Apr 17

Summer Training Opportunities For Faculty

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One of Title III’s most important goals is to contribute to the professional development of our distance faculty in a variety of ways. To support that goal, we have a number of out-of-town training opportunities listed below which you can apply for.

Basically, you qualify for travel on Title III funds if you’ve been involved in Title III activities over the last year or are willing to commit your involvement in one of our current projects (iTeach Sitka, Peer Review, or the Fall ED593 course). For more details on how to apply for travel funds visit our Apply For Travel Funds page.

Take a look at these conferences and see if any of these would be right for your needs!

May 31 – June 2:  The Teaching Professor Conference, New Orleans LA

The 10th annual Teaching Professor Conference provides an opportunity to learn effective pedagogical techniques and interact with colleagues committed to teaching and learning excellence. The plenary and conference sessions will renew and energize you.

July 7-11: BbWorld 2013, Las Vegas NV

Relevant sessions by expert speakers, hands-on training, all centered around the Blackboard CMS.

July 8-9: 10th Annual Sloan Consortium Blended Learning Conference and Workshop, Milwaukee WI

A conference devoted to the purposeful, strategic and comprehensive approach to blended teaching and learning.

July 29-August 1: Campus Technology, Boston MA

This conference leverages technology to improve performance in education. Aimed at Provost/Directors/Faculty/Instructional designers – there are sessions here for everyone.

August 7-9: 29th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning, Madison WI

This conference is for elearning practitioners. You will network with instructors and online innovators.

Image: ©iStockphoto.com/vm

Apr 16

What College Students Really Think About Online Courses

thinking Original post: 4/3/2013. Reposted with permission.By Tanya Roscorla

A group of student leaders has tried online classes, talked with other college students about their experience and traded their insight with educators. And as more colleges expand their online offerings, education administrators and policy-makers could learn something from these students.

Thirty-two percent of higher education students took at least one course online in fall 2011, according to the Sloan Consortium report Changing Course: Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States, released in January. At NorthWest Arkansas Community College, 42 percent of its 8,069 students enrolled in at least one online class, an increase of 17 percent since last spring.

“When we see those numbers increasing or see feedback from the students saying that they want more online options, we take that very seriously, and have responded with resources and more online opportunities for our students,” said Todd L. Kitchen, vice president for learner support services. Continue reading

Apr 15

UAS Online Has a New Tool!

UAS Online has added a new block to the UAS Online Blackboard LMS – Set Grade Center Due Dates. Due dates can now be changed on a single page in UAS Online. Instead of having to edit every assignment, quiz or discussion board column, you can now just select the Set Grade Center Due Dates and change the due dates on this page. It can be a real time saver!

Heidi Olsen, an Instructional Designer at UAF, created a great tip sheet (pdf) on the tool. If you need any additional assistance please contact Maureen O’Halloran, Kathi Baldwin or Lori Cheezem.

Apr 09

iTeach Sitka is Coming Soon, and It’s Going to ROCK!!

Is your application in for iTeach 2013? Here’s a preview of what we’ll be doing together:

  • Using the latest iPad and sharing the best educational apps
  • Learning about some Google Apps that can enhance your classroom experience
  • Learning some great story-boarding tips and techniques that can be used when designing instruction
  • Creating video tutorials or video lectures
  • Using Blackboard and online design best practices
  • Collaborating with faculty from UAA
  • Playing with nationally known presenter, Diane Elkins
  • Designing and building your online course
  • Learning more about Jing, Camtasia, SoftChalk, VoiceThread, Blackboard, AdobePresenter,  and lots of cool web 2.0 tools

It is sure to be a fun and productive week. Please join us!

Click for Complete iTeach Sitka Information.

Apr 08

Feeling “Google-y”?

workshop photo

Kathi, Lori, Maureen, Marian, Nicole and Sarah (along with 22 others from around the state) immersed in Google Apps for Education training last week. It was pretty amazing how much we learned in two days. Even when you use something like Google every day, there are so many tricks and shortcuts to learn! Thank you *so* much Molly Schroeder for your great Google Apps for Educators Boot Camp!

Here are some keyboard shortcuts that I found quite useful for Chrome and Google:

  • Control or Command T will open a new browser tab
  • Control or Command F will bring up a search bar to search your document for something
  • Command Shift 4 (on mac) will grab an image
  • If you are using Google Sites, “e” will put you quickly into edit mode

A few good tools or websites that you might be interested in checking out are: Continue reading

Apr 01

Diane Elkins Joins the iTeach Sitka Team in June!!

