TLP Blog

Virtually everyone has heard of YouTube by now and millions of viewers who go there daily attest to that fact. And although there are oodles of quality video there, finding the good stuff becomes a bit of a task. I have listed below a few alternates to YouTube that educators and students might find more valuable. If you give one a try and form an opinion, please let us know by leaving a comment.

Snag Films
What is great about this site:
All of the movies on Snag Films can be embedded into a blog or into a learning management system.
Dozens of NOVA and National geographic films are there and for free.
It is committed to providing the world‘s most compelling documentaries.

Teacher Tube
What is great about this site:
It is an educationally focused, safe venue for teachers, schools, and home learners.
TeacherTube community members are a major part of the evolution of the site.
The service is free for everyone.

School Tube
What is great about this site:
SchoolTube provides students and educators a safe and FREE media sharing website.
It contains only moderated and teacher approved videos.

DotSub
What is great about this site:
It is a browser based tool enabling subtitling of videos on the web into and from any language.
Anyone has the ability to translate video content into multiple languages via subtitles rendered over the bottom of the video.
There is nothing to buy and nothing to download.

Woopid Video Tutorials
What is great about this site:
It has thousands of FREE video tutorials for PCs, Macs, and tons of different applications.
You can have tutorials created for you by Woopid.
You can create bundles, which are collections or groups of related videos.

If you’d like a starting point for searching for free technology solutions for teachers and students, a good place to start is with Richard Byrne’s Free Technology for Teachers at freetech4teachers.com.

During this presentation, Bill Maligie, a recipient of one of CSU, Chico’s 2009 Exemplary Online Instruction awards, details practical ways to apply the Rubric for Online Instruction to create better organization in Vista classes. Throughout the presentation Bill shows how he reorganized his file system, created learning modules, and recorded Camtasia videos to create an online environment that has won rave reviews from his students.

Watch the presentation here. At the login window use the Participant Login and please enter your name. No password is required.

Watch the Camtasia video created by Bill Maligie for his Vista class.

This presentation was previously given by Bill Maligie at the 2009 CELT Conference.
List of all Exemplary Online Instruction winners

The National Survey on Student Engagement is available for your review. It is lengthy to print out, but as a PDF document, you may find it very revealing about higher education today. CSU Chico was a contributor to this survey, along with many other institutions. “Assessment for Improvement: Tracking Student Engagement Over Time,” see the annual results for 2009.
http://nsse.iub.edu/NSSE_2009_Results/pdf/NSSE_AR_2009.pdf

Laura Sederberg

When: Thursday, November 5, 2009 6pm Second Life Time
Where: Second Life at ISTE Island Events
Event support is coming from ISTE, Metanomics and the University of Michigan.

The federal government of the United States of America has assembled an 18 person team to update and revise the National Education Technology Plan. Their report deadline is November 11, 2009. There will be a community meeting in Second Life for educational technology stakeholders to provide input into the planning process. Currently, we expect that a representative of the national team will be present as an observer at the SL event.

The event coordinator is Perplexity Peccable (RL: Patricia F. Anderson, patriciafanderson@gmail.com). Perplexity is the University of Michigan Emerging Technologies Librarian for the Health Sciences, and the community manager for Wolverine Island in SL. Contact Perplexity for more information or to volunteer support or services for this event.

Information on prior versions of the plan is available here:
National Educational Technology Plan: http ://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/os/technology/plan/index.html

Information on the current planning process is available here:
National Educational Technology Plan: https ://edtechfuture.org/

The team is seeking input from the public. You can join the conversation on their website here.
Opportunities for Input: https ://edtechfuture.org/?page_id=888

“If you had five minutes to talk with President Obama about educational technology, what would you say?”

The key topic discussion points are these.

* Learning: Providing unprecedented access to high-quality learning experiences.
* Assessment: Measuring what really matters and providing the information that enables continuous improvement at all levels of the education system.
* Teaching: New ways to support those who support learning.
* Productivity: Redesigning systems and processes to free up education system resources to support learning.

