Monthly Archives: March 2011

DePaul Instructors Talk about Teaching

The most recent video posted on DePaul’s Teaching Commons features Mary Frances DeRose of the School of Public Service. The video focuses on what she’s learned about how to teach statistics since first arriving at the university.

Difficult Courses: Statistics, produced by videographer and animator Heather Banas, joins a growing number of short videos about teaching available in the Teaching for Learning video archive. Each video features DePaul faculty members—from a variety of disciplines—talk about how they teach.

I am not an objective observer. By way of honesty, I was privileged to produce some of the first videos for the DePaul Teaching Commons website. But, as a sometime qualitative researcher, I also can’t help seeing this archive as a growing collection of data! And have, therefore, noticed some themes!

Watch some of the videos and see if you don’t agree:

  • Theme One: Some assessments are worthwhile, some are not.
  • Theme Two: Real world examples engage students.
  • Theme Three: Make good use of students’ time in the classroom.
  • Theme Four: Use multiple techniques during class to address the varying abilities among students.
  • Theme Five: Create opportunities for immediate feedback.
  • Theme Six: Create opportunities where students can view their progress.

In the statistics video, I was particularly impressed by one assignment used by DeRose: returning to the same journal article (one selected by the student) several times throughout the quarter. Over the course of the class, students realize how much they have learned. An assignment to match all six themes!

An upcoming opportunity to hear DePaul faculty talk about teaching—this time live and in person—is the DePaul Teaching and Learning Conference, May 6. Register today!

Avatar photo

Google Cloud Connect or: Shouldn’t This Have Been Built into Word in the First Place?

When you’re preparing your course materials, you’re probably using Microsoft Office—Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. And depending on the size and complexity of the files you’re working with, you may want a better way to manage them then leaving them in a folder on your computer.

Google to the rescue!

Cloud Connect (highlighted)

Google Cloud Connect is a free plug-in for Microsoft Office that allows you to sync any of the Office documents you’re producing on your computer to your Google Docs account. And while this tool isn’t intended specifically for creating instructional materials, it’s been so useful to me that, well, I just had to share.

What do you need?

What does Google Cloud Connect do for you?

  • Cloud Storage – Every document you create or open and save on your computer is saved both to your computer and to your Google Docs account. That means if you need to work on it from another computer, you can just go to docs.google.com and download it.
  • Version Control – Every time you click save in Word, PowerPoint, or Excel, Cloud Connect will save a new version of the document. Did you ever delete something by accident and then save the file? Or edit a document only to realize that the previous version was better? Version control can solve these problems. You can access old versions, listed by date, from directly within Word, PowerPoint, or Excel.
  • Collaboration – Just like Google Docs, Google Cloud Connect allows you to share your documents with others just by entering their email address. Your collaborators can edit the files simultaneously, and if you both edit the same part of the document at the same time, you’ll be able to decide which version should be used.

Why Google Cloud Connect rather than other cloud-based options?

  • Dead Simple Setup – Once you install the plug-in, just keep doing what you were doing. Every document you open and save in Word, PowerPoint, or Excel will go to the cloud. All of your version control and collaboration can be done from within Office—not on an external website.
  • It stays in the Microsoft Office format – If you’ve shied away from using Google Docs as your primary productivity suite because of all the formatting options afforded to you by Word and PowerPoint or the learning curve of a different set of programs, don’t worry. These are Microsoft Office files getting saved to the cloud. They aren’t converted to another format.
  • Edit Offline – You don’t have to be connected to the Internet to access your files, because they’re also on your computer. You’ll be able to sync any changes to your Google Docs once you have a connection again.

There are other tools out there that have similar benefits—Dropbox, Google Docs proper—but the little unobtrusive bonuses that Cloud Connect gives without making you change, well, anything about the way you work make it a winner for me.

Avatar photo

Desire2Subscribe2Discussions

A new version of Desire2Learn, D2L 9.1, has been released, and will soon be replacing our current version at DePaul. There are several systematic and aesthetic changes to the new version but one that will excite most teachers and students is the option to subscribe to discussion forums. With a simple mouse click, teachers and students will no longer need to check their courses for new discussion posts on a daily basis; the new posts will come directly to them.

In D2L 9.1, when you go to the discussions section of a course site, there are star icons on the left of the forums and topics list. By clicking on a star icon, you will be signing up for automatic e-mail updates whenever a new post is made to the discussion you subscribed to. A window will pop up asking you if you are sure that you want to subscribe to this forum and showing you the e-mail address that the notifications will be sent to. To change the settings of the subscription, click “Subscriptions” on the left-hand menu bar. From here you can choose how frequently you want notifications to be sent. For more options, click “Notification Preferences.” In this section you can change the e-mail address that the notifications are sent to if the default address is not one you check frequently.

Subscriptions to posts will be huge time savers for teachers and especially students who might have five classes each with several discussion forums. Students will no longer need to enter each course for updates or run the risk of missing a new post.