Storybook Stack: Email Reduction Strategy
Joys of Student Storytelling
Showing posts with label Fall2014 Diary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fall2014 Diary. Show all posts
August 27, 2014
Fall Diary, August 27: student storytelling!
I've just been so busy this week, so here are the relevant Google+ posts for today!
Storybook Stack: Email Reduction Strategy
Joys of Student Storytelling
Storybook Stack: Email Reduction Strategy
Joys of Student Storytelling
August 26, 2014
Fall Diary, August 26: Inoreader workflow - commenting
I've just been so busy this week, so here is the relevant Google+ posts for today!
Inoreader Workflow: Commenting
Inoreader Workflow: Commenting
August 25, 2014
Fall Diary, August 25: Inoreader workflow - incoming posts
I've just been so busy this week, so here is the relevant Google+ post for today!
Inoreader Workflow: Incoming Posts
Inoreader Workflow: Incoming Posts
August 22, 2014
Fall Diary, August 22: Day 5... maps!
I found some time this evening to go through all the Favorite Places posts and compile them, and then I made maps: the world, Europe, and the U.S. So much fun! I compiled all the post links, and I think I will use this as an extra credit option in the Review Week (Week 8) as an option for some fun social interaction! Then I put the world map in the Saturday announcements too!
Hey, it's not BIG DATA, ha ha, but it's big enough data for me, and I really had fun doing this! This Favorite Places post assignment has turned out to be useful in so many ways, and I really want to make use of it again later in the semester too. RE-USE: my favorite online strategy. :-)
Hey, it's not BIG DATA, ha ha, but it's big enough data for me, and I really had fun doing this! This Favorite Places post assignment has turned out to be useful in so many ways, and I really want to make use of it again later in the semester too. RE-USE: my favorite online strategy. :-)
August 21, 2014
Fall Diary, August 21: Day 4... commenting about to begin
Today was another day that was especially bureaucratic... I need to remind myself that the Wednesday and Thursday of add/drop week are just crazy-making, and not just for me, but no doubt for the students too! Chasing down students who haven't done Orientation Week assignments, replying to all the students who want to enroll... very distracting. It was hard to find any real time to focus today!
Still, the blog groups are set up, and commenting can begin. I hope that will go well! One student ran into a strange snag with his Google account in Chrome (weird!) which interfered with commenting, but things turned out fine when he used Firefox. So, we'll see: I'll definitely be keeping an eye on the email this weekend in case people do run into problems.
I'll confess that this is the one place where the Blogger solution falls short of Ning: in Ning, the "Comment Wall" and the "reply back" features really made it easy to sustain conversations. I realized too late that I should have had people create a Comment Wall post immediately at their blog, so I will be sure to fix that next semester. It's a logical thing to ask them to do when the Week 4 Internet assignment rolls around, though, so I'll be sure to include it then. Better late than never!
And since bureaucracy wears me out like nothing else, that's all I have to say tonight for my course diary... but hoping for good adventures on Friday without all the add/drop distractions that really tugged at me both today and yesterday. Fingers crossed!
A bright spot today thanks to this marvelous article at Hybrid Pedagogy... I'll try to find some real time this weekend to comment on it in more detail! :-)
Still, the blog groups are set up, and commenting can begin. I hope that will go well! One student ran into a strange snag with his Google account in Chrome (weird!) which interfered with commenting, but things turned out fine when he used Firefox. So, we'll see: I'll definitely be keeping an eye on the email this weekend in case people do run into problems.
I'll confess that this is the one place where the Blogger solution falls short of Ning: in Ning, the "Comment Wall" and the "reply back" features really made it easy to sustain conversations. I realized too late that I should have had people create a Comment Wall post immediately at their blog, so I will be sure to fix that next semester. It's a logical thing to ask them to do when the Week 4 Internet assignment rolls around, though, so I'll be sure to include it then. Better late than never!
And since bureaucracy wears me out like nothing else, that's all I have to say tonight for my course diary... but hoping for good adventures on Friday without all the add/drop distractions that really tugged at me both today and yesterday. Fingers crossed!
A bright spot today thanks to this marvelous article at Hybrid Pedagogy... I'll try to find some real time this weekend to comment on it in more detail! :-)
August 20, 2014
Fall Diary, August 20: Day 3... tagboards!
Today was the bureaucratic day of Orientation Week, boring and not very exciting to write about. I only had a few students to track down who were no-shows, and there were students who dropped (which I anticipate... indeed, I count on it - I overenroll, knowing some will drop... but never knowing just how many), and then I was able to make the Blog Directory.
