Month: June 2009

Blogging. . .

Want to try something new for Fall Semester?  Want to get started now?  Would you like to publish your thoughts on various topics for your students to read before class?  Perhaps a blog is the best tool for you.  It is an easy way to share your thoughts, photos, and more with your friends and the world.   It’s easy to post text, photos, and videos from the web. You can also personalize with different themes and widgets!

A blog (a contraction of the term “weblog“)[1] is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.  (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLOG)

That’s what this is all about and you can do it too!  Just go to http://blog.ecu.edu/sites/ to create your own!  Call OET for assistance!

Clickers!!!

Add interactivity to your Power Point presentations.  Our Clickers (aka Audience Response Systems or just think of Millionaire’s Poll the Audience!) will allow you to put short, multiple choice questions in a Power Point presentation and get response from the students.  The students think it’s fun and you can see where you may need to do more work.

Stop by Jean’s office, HSB3370 for a quick demo of how they work!

Many Students at a Distance

Join Academic Outreach for this weekly summer series!

This summer tune in as AO chats with faculty teaching Many Students at a Distance. ECU faculty are successfully teaching distance education classes with 75+ students; all with lives beyond these classes! Academic Outreach is offering this series to disseminate best practices in teaching Many Students at a Distance.  You can either listen or read the interviews.  Some really good ideas for using the discussion board.

http://ao.ecu.edu/many/

Communicator – Now Available for all Faculty/Staff!

A handy tool for quick exchange of information etc.  Yes it is basically an Instant Message tool but it is supported by ITCS and works much better than your original instant messenger.

With many advanced features, Communicator 2007 works with your Outlook address book and calendar so that:

•  You communicate securely with ECU colleagues
•  You can refer back to saved conversations in your Outlook mailbox
•  You can see when a colleague is available to chat

How Can Communicator Help You?

  • Initiate a one-to-one or group text-based conversation when you need information quickly;
  • Schedule video conferences using a Web camera for more personal communications;
  • Place Communicator calls (calls from your computer to another computer or to a phone) from any connected location;
  • View presence information—whether a person is online, in a meeting, out of the office, etc.from an e-mail message received in Outlook 2007;
  • Share documents through Communicator “data sharing” sessions;
  • Instant message contacts securely using public IM programs such as AOL Instant Messenger, MSN / Windows Messenger, and Yahoo! Messenger. Communicator calls and audio/video conferencing are not supported with public instant messaging contacts.

Communicator 2007 for Windows is available from download.ecu.edu . Sign in using your piratemail address/passphrase and choose the Microsoft Applications category.  Mac users should download Mac Messenger 7.0 or use the Communicator Web Access application.

Twitter?

Click the Watch Video Link

Do you have a group of students on clinical rotation away from the classroom?  Twitter can be an effective system to let them communicate with each other and with you while they’re away from class.  Not only will it work on a computer connected to the internet but it can also work on cell phones.  Here is an article from US News on Twitter, http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/2009/06/02/twitter-goes-to-college.html

Just found another good link on getting started with Twitter http://www.slideshare.net/janehart/twitter-workshop-1604109?type=presentation

From Jane Hart’s Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies, http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/handbook/twitter.html

BING!

Just the homepage alone is inviting, check out this new search engine:

http://www.bing.com/

“The truth is you’ve evolved. It’s time search caught up.

So we had an idea. Start over. And we did.

“We took a new approach to go beyond search to build what we call a decision engine. With a powerful set of intuitive tools on top of a world class search service, Bing will help you make smarter, faster decisions. We included features that deliver the best results, presented in a more organized way to simplify key tasks and help you make important decisions faster.” http://www.discoverbing.com/welcome/

Laupus Library Links

For those of you who use video links provided by Laupus Library please be advised that they disable EVERYTHING at the end of each semester.  If you need to re-activate access to a particular recording, you must visit their web site and fill out another video request at this link

http://www.ecu.edu/cs-dhs/laupuslibrary/videorequest.cfm

The video still exists, all they have to do is re-activate it.  They do this to make sure that everything on the server is actually needed.  Just hit the link above and re-do the request form.  You might want to bookmark the request form page and plan to hit it every semester that you need the video.

Please note any Mediasite recordings that you may want to revisit will also need to be requested from OET for a new catalog link since our Mediasite upgrade in May.