Elkins from artisan eLearning

Diane Elkins

(1) We are very excited to announce that Diane Elkins, co-owner of Artisan E-Learning, will join our iTeach training team. Our team this year includes, Mary, Maureen, Lori, Kathi from Sitka campus and Madera from UAF!

Diane is a trainer in the fast-growing field of “rapid development tools” and has written books and trained diverse clients in the use of products like Captivate, Lectora, Storyline, Jing. She is a master of story-boarding and managing training materials, videos and e-learning projects. Most recently Diane has created training materials with easy video production using whiteboards. (Have you ever looked at a “In Plain English” YouTube? These videos are a lot like those). We have a lot we can all learn from Diane.

Diane is excited to share her knowledge and work with you during the June 3-7 iTeach week in Sitka.

(2) Remember iTeach is your week to work on your online course(s), get 1:1 help from Sitka and Fairbanks Instructional Designers, learn and collaborate with colleagues and have fun while constructing your online materials! There is a stipend attached to the week. Be sure to apply soon.

(3) This year some UAA faculty will be joining our iTeach week. This should enrich your learning environment to work with people from other campuses.

(4) Even if you have attended an iTeach in the past– you CAN APPLY AGAIN! Join us in June. We expect the week to be great.

For full information on how to apply for our iTeach, please check out:

iTeach Information

Kathi

Mar 28

SoftChalk Learning Page for UAS Faculty

UAS has a SoftChalk Learning Page for faculty where prior webinars and additional video tutorials are posted. If you missed a webinar or want to review the content again, please visit the page. (Please note – some videos do not play in the Chrome browser.)

The following videos are currently available:

SoftChalk video tutorials
  • SoftChalk overview (recorded webinar; 50 minutes)
  • SoftChalk introduction (recorded webinar; 3 hrs)
  • How to create a connection between Blackboard and SoftChalk 7 (3 minutes)
  • How to manually upload a lesson created in SoftChalk 7 to Blackboard (4 minutes)

 

Mar 21

Assessment and Alignment

We’ve added a new category to our web-based resources and included the content below. Find these resources and more on our web-based resources page.

Professor Dancelot and the Perils of a Misaligned Course

No one would really teach a dance class this way, would they? This video takes a humorous look at what can go wrong when a course’s learning activities do not align with the intended outcomes and assessment. Although this is an exaggerated example, it reminds us to look at the courses we teach to see if any of the elements are out of alignment.

Assessment & Instructional Alignment – An Online Tutorial for Faculty

Learning assessment is more than testing students and assigning grades. It is a system that provides feedback about student learning. This tutorial introduces an assessment approach using the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy. Using the taxonomy can improve your assessment system and improve student learning by aligning course objectives, activities and assessments with each other. In this course you’ll learn how to:

  • Write observable learning objectives.
  • Choose learning activities that support your learning objectives.
  • Choose assessments that match your activities and objectives.
  • Use a taxonomy to align learning objectives, activities and assessments.

Mar 19

New Webinar Opportunity

respondus

Respondus is a powerful tool for creating and importing exams into your Blackboard courses. Two, free forty-five minute sessions are offered to introduce you to Respondus 4.0. These sessions are also great for those of you who are familiar with the software but would like a refresher.

Wednesday, March 27th at 2 p.m. ET – Register

Thursday, March 28th at 4 p.m. ET – Register

Seats are limited, so be sure to sign up soon if you are interested. The sessions will cover the following:

  • Overview of Respondus 4.0
  • Using the Import Wizard to bring in questions from other sources, including formatting tips for Word files
  • Copying items from other Respondus files from the Edit Tab
  • Accessing publisher test banks through the Respondus Test Bank Network
  • Using the Retrieval Tab to reuse and/or edit assessments already in your LMS
  • A chance to ask questions

UAS has a site license for Respondus and you can download the program, using your UA username and password, at http://www.uas.alaska.edu/idc/respondus/index.html.

Mar 13

Google Boot Camp “ON” — Summit Postponed!

The Google Boot Camp (April 4/5) is ON, but unfortunately the summit itself has been postponed indefinitely. While this is disappointing, the good news is that the boot camp will be tailored to meet the needs of teachers who want to become Google Certified Instructors AND those who really want an intense “how to use” the google suite of tools, or how do I show teachers how best to use these tools in the classroom.

The Google suite of free tools can be used by any faculty, staff, or student. And, while UAS may not officially be a google campus, many of our students have Google accounts already through the university, or through personal accounts.

You can read more about the Boot Camp here: http://ak.gafesummit.com/bootcamp   I’ve been in contact with the organizers and they assure me that both days will be filled with activities that will enhance your use of these tools in the face-to-face classroom, hybrid or fully online classroom and/or in your work or play.

Think about joining us at the Google Boot Camp!

Kathi