That means I will be able to set up the responding groups on Thursday, and I'm going to be trying to do a better job with that part of the classes this year. Given the chaotic nature of each week — where it's never sure just which students will do the blog posts and likewise which students will do the responding — I've decided not to try any longer to do groups that persist from week to week. Instead, I'll be doing new groups every week, and I should know on Thursday just who has posted a story for the week and who has not. During Orientation Week there will probably be some stragglers, but that's okay - I'll be putting everybody in groups tomorrow, and then, starting in Week 2, I'll be able to see who has published a story (grace period deadline at noon on Thursday), allowing me to base the groups on just who has published a story that week and who has not.
So, not the most exciting stuff... but I did manage to set up tagboards for the classes. That was fun! Here's the Myth-Folklore Board, and here's the Indian Epics Board. I think this could be really useful because if students also use the hashtags in their posts, it should all show up together.
And tagboard has an embed feature! Let's see how it looks!!!
That means I will be able to set up the responding groups on Thursday, and I'm going to be trying to do a better job with that part of the classes this year. Given the chaotic nature of each week — where it's never sure just which students will do the blog posts and likewise which students will do the responding — I've decided not to try any longer to do groups that persist from week to week. Instead, I'll be doing new groups every week, and I should know on Thursday just who has posted a story for the week and who has not. During Orientation Week there will probably be some stragglers, but that's okay - I'll be putting everybody in groups tomorrow, and then, starting in Week 2, I'll be able to see who has published a story (grace period deadline at noon on Thursday), allowing me to base the groups on just who has published a story that week and who has not.
So, not the most exciting stuff... but I did manage to set up tagboards for the classes. That was fun! Here's the Myth-Folklore Board, and here's the Indian Epics Board. I think this could be really useful because if students also use the hashtags in their posts, it should all show up together.
And tagboard has an embed feature! Let's see how it looks!!!
August 19, 2014
Fall Diary, August 19: Day 2 - thoughts on tech support
Today was Day 2 of the semester, with three assignments to do: a "Declaration" at Desire2Learn (really a quiz, but I relabel the Quiz tool as "Declarations" since it is the only kind of quiz I use), creating a Blogger blog, and posting a first Blogger post with images. You can see the assignments here: Orientation Week.
Since I have about 100 students, it's easy to do a percentage: I'd say that 95% of them had no problems at all. I think that's GREAT, so no complaints here. In fact, it's way better than I expected ... although, since this is my first time using Blogger with students, I wasn't really sure what to expect!
Of course, a few students did run into problems, and because the Blogger instructions are being used here for the first time, I was so grateful for their feedback in terms of being able to update the instructions to avoid confusion in the future. Biggest source of confusion: difference between creating a blog and a blog post. I shouldn't be surprised by that; for some years, I've noticed that students often use the word "blog" to refer to a blog post... but I didn't anticipate the way that would be a problem for the assignment instructions. Lesson learned.
One student also ran into terrible trouble because she put forward slashes into her blog title, and that was in turn a result of not understanding the difference between a blog and a post (she used today's date as the title of her blog). I think that was the cause of the problem ... to be honest, I'm still not completely sure what went wrong, but she was great about troubleshooting it, and she even added me as an admin temporarily on her blog. So, I'm pretty sure it was the forward slashes that caused the problem. I can say with 100% certainty that it was the weirdest Blogger problem I've ever seen (somehow the CSS would not load fully, with very bizarre consequences for blog display and functionality). But we got through it, and the blog is working just fine now! And I did learn that an admin can delete herself from a blog, so I was able to delete myself instead of asking her to go in and delete me after we were done troubleshooting.
That problem is a good case in point, though. The student needed timely intervention and expert help to solve the problem, and she was understandably stressed about it. If she had had to wait a long time and/or if we had not found a solution to her problem, that would have been a really negative experience for her, and I would have felt very badly about it too.
Luckily for me, though, I can usually provide tech support in a timely and reliable way.
Timely. Since I teach fully online and only online, I'm available M-F to help students in a very timely way. I don't provide that kind of support on evenings/weekends, but the students know that they can get pretty much instant access to me during the regular work week for any question they have, no matter how random, and for serious problems of course I'm willing to work with students on evenings and weekends too... but that almost never happens.
Reliable. I try to make sure that I have personal experience and at least some technical expertise in the tools that I recommend or require students to use for these classes. And I will confess that I actually enjoy troubleshooting a problem because it allows me to extend that experience and expertise, which will thus allow me to do an even better job in the future.
