1. Design your presentation mindfully; plan interactive moments.

Use the interactive features of your web conferencing software to keep your audience connected to your topic and each other.

• Provide a warm-up activity. Share a map on the whiteboard and have participants identify where they’re located, for example, or have participants play a simple word game, like Hangman. Getting participants to use the interactive features right from the start helps set the “ground rules” for interactivity throughout the session.

• Design moments for guided reflection. In her undergraduate World Music course, Dr. Carol Muller plays unfamiliar music to her students and prompts them to describe in few words their initial response to that music using the direct messaging tool.  As the written responses come in, she continues to speak, rephrasing student thoughts using the academic register of her field. Within a few weeks, she notices that students start to use the language of ethnomusicology in their chat sessions.

• Design question and answer sessions into your talk. While Dr. Peter Struck delivers lectures in his Greek and Roman Mythology course, for example, students are encouraged to participate in backchannel conversations with the Teaching Assistant via the chat tool. Every 10-15 minutes, he pauses his lecture, allows the TA to report on what students are commenting on in the chat, and then extends the conversations with the students via the voice and video tools before returning to his lecture.

• Design small group work into your presentation. In Academic Writing and Research Design in the Arts and Sciences, a graduate seminar, Dr. Kris Rabberman uses breakout rooms for close reading and group discussions. In these private spaces, students work with a select number of their peers on an activity aligned with instructional goals. Dr. Rabberman visits each room to provide guidance/feedback. After the group exercise, students then return to the main room to present their findings/conclusions to the larger group.

• Use polls (quizzes) to check for understanding and track participation.  You can design these in advance, or create them as you deliver your content. In the LPS information session for online students, for example, we ask how many users have taken an online course before, whether or not they’ve used the web for real-time interaction, and, if so, which tools they’ve used (Skype, Google Talk, etc.). We then use that data to drive our conversations about how online courses work at Penn.

2. Create visuals that enhance your verbal delivery.

• Share your screen with users. Take participants on a web tour or show them how to use online tools. As a guest lecturer in a graduate seminar, for example, David Azzolina from Penn Libraries introduces students to key databases and resources available in Penn’s extensive library system.

• Create a whiteboard where participants can work collaboratively. Dr. Kris Rabberman uses the whiteboard to help students identify writing conventions and develop peer editing skills. She uploads samples of text to the whiteboard and asks students to use the marking tools to highlight/circle key issues.

• Pre-load images or include them in your lecture slides. In a lecture describing the history of parliamentary land enclosure in Britain in the eighteenth century for her Introduction to Romanticism course, Myra Lotto includes historic maps and images of a pastoral countryside to convey the mood of that period.

• Use PowerPoint strategically. In Calculus 2, Nakia Rimmer uses animated slides to guide students through solutions to complicated problems. Read Edward Tufte’s work if you want to learn more about the effective use of Power Point and the design of visual information. He’s bringing his one day course on Presenting Data and Information to Philadelphia on March 16, 2010.

3. Control your verbal delivery.

• Speak a little bit slower and a bit more emphatically than you might normally speak in a face-face lecture session.
• Vary the volume, rate and tone of your speech.
• Incorporate pausing to highlight key ideas, transition between points, and/or recapture the audience’s attention.
• Worried about whether or not your participants are following along? Establish techniques for collecting frequent feedback from participants. Have students use the “My Status” tools (shown on the right), for example, to let you know whether you need to speed up or slow down, speak louder or softer.

To learn more about effective practice in designing presentations using Adobe Connect Professional, visit:

RIT Online Learning, winner of the New Media Consortium’s 2008 Center of Excellence Award.

• Student Engagement Strategies
• Best Practices and Technical Tips

Adobe’s Resource Center provides tutorials on features and best practice advice:

• Read through the User Quick Guide or watch a video about how the web conference tool works.

• Best Practices for Delivering Virtual Classroom Training

Please consider sharing what you learn by submitting comments below.

It’s no surprise that most of the technologies (and the pedagogies behind them) that we’re recommending  are the very same things we already advocate as effective ways to enhance teaching.  You can see a summary of these recommendations on the SAS Computing web site at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/teaching_resources/flu

Hopefully, we won’t face a true emergency situation this fall.  But I am hoping that the threat of a flu outbreak will motivate more instructors to take advantage of services that are already available, and get them interested in new ways to engage with their students.

Many of the technologies we recommend are very basic, such as using Blackboard to make announcements, distribute documents or collect assignments.  Others involve more creativity, such as using discussion boards, wikis or collaboration tools.  Blackboard is the obvious first place to turn since it’s already tied into Penn’s registration systems and we’ve got good support systems in place.

