Teaching With Technology

Social media copyright etiquette

rickwest — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 20:49:38 +0000

Moms know copyright! At least these ones do, and here is a very thoughtful blog article about proper etiquette for sharing photos and media through social networking sites like Pinterest in a way that does not abuse copyright. Check it out! What are your thoughts?

Embedding the creative commons graphic

rickwest — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 20:45:18 +0000

Part of the copyright assignment, remember is to embed a graphic into your website licensing your work under some kind of creative commons permission. I think the easiest way to do this is first to create the embed code for the kind of license you want here.

Then in your website, click the button to the far right of the toolbar that has your buttons to center and justify your text. Paste in your embed code, and then click update!

As my daughter says, “easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy.”

Teaching with Twitter

rickwest — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 04:45:50 +0000

Twitter is a tool that you could learn about as one of your personal technology projects if you wished. It’s a nice tool for more than following celebrities. What I like about it is that you can easily from any mobile device share quick ideas and connect them using hashtags (the words following the # sign). Here’s an interesting article about practical advice for teaching with Twitter and for creating a Twitter backchannel, which is a discussion on Twitter about the stuff you are talking about in class, which happens during class. Hey, if they are going to text each other anyway, might as well have them text about class topics right?

Do any of you use Twitter? How could you use it in your teaching?

Creating your own “Blackboard”

rickwest — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 04:40:55 +0000

As I mentioned the first week of class, I use WordPress for this website, which is a free website and blog-creation tool. If you are interested in using WordPress for your own teaching, but want to have more features like what you see in Blackboard or other course management systems, then you might check out this article about a plugin for adding these features to WordPress.

Free audiobooks

rickwest — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:15:10 +0000

I told the face-to-face students about Librivox.org the other day, a site for free audiobooks of public domain works. You may also enjoy LearnOutLoud, which sometimes has free audiobooks too. They are now offering The Chronicles of Narnia!

What role do audiobooks have in your teaching, especially if you are English teachers? Especially if you teach students with learning disabilities?

Internet Safety

rickwest — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:13:13 +0000

I have graded all of the Internet Safety assignments that I have received. If you have a grade of 0, it is because I didn’t know where your assignment was! Remember the online students post their assignments as links in the correct module.

Also, here were a few really great examples! Notice how they all emphasized different things. I appreciated that you took ownership of this material and made your pages uniquely about what was important to YOU in your classes.

Digital Citizenship

rickwest — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 04:10:21 +0000

This week we are learning about Internet Safety, and I liked this well-thought out piece about the nine elements of Digital Citizenship necessary for today’s society. If we had more time in our class, we would explore all nine! But at a minimum, I’d like you to read it and respond in the comments about which you think are most important, and how you might teach any in your classroom. It’s important for our students to gain these skills.

Grading up to date!

rickwest — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 20:30:54 +0000

Just a note that we have graded all of the Gospel Insights and class website assignments that we have received. You can check your grade at gradebook.byu.edu and if you don’t see a grade, then email us the link to your assignment. Also, if your score is less than 100%, then we have left you feedback as a note attached to the grade in gradebook. Remember that if the assignment is on time and a good faith effort was done, then you can redo the assignment for full credit within two weeks!

Another screencasting tool

rickwest — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:56:16 +0000

I introduced the online students to screencast-o-matic, which isn’t perfect, but has some nice convenience features of being easily uploaded to Youtube and embedded in websites. I just learned about another screencasting tool that is pretty easy to use as well, it seems. If anyone checks it out, let us know in the comments whether you like it better or worse than screencast-o-matic!

Best Educational Wikis of 2011

rickwest — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 23:53:06 +0000

Right on cue, after we learned about wikis in the Internet Communications segment of class, comes this post highlighting the top educational wikis of 2011. Check them out (especially you history teachers!)

Notice that this blog emphasizes wikis on wikispaces.com. There are also other great wikis on other wiki platforms.