Some faculty might expect to the IT Helpline to provide all the tech support for their students, but that seems to me like expecting the Writing Center to provide all the writing instruction. There are some things that we just need to do as faculty members using technology for academic/professional purposes, and one of those things (I believe) is to help our students learn to use technology for academic/professional purposes too. It's obviously at the beginning of the semester when students require extra support, so I anticipate spending that extra time at the beginning of the semester. And at least so far, it really hasn't been bad at all.
Plus, it's good for the brain! Critical thinking, problem solving, and communication skills: you need ALL of them to troubleshoot a computer problem.
Meanwhile, about this analogy between tech support and writing support, I actually have more to say, but I'll save that for tomorrow.
For now, I'll close with one of my all-time favorite computer cartoons:
Since I have about 100 students, it's easy to do a percentage: I'd say that 95% of them had no problems at all. I think that's GREAT, so no complaints here. In fact, it's way better than I expected ... although, since this is my first time using Blogger with students, I wasn't really sure what to expect!
Of course, a few students did run into problems, and because the Blogger instructions are being used here for the first time, I was so grateful for their feedback in terms of being able to update the instructions to avoid confusion in the future. Biggest source of confusion: difference between creating a blog and a blog post. I shouldn't be surprised by that; for some years, I've noticed that students often use the word "blog" to refer to a blog post... but I didn't anticipate the way that would be a problem for the assignment instructions. Lesson learned.
One student also ran into terrible trouble because she put forward slashes into her blog title, and that was in turn a result of not understanding the difference between a blog and a post (she used today's date as the title of her blog). I think that was the cause of the problem ... to be honest, I'm still not completely sure what went wrong, but she was great about troubleshooting it, and she even added me as an admin temporarily on her blog. So, I'm pretty sure it was the forward slashes that caused the problem. I can say with 100% certainty that it was the weirdest Blogger problem I've ever seen (somehow the CSS would not load fully, with very bizarre consequences for blog display and functionality). But we got through it, and the blog is working just fine now! And I did learn that an admin can delete herself from a blog, so I was able to delete myself instead of asking her to go in and delete me after we were done troubleshooting.
That problem is a good case in point, though. The student needed timely intervention and expert help to solve the problem, and she was understandably stressed about it. If she had had to wait a long time and/or if we had not found a solution to her problem, that would have been a really negative experience for her, and I would have felt very badly about it too.
Luckily for me, though, I can usually provide tech support in a timely and reliable way.
Timely. Since I teach fully online and only online, I'm available M-F to help students in a very timely way. I don't provide that kind of support on evenings/weekends, but the students know that they can get pretty much instant access to me during the regular work week for any question they have, no matter how random, and for serious problems of course I'm willing to work with students on evenings and weekends too... but that almost never happens.
Reliable. I try to make sure that I have personal experience and at least some technical expertise in the tools that I recommend or require students to use for these classes. And I will confess that I actually enjoy troubleshooting a problem because it allows me to extend that experience and expertise, which will thus allow me to do an even better job in the future.
Some faculty might expect to the IT Helpline to provide all the tech support for their students, but that seems to me like expecting the Writing Center to provide all the writing instruction. There are some things that we just need to do as faculty members using technology for academic/professional purposes, and one of those things (I believe) is to help our students learn to use technology for academic/professional purposes too. It's obviously at the beginning of the semester when students require extra support, so I anticipate spending that extra time at the beginning of the semester. And at least so far, it really hasn't been bad at all.
Plus, it's good for the brain! Critical thinking, problem solving, and communication skills: you need ALL of them to troubleshoot a computer problem.
Meanwhile, about this analogy between tech support and writing support, I actually have more to say, but I'll save that for tomorrow.
For now, I'll close with one of my all-time favorite computer cartoons:
August 18, 2014
Day 1 of the semester... Blogger+Inoreader success
Given that so many students had created their blogs already during the "soft start" week of the class last week, I wasn't too worried... but still, what a great relief that the new Blogger blog approach seems to be working just great! There are now 60 blogs up and running (out of appx. 90), and no problems at all along the way. A couple of people were not clear on the difference between blogs and blog posts (so they tried to create a new blog for each new post), but we got that straightened out pretty easily, and I revised the instructions accordingly. Best of all: people seem really excited about blogging with a real blogging tool like this. Most of them are completely new to blogging (a few tumblr users, a few WordPress, but overall: blogging is new!), and I am really glad about how the first post about "Favorite Places" was something fun and easy to write, while also introducing them to one of the most powerful things about blogging: combining text and images.