But I’ll take this opportunity to put in a plug for one of my  favorite technologies which is rarely used but could be enormously useful – even when everyone is healthy.  That is, creating “screencast” movies to record basic lecture materials or technical demonstrations.

By moving some lectures outside of the classroom instructorss can free up more time for discussion and problem solving.  Those using special software such as Matlab or SPSS in their classes can record tutorials on how to perform important functions.  Screencast movies can  demonstrate how to use Library resources for research.  Basically, if you can do it on a computer, you can make it into a movie.  Details are explained at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/teaching_resources/record_lecture

Founded in 2007 and supported by six higher education publishers, CourseSmart provides higher ed markets with digital versions of over 7000 titles from some of the leading textbook publishers today (including McGraw Hill Higher Education, John Wiley & Sons , Sage Publication, Pearson and 10 others).  According to its website, students from nearly 6000 universitites have subscribed to CourseSmart eTextbooks, saving an average of $62 per purchase.

Saving  up to 50% off the publisher list price, students subscribe to eTextbooks for 180 days, in either fully online or downloadable versions.  eTextbooks have the same content, page numbers, and layout as print versions of the text, as well as a suite of interactive tools which allow students to search for keywords, add notes, highlight key points, copy and paste quotes, print pages and even email excerpts to their classmates.  What’s not to love?

http://www.atimod.com/e-tivities/intro.shtml

The site provides a synopsis of a book which is now somewhat out of date (published 2002), but still provides some useful tips in concise form.

The book is called E-tivities by Dr Gilly Salmon.  According to the author, “E-tivities is the word I give to frameworks for online active and interactive learning.”  Most examples cited concern how to make effective use of text-based discussion boards such as those found in Blackboard and other learning management systems).  It’s not hard to extend the principles to other types of asynchronous online activities.

On the web site,  the 5 Stage Model page is helpful for conceptualizing how a well structured E-tivity supports learning.  It shows the basic actions at each step for both learners and moderators.

http://www.atimod.com/e-tivities/5stage.shtml

I also liked the Building e-tivities- key principles extract from chapter 4.

http://www.atimod.com/e-tivities/extracts.shtml

I look at this list not so much as a cookbook recipe for how to structure an activity, but rather as a checklist.  Use it to apply a reality-check to the activities you’re planning.

I have to say that I’m really loving my wiki office hours sign-ups.  It has made my life so much easier – no more back-and-forthing to figure out times for everyone; I just post time slots and they sign up.  My students seem to like it too; I worried that it would make things too formal – I like the option of people being able to drop by – but it’s much more efficient for them to know for sure that they will have some face time. I think it could be really useful for other people too!

How to Create a Wiki in Blackboard
Before you can add the wiki tool to areas of your Blackboard course site, you first need to configure it. Go to the Course Tools area in the Control Panel and click on Configure Wiki. You’ll see lots of options for authoring and editing permissions and access dates. Choose which best suits your needs, click OK, and then add it to your course site as you would any other tool.

To highlight its functional significance for Advising Meetings and make it easy to find, Julie added it right to her navigation menu.

If you’d like help making changes to your Blackboard site, send an email to the Penn Blackboard Support.

What other ways can you envision wikis streamlining your teaching practice?

]]> http://www.pennedutech.org/office-hour-wiki/feed/ 0 http://www.pennedutech.org/keep-students-informed-about-their-performance/ http://www.pennedutech.org/keep-students-informed-about-their-performance/#comments Tue, 21 Oct 2008 20:30:51 +0000 John MacDermott http://www.pennedutech.org/?p=139 At a recent meeting about technology support for SAS students, several student pointed out that they would like to see their instructors make better use of the Grade Center function in Blackboard.  In particular, they were urging their instructors to use the Grade Center to track all graded assignments – not just mid-term or final exams.  By having a complete picture of how they’re doing in the course, they’ll know if they need to get help or make adjustments to how they approach their coursework.

The Grade Center in Blackboard is a very versatile tool for recording and communicating grades, but it can be a little intimidating to instructors because there are so many options.  A good place to start is the Blackboard Quick Start guide, which offers an overview of the key functionality and brief summaries of how to perform common tasks.

On December 1, 2008 Penn Library courseware support specialists will be offering a workshop for faculty on how to use the Grade Center.  See http://wic.library.upenn.edu/workshops/#SBBG for details.

Or contact the instructional support staff for your School for help in learning how to use the gradebook effectively.  SAS faculty can contact instructional-support@sas.upenn.edu