant to improve student learning, either in a current course or for future academic endeavors. This is in contrast to summative assessment which focuses on a grade, often at the completion of the assignment or course. Formative assessment is commonly referred to as "feedback" to students and can be time consuming and overwelming in large-size classes for the faculty member. Dr. Skeele uses peer assessment as one tool to provide this type of feedback to students throughout the semester on their assignments.

One of her current classes is rather large and because of the size it is difficult to provide formative feedback on different parts of a final project that are due throughout the semester. Students divide into small groups and use a rubric she has created to provide feedback to each other on a particular assignment. This technique helps students understand the project requirements and different levels of quality while also providing a greater and more varied amount of suggestions on their work. Collaborative learning is encouraged through this method with the teacher becoming a "guide on the side". Students are then asked to reflect and journal on the peer assessment process and the suggestions given to improve their work.

Dr. Skeele has presented and published on the topic of peer assessment. For more information on her work, please see her most recent published paper. This document also shows how she uses Waypoint, a rubric/evaluation tool in the Peer Assessment process.

This summer, the Teaching, Learning and Technology Center will upgrade Blackboard to the latest version. For more information on what's new and improved in Blackboard 9, attend a training session or to see a preview click HERE.

Last week Google introduced a new feature to their popular image search, the ability to filter searches by Creative Commons license or images that are in the public domain.

From http://images.google.com select the Advanced Image Search option to the right of the search field. The Usage Rights option will allow you to filter the results by the license type.

For additional information, please see the announcement on The Official Google Blog.

If you have a little time (~20 minutes), I suggest watching this interesting TED Talk in which Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves. His experiments took place in various urban and rural locations in India and involve one computer and mouse, unattended for months at a time. Watch what happens...

For more detailed information about Sugata Mitra and his research, including what the children (who unknowingly participated in the experiments) said in later interviews, visit the Hole-in-the-Wall website.

It's time to gear up for the highly anticipated release of Blackboard 9 this July! Take advantage of these newly created courses that will highlight the major changes taking place in Blackboard.

This summer the Teaching, Learning and Technology Center will be offering courses to soothe the transition to the newly updated interface by holding a series of courses centered on technology in teaching and learning through the use of Blackboard. The series of classes will be offered on Mondays and Wednesdays throughout the summer as both online webex sessions and instructor led sessions.

You can chose from any one of the following dates:

Type: Bb 9 Training (Instructor-led Session)
Dates: Monday, July 6
Wednesday, July 15
Wednesday, July 29
Monday, August 3
Time: 11am-12pm
Place: ITV Room, 1st floor of the Walsh Library

Type: Bb 9 Training WebEx Session (On-line Session)
Dates: Wednesday, July 8
Monday, July 27
Wednesday, August 5
Time: 11am-12pm

To register for a face-to-face session today, go to http://tltc.shu.edu/projects/bbtraining!

To register for an on-line web-ex session, click here to e-mail the instructor with your name, department, e-mail address, and CWID number.

We hope to see you there!