May 19

Tech Tuesday: More On Bb’s Achievements

Yesterday’s post mentioned Bb’s Achievements and today we want to leave with you a little more background and “how to” information.

  1. You will find Achievements under Control Panel > Tools > Achievements.
  2. After creating an Achievement Badge you can modify the achievement and even swap out the badge, even if it has already been awarded to students. Might be a good idea, however, not to modify the triggers if students have already earned a badge or that will all change too.
  3. You need to create the item/quiz/survey/discussion board/page or whatever the trigger is BEFORE creating the achievement. In other words plan and develop your content and then add your badges.
  4. Consider how your badges will differ from grades. Try NOT to badge the same things that earn students points in your course or you will trivialize the badges or the grade. Of note, Jennifer Stone, Associate Professor of English, UAA has given permission for us to post her presentation at Serious Fun at UAA  “Using Achievements to Support the “Habits of Mind” of successful Online Students where she explains how she thinks about the “habits of mind” that she feels leads students to success in her course. Thank you Jennifer for sharing your thoughtful use of Achievement badges.
  5. Achievement Badges operate using Blackboard’s Adaptive Release rules. When copying or exporting or archiving a course you must copy BOTH the adaptive release rules AND the content or your achievements will not copy correctly.

WhiteBirdBelow are some resources that might help you to integrate Achievements into your course. We’ll be creating our own tutorial soon, but these should be enough to get you started.

Blackboard Help: Create and Manage Achievements

University of Kansas: Create and Manage Achievements

Blackboard Learn Quick Hit Video on Achievements

To side- one of our “Early Bird” badges from iTeach. Blackboard. You can use Blackboard’s badges or upload your own.

Questions? Thoughts about achievements and badges? Don’t hesitate to reply to this post or send us an email.

May 18

“Brain Sponge is Dripping” from Anonymous iTeach 2015 Participant!

What a great week we had in Juneau last week. We all (Tina, Maureen, Mary, Nicole and I) want to thank all of our faculty for their enthusiastic efforts last week. And the food, well, what a delicious and pleasant surprise, was terrific too!!

Mostly though, I wanted to point out and emphasize, while our group of Instructional Designers are the ‘instructors’ we come away learning so much from you! The discussions we had were rich and often inspiring. And while we may show you some new tools, how you creatively put them to work in your courses is amazing. The brain sponge drip happens to us as well!

This week I want to point out a new tool (new for UAS at least) in Blackboard and share with you what Charla Brown created. It’s pretty awesome. The tool is Blackboard’s Achievements. These are milestone badges that Blackboard can award automatically when you set “Review Status” on a particular page(s) or when a student submits an assignment or scores a particular grade on an assignment. You determine what will “TRIGGER” the achievement badge and Blackboard will automatically award it. Pretty cool idea. Later this week I’ll post some tutorials about Blackboard’s Achievements.

What’s the difference between badges and grades? That was one of our best discussions last week. I think we pretty much decided that Jennifer Stone (UAA English Professor who shared what she is doing Achievements) has it right: badges are for habits that you want students to cultivate; grades are for skills and knowledge that you want students to gain. At least that’s what we thought last week. Let us know if you have a different notion.

I’d like you to examine the badges that Charla has created for her Organizational Change course. Her theme (if you couldn’t guess from the badges) is Mission Possible. I hope Charla will let us know if these badges inspire and motivate her students as we’re hoping they will!

Again– look out for step-by-step instructions and more badging information later this week! And thanks Charla for sharing your action plan. PS- Charla used Piktochart to create this infographic.

Infographic by Charla Brown

 

May 14

Deeper eLearning Design: Part 1 – The Starting Point – Good Objectives

 

This is the first post in a series of six that covers Deeper Learning. The goal of this series is to build upon good implementations of instructional design, and go deeper into the nuances of what makes learning that really works. We’ll move on to practice, examples, concepts, emotional elements, and putting it together, but to start, we’re talking objectives.

Targeted learning graphic

Image source: ©iStockphoto.com/ymgerman

To read Part 1, click on the link below.

Source: Deeper eLearning Design: Part 1 – The Starting Point – Good Objectives | Learnnovators

 

 

May 12

Tech Tuesday – Teaching Professor Tips App

Get a daily teaching tip delivered to your smart phone or tablet with the new Teaching Professor Tips app. Brief and to the point, each tip provides a nugget of wisdom regarding assignment strategies, student engagement, classroom management, instructional vitality, and much more.

The free app lets you:

  • Get one tip every day (365/year)
  • Specify the time of day you want to receive your tip
  • Share favorite tips on social media or email
  • Send your own tips to the editor

Available in the App Store and Google Play.
app on phone

(Image source: http://www.coolmockups.com/)

May 08

Fried Friday: Standardized Tests

John Oliver investigates what’s wrong with standardized testing (warning: contains strong language). Here’s a link from Karl Kapp’s blog:http://karlkapp.com/take-down-of-standardized-tests-truth-in-comedy/

May 05

Tech Tuesday: Slides that Communicate Your Idea

Charla Brown shared this resource saying that it was really helpful to create better, more expressive slides. Certainly TED has created high standards for presentations and these tips from the TED’s in-house expert should improve any presentation. Check them out and share with your students.

10 tips on how to make slides that communicate your idea, from TED’s in-house expert

instructor presentationThanks for sharing Charla!

Image credit: iStockPhoto laflor

 

May 01

Fried Friday: Happy Graduation Everyone!

While we’re all thinking about graduation today, we thought you might enjoy a few funny graduation speeches (I enjoyed Stephen Colbert and Neil DeGrasse Tyson in particular!).

10 Hilarious Graduation Speeches That Won’t Put You to Sleep.

And for those of you in a more serious mood, NPR has picked out 300 addresses going back to 1774! You can search by name, school, date or theme and listen to some awesome commencement speeches.

The Best Commencement Speeches, Ever

Congratulations to all graduates!

Graduation

Image Credit: iStockPhoto Rawpixel

Apr 30

Free Respondus Webinars

Respondus Webinar Informationhttp://www.respondus.com/products/webinar/

Apr 28

Tech Tuesday – Student Mobile Workspaces

The RAPID EVOLUTION OF TECHNOLOGY is changing the way we learn, work and educate. Students want the freedom to learn and study using the latest software or applications on any device, in the location where they feel most productive and inspired.

infographic-student-mobile-workspaces

Apr 24

Fried Friday: MakeUseOf Best Websites

MakeUseOf.com is a  blog that is very popular for learning to “make use of” technology and discover cool tools and sites on the internet.  This post titled, The Best Websites On The Internet, lists the websites their experts consider to be the best (most useful) in fourteen categories including: Learning, Social, Searching, Books, Productivity, and more. They also update this list regularly which is extra helpful so bookmark it for future reference.

If you look under the “Social”  listing you will see Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc., which brings me to the “Fried” part of this post.  BuzzFeed shared a post this week titled, If The Characters of “Friends” Had The Internet.  If you are a fan of “Friends”, you can imagine Monica on Pinterest and Ross on LinkedIn!

Monica pinterest

Check it out for a little entertainment and take a look at MakeUseOf and consider following them on social media or subscribing via RSS or email.

MakeUseOfsm