4 Sims allocated for this meeting, all at the ISTE site:

1. http://slurl.com/secondlife/ISTE%20Island/92/83/30

2. http://slurl.com/secondlife/ISTE%20Island%202/128/128/2

3. http://slurl.com/secondlife/ISTE%20Island%203/2/190/30

4. http://slurl.com/secondlife/ISTE%20Island%204/208/215/25

If any CSU Chico faculty or staff would like to attend this virtual conference, please contact Ann Steckel in the Technology & Learning Program at X6780.

Learn how Rovane Younger of the CSU, Chico Construction Management Department has used Blackboard Vista to assess student learning.

This presentation was given on Wednesday, October 28
Presenter: Rovane Younger
In this TILT session, Rovane Younger details the process his department has gone through to assess student learning using Blackboard Vista. His presentation includes examples of test questions, testing scenarios, setting changes and recommendations, as well as what his department hopes to accomplish in the future.

View the Archive of the Presentation

Educause Live! offered a free session today, and you can watch the archive!
What it’s about:
In the past decade, the proliferation of Web 2.0 tools for sharing and creating knowledge, coupled with the creation of open-access journals, databases, and archives across the web, has begun to redefine the concept of “openness” in higher education. Advocates of the open-access campaign argue that free, virtual access to scholarly works and research advance scientific discovery and lead to faster knowledge dissemination and richer research collaborations, throwing open the doors that once restricted knowledge sharing and exploration. Critics of the movement have doubted its economic sustainability and raised concerns about its impact on peer review. Regardless, open access requires a new examination of campus copyright and publishing policy. Join us as we discuss the strategies and definitions behind open access and its implications for campus IT, librarians, administrators, and policy offices. To view the archive, click on this link.
http://www.educause.edu/Resources/ThrowingOpentheDoorsStrategies/185876

This presentation was held on Wednesday, September 23.
Presenter: Dr. Kim Jaxon, from CSU, Chico’s Department of English
In this TILT session, Kim Jaxon presents classroom practices she uses with her students in order to make their group work productive. This session includes video of students working together as they establish norms, negotiate work, and discuss ideas.

After The Fact – View the Archive
Go to the Participant Login and please enter your name. No password is required.

TLP is here to help you improve your curriculum with technology. During this most disturbing budget crisis, some of you are seeking to create online content for your students to use during your furlough days.

We appreciate your desire to maintain student learning and encourage you to come use our expertise as consultants and instructional designers to help you achieve your goals. While we have limited resources, we do have a number of ways we can support you in this effort:
(more…)

In an August 31st article by Marc Parry in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the author writes about faculty opinions and beliefs about online education as captured by the Sloan National Commission on Online Learning. “The Paradox of Faculty Voices: Views and Experiences With Online Learning,” is part of a two-volume national study recently released by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. Parry uses this study as the basis for his article.

If you would like to read more about this national study and its results, please go to:
The article by Marc Parry:
http://chronicle.com/article/Professors-Embrace-Online/48235

and the study:
http://www.aplu.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=282

If you are thinking of personalizing the icons used for files, folders, and other elements in Vista, Icons Etc is a great place to look. Once you find the theme you like, click into the set and save the thumbnail images to your computer. (Creating a folder on the desktop called “Vista Icons” might be a good place to save them.) After you collect the necessary icon, enter your Vista course, and in the Build tab, click the action arrow to the right of the icon to be changed. Select “Customize Link,” “Replace Icon,” and browse for the correct icon saved to your computer.

More about Icons Etc:
Icons Etc offers 107,553 free icons and clipart stock images for web design, application design, graphic design, and many other purposes. Click on the Browse All Tags tab in the menu to browse all of tags in alphabetical order. Go to the top of the sidebar to Browse By Category (Icon Style) or scroll down and Browse Icons & Clipart by Most Tags (In descending order).