That particular assignment — create a blog, and then create a Favorite Place(s) blog post — has a due date of Tuesday, so I should get the rest of those in tomorrow. I'm very pleased at how many people took care of all that already on Monday (or earlier).
I was also super-pleased with how Inoreader is helping my workflow (a couple of specific posts about that at Google+ here and here), and the guys at Inoreader even tweaked the HTML clippings so that the width is now a variable that I can control. That let me create a nice page at the class website with the Favorite Places posts embedded via an iframe right there inside the class site. Here's that page, and here's a screenshot:
So, tomorrow they will be adding more of these Favorite Places posts, and then on Wednesday will come the storytelling posts! There are already about a couple dozen of those storytelling posts also, using all three of the options - fable, nursery rhyme, map. So far it looks like the nursery rhyme is the popular choice, which is just great: that was something new this semester too!
I'm sure there are going to be snags and problems along the way, but at least so far, I didn't really have anything to worry about with these new features of the class. I guess that by focusing on the classes over the summer (something I've never done before!), I really got "in the groove," so that the changes fit together nicely and all make sense. Or so it seems from how things are going thus far... and one student is already done with Week 2 (pretty amazing!). That's very reassuring: if he got through all of Week 1 and all of Week 2, the instructions must make at least some sense. :-)
Anyway, long day — we'll see what tomorrow brings, and I am excited that it will start off with me commenting on as many of these wonderful blog posts as I can find time for! Whoo-hoo!
That particular assignment — create a blog, and then create a Favorite Place(s) blog post — has a due date of Tuesday, so I should get the rest of those in tomorrow. I'm very pleased at how many people took care of all that already on Monday (or earlier).
I was also super-pleased with how Inoreader is helping my workflow (a couple of specific posts about that at Google+ here and here), and the guys at Inoreader even tweaked the HTML clippings so that the width is now a variable that I can control. That let me create a nice page at the class website with the Favorite Places posts embedded via an iframe right there inside the class site. Here's that page, and here's a screenshot:
I'm sure there are going to be snags and problems along the way, but at least so far, I didn't really have anything to worry about with these new features of the class. I guess that by focusing on the classes over the summer (something I've never done before!), I really got "in the groove," so that the changes fit together nicely and all make sense. Or so it seems from how things are going thus far... and one student is already done with Week 2 (pretty amazing!). That's very reassuring: if he got through all of Week 1 and all of Week 2, the instructions must make at least some sense. :-)
Anyway, long day — we'll see what tomorrow brings, and I am excited that it will start off with me commenting on as many of these wonderful blog posts as I can find time for! Whoo-hoo!
August 17, 2014
Fall Diary, August 17: Class Twitter Widget
I had such a success with the Course Redesign Diary this summer that I am going to try to do something similar for the Fall semester, even if it is just a quick post or an embed of a Google+ post each day. Today is Sunday, August 17... the day before the official first start of classes. I've made so many changes to the classes this semester (some of them HUGE), so I will have plenty to write about here in my diary, but I wanted to start with something simple and powerful: the dedicated class Twitter stream. I've pasted it in below as a widget, and there is also a widget in the Class Announcements sidebar.
I'm been amazed at how incredibly easy it has been to integrate posting to this Twitter account a natural part of my day, with multiple items every day that just present themselves — either from my OU Twitter lists and/or my web browsing and/or class content creation. There have even been some tweets for student content creation, and I hope there will be more and more of these.
So, I guess all my time spent FINALLY learning how to make good use of Twitter has paid off. I am hoping this Twitter stream will be both fun and useful for the students. Obviously, it could have the best impact on students who already use Twitter, but thanks to the widget in the Class Announcements sidebar and my links to the Twitter stream in the announcements, it will be fun and useful to ALL the students in these classes!
OnlineMythIndia:
I'm been amazed at how incredibly easy it has been to integrate posting to this Twitter account a natural part of my day, with multiple items every day that just present themselves — either from my OU Twitter lists and/or my web browsing and/or class content creation. There have even been some tweets for student content creation, and I hope there will be more and more of these.
So, I guess all my time spent FINALLY learning how to make good use of Twitter has paid off. I am hoping this Twitter stream will be both fun and useful for the students. Obviously, it could have the best impact on students who already use Twitter, but thanks to the widget in the Class Announcements sidebar and my links to the Twitter stream in the announcements, it will be fun and useful to ALL the students in these classes!
OnlineMythIndia:
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