I’ve written here before about doing some D2L Spring cleaning and about the changes to your course displays if you’re enrolled in too many courses. But – get excited! – our system admins are going to be addressing both of those issues for us. Last week, you should have received …
I need to have a moment about PowerPoint, y’all. When done well or creatively (as Rich Whitney recently shared with us), PowerPoint presentations can be a thing of beauty. When poorly organized or over-stuffed with content, they can be dangerous. But, as a ubiquitous medium, we’re all going to use …
I went to Mexico late last week and, although I had Internet, I had no contact with my students. I was in Mexico City to work on another project, so while I checked the course’s D2L site, I didn’t send any emails. Similarly, students didn’t contact me. I came back …
This week’s post is going to be shorter than past posts. I am traveling and pushed for time, so about all I can provide is a quick update of the past week. We had our fourth of five face-to-face meetings on Monday, where students presented their progress on their group …
With all of the big changes that have happened in D2L this year, there’s a feature that’s been “flying under the radar,” so to speak, since it was enabled in our system during the Autumn upgrade: the Record Audio button. I think this feature has avoided fanfare for a couple …
I want to pick up with where I ended last week. I made 4 general observations about what I thought was happening in my TCH 421 classroom, suggesting that these things were happening because I required students to go out and find the course content and because I nudged them …
Now that I’ve become a podcast fan (late to the game, I know), I find myself seeing ways that audio clips can be used in teaching much more often. They’re a nice lo-fi way to bring some life to your course, and sometimes, we just need to communicate with speech. …
Linda Harasim, in her recently published book, Learning Theories and Online Technologies, wrote that “active learning as it is defined and practiced falls short in addressing social issues and real problems” (p. 81). She suggested that, unless pushed to think beyond the context in which what they already know exists, …
Last week, I went over the basics of how to create a Twitter widget for your D2L course: you use the Twitter Widget generator to create the code; then, you copy and paste the code into a custom widget on your D2L course homepage. Last week’s post focused on how …
The TCH 421 class met face to face on Monday for the first time in three weeks. I had an inkling before the class about the importance of face-to-face meetings to hybrid courses and how problematic not having such meetings could be to an online courses. The meeting confirmed this …