Spring Cleaning – Yes even at work!

Here are some tips for organizing your computer and Blackboard sites.

Remember to Update your Computer Windows and Mac

Hiding courses from previous semesters (they are not gone, just hidden)

Being a good steward of student information (make sure no grade files etc are on your hard drive, they should be saved to pirate drive)

While you are checking My Documents for student information perhaps sort by date modified and clean out those files that are over 5 years old!

Clean up your gradebook.

Organization of content.

Need help with course organization or development contact OET!

 

Keeping in Touch

During summer sessions many students are embarking on clinical internships and/or faculty may be traveling.  ECU offers a number of ways to stay in touch synchronously such as Saba Meeting, Skype for Business (you can share screens), Cisco WebEx, Cisco Jabber and Dedicated Hardware.  To find out what each can do click here.  Want to try it out just contact OET for a demo or trial run.  Don’t let distance keep you apart!

Coming soon in the next release . . . (fingers crossed)

I recently shared an article Why Gamification in Healthcare is the Next Big Thing  and now to follow up here is a Q&A: How Gamification Increases Learning Outcomes with this partnership I am hoping to see the availability for us to add quizzes, feedback etc to our Mediasite Recordings.  I will be attending the Mediasite User Conference the first week of May and if you have any thoughts or feedback you would like me to share at the conference please comment below.  They do listen to their customers and there is always an “I wish” board to post on!

Speaking of lecture what about feedback, here is an article about a new way to deliver feedback, which can be done with Voice Thread a new product we have been piloting here at ECU!

 

 

Who’s counting?

Yes there are less than 10 class days left of Spring Semester 2017 classes.  So I have some housekeeping items to share

Blackboard Downtime during break – Monday May 8 – Thursday May 11 click here for a list of upgrades.

Tuesday, April 25 is a Friday meeting day according to the academic calendar.

Wednesday, April 26 is Reading Day, time to catch up!

Summer Session starts May 15.

Grade Center – need assistance in weighting grades contact OET! Remember that anytime you download grades (work offline) you must save that file to a piratedrive location not your desktop, laptop, Read more

The 4 D’s of email

I am reposting as we enter the last week’s of the semester your inbox may be put on the back burner but you might want to implete the “Four D’s for Decision Making” model (4 D’s) is a valuable tool for processing e-mail, helping you to quickly decide what action to take with each item and how to remove it from the Inbox.

Decide what to do with each and every message

How many times have you opened, reviewed, and closed the same e-mail message over and over? Some of those messages are getting lots of attention but very little action. It is better to handle each e-mail message only once before taking action—which means you have to make a decision as to what to do with it and where to put it. Under the 4 D’s model, you have four choices:

  1. Delete it
  2. Do it
  3. Delegate it
  4. Defer it Read more

Another Doodle but not by Google!

I blogged about this before but recently had a question come across my desk about creating a calendar to avoid “an organizational nightmare”?  As we head into the final third of the semester it may come in handy when setting up presentation times/dates for students as well as meeting times/dates.

Doodle.com

According to the website “Doodle offers a wide selection of online solutions that radically simplify the process of scheduling appointments, ranging from the group event “poll” that doesn’t require registration to the professional appearance with own branding.”

Check it out!

Anyone willing to give it a try?

Last week I went to a demonstration of Mursion Virtual Lab which I shared an article about from Campus Technology and is a very cool project taking place at our College of Education here at ECU.

“Mursion is an immersive learning experience that provides our education candidates a safe space in which they can practice what they have learned in the classroom with an opportunity to get direct feedback from virtual students, peers, and their professor.” [from http://www.ecu.edu/cs-educ/oaa/Mursion.cfm]

It not only can be used in Education but could also be used in Healthcare Training and Hospitality Settings.

Interested?  from COE “Beginning Fall 2017

If you belong to another college or university, we would love to work with you to see how we might provide the same services mentioned above for our faculty to you. In addition to faculty using Mursion for classes, it can also be used to give students an opportunity to practice interview skills and other soft skills that may otherwise be neglected. If you would like to learn more about using Mursion at your college or university with our help, please email us at mursion@ecu.edu.”