Teaching With Technology

Online teaching in emergencies?

rickwest — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:54:11 +0000

Interesting article today about how in Singapore, they use online teaching as part of their emergency preparedness. If there is an emergency, they can continue teaching online without missing a beat. This was also valuable to me last year during the H1N1 season because when I got sick, I was able to keep teaching the face to face class by doing the same thing for them that I was doing for the online class already.

Should learning how to teach one’s subject online be part of every school’s emergency preparedness plan? What about in the future?

LDS Tech Tip! – The new LDS.ORG

rickwest — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:44:16 +0000

The LDS Tech Tip for this week is to check out the new lds.org at http://new.lds.org. You will be excited! The Church has hired some great designers and they have been taking feedback from Church members about what they want in the new website. My favorite part is you can use your LDS log in and highlight/take notes on scripture verses and conference talks. These notes will remain every time you log in! If you have an iPod, iPhone, or some other smartphone, the notes will sync so you can take notes on scripture verses in Church and later have them uploaded to your online account. Awesome! They’ve also made huge improvements to the music player (under development still) and the search engine, among other things.

This video presentation shows you how to use the new LDS.org. Check it out!

Gospel Insights signups!

rickwest — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:38:40 +0000

ONLINE STUDENTS – Please leave a comment letting me know which week you would like to do the Gospel Insights presentation. The assignment page explains how to complete this assignment. Most weeks you can do a presentation on any topic related to teaching and/or technology. However, weeks 8 (Oct. 19 – honesty) and 12 (Nov. 16 – internet safety) have special topics.

FACE TO FACE STUDENTS – we will do this in class today

Week 1 voicethread

rickwest — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:45:55 +0000

Hello everybody in the online section,

This post is for those students who are not able to make it to class today. First, a warning! If you can make it to class today, I think it will be much to your advantage. Usually when people have trouble the first few weeks in class, it’s because they didn’t come the first day and are then confused about how the online class works.

But, for those who couldn’t make it, here is a Voicethread presentation explaining everything we talked about. It is long … much longer than they will normally be each week. That’s because there was a lot to talk about and I needed to show you how to use Voicethread, how to navigate my website, how to do the first couple of assignments, etc. So please pull up some lunch or dinner and view the whole thing. It will make the rest of the semester go much easier!

Thanks!

The start of a new semester!

rickwest — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 21:11:24 +0000

If you are enrolled in IPT 286 with Rick West for Fall, 2010, then you have found the right place! This will be our class website. On the right you will find links to websites we’ll use as a class, as well as your peers’ blogs. You’ll also recent updates from your peers to this blog through comments, or to our Diigo group. Up above, you’ll find links to the assignments and the syllabus materials.

I look forward to this semester with you!

Correctly doing the wiki assignment

rickwest — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 15:20:15 +0000

Remember that for the wiki assignment you need to make TWO contributions:

1. Contribute your lesson plan and artifact and

2. Contribute the best blog resource that you followed in your Google Reader this semester and why you liked it in one sentence. This needs to be a BLOG that you subscribed to with an RSS feed, not a website that you found because someone recommended it to you.

These need to be put in two different places on the wiki. The following screen capture shows you the Language Arts page where there are two links: the first is for the lesson plan and the second is for the blog resource. The other subjects are similar.

Note: Make sure to post on your blog links to both your wiki contributions so I can give you credit! These need to be links to the pages you created on the Wiki, not to the the things themselves (for example, not to the blog resource itself). This is so I can quickly find the wiki page you created for the assignment.

End of Course Survey

danyoung — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 23:55:56 +0000

For those of you who may not have received this, here is a link to the survey:

https://byu.qualtrics.com/SE?SID=SV_a902fgjoTNdmSxu&SVID=Prod

Remember that this is worth 5 points and will provide me with some great feedback to use for future courses.

Thanks for a great semester!

Ideas from your peers!

rickwest — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 22:43:24 +0000

A few more neat ideas from your peers as I reviewed the blogs! First a shout-out to the team from the face-to-face section (Becky, Rachel, and Alison), who took third place in the IIC competition! Way to go! Judging from your blogs, many of you liked their project the best, as well.

Krista discovered the “interesting” button in Flickr and found that this leads to the “best of the best” pictures. I’ve enjoyed surfing through the interesting photos many times myself. Some are simply stunning!

Mike had an interesting reflection on the value of reading and media in today’s society and how media might enhance our engagement in literature.

Catherine, and many of you, noticed the Mighty Authors website used by one of the IIC groups that seems to be an easier and better way to have students self-publish their work.

BYU’s Innovative Instructional Technology Competition

rickwest — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:31:06 +0000

Here are the finalists from this year’s IIC competition! Great ideas for using technology in classrooms.

SS6 – Road to Revelution – multiple technologies
SS2 - Revolutionary War - google earth, blogs, etc
SS1 – Civil War Debate – many resources
Lit6 – google wave
Lit4 – social media diigo and mindmeister
Lit2 – mobile device (ipad) for early literacy
Lit1 – kidsperation, Mighty Authors for child publishing

Team	Video Pitch	Instructional Plan and Products	Rationale Document
Lit1	Lit1 Video	Lit1 Plan	Lit1 Rationale
Lit2	Lit2 Video	Lit2 Plan	Lit2 Rationale
Lit4	Lit4 Video	Lit4 Plan	Lit4 Rationale
Lit6	Lit6 Video	Lit6 Plan	Lit6 Rationale
SS1	SS1 Video	SS1 Plan	SS1 Rationale
SS2	SS2 Video	SS2 Plan	SS2 Rationale
SS6	SS6 Video	SS6 Plan	SS6 Rationale

Great videos from our classes!

rickwest — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 20:29:52 +0000

These videos were just too good to not share. Good job everyone!

Kelli (Dance)

Emily (poetry interpretation)

Tasha (Chinese language learning)