The Open University

Are you looking for some professional development points, or just a site that offers some great information for your students?

The Open University offers both and much more! What I like about The OU is that the site offers many free articles and videos in the OpenLearn area that you could use for your classes. If you are just interested in videos, then you can also search their YouTube channel. Some of the subjects covered include history, the arts, education, and science and math.

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A new look at Project Gutenberg

Have you seen Project Gutenberg lately? This site is the grandaddy of eBooks; I remember skimming through it when we first got the Internet. Oodles of out of copyright, free books. No images, just unformatted text. Very boring, slow, hard to search.

It has survived and grown with new technologies. And of course added much more, since more and more books are getting out of copyright restrictions.
One notable addition is the listing of books with images, and audio books. They also list the multiple versions and platforms (Epub, HTML, Kindle, PDF) Versions are available for your IOS (iPhone, iPad) device, Android, Nook, Kobo, Kindle and more.

They have even added QR codes - not just for hipness but for a practical reason. Scanning the code with your phone (on your PC) will bring up the website on your device and let you download the file right on your phone or tablet.

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Google Presentations

Google recently rolled out some new features for creating presentations in Google Docs. The new features now allow for faster collaboration and more creative presentations. Google has added 50 new tools including tables, transitions and animations.

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Prezi Workshop

Are you looking for a sensational alternative to PowerPoint? If so, Prezi is the answer!!

Prezi allows you to create a presentation with several components on a zoomable canvas. If you would like to learn the basics of Prezi, we will be offering a Prezi workshop, here at the Butler of Andover campus, on Friday, 10/28, from 10-noon.

For a dynamite example of what you can do with Prezi, look at this presentation made by one of my Public Speaking students, Ted Warner. He presented this during his informative speech, and the class was in awe of his talent, and so was I! This presentation has inspired some of my other students to look beyond the world of PowerPoint and stretch their imaginations.

Now THAT is a great thing!

(Please note that this must be viewed in Firefox to work properly)

Copy of Frank Lloyd Wright on Prezi

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Promoting Academic Integrity in Online Education

How do you feel about academic integrity in online education? Have you ever had an online student cheat or had a suspicion that they were cheating?

No matter your feelings about, or your experience with academic integrity, you will surely find this new report from Faculty Focus interesting. In this report you will find information regarding the state of academic integrity in online education and how to prevent cheating. This 20 page report is free to Faculty Focus members and definitely worth reading!

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New Look for Google Docs and Sites!

Google has rolled out a new look for Docs and Sites in order to establish consistency throughout Google products.

I use both Docs and Sites, and the new changes are not difficult to identify or use. If however, you have your students use either one of the sites, keep in mind that some of the verbiage has changed. For example, in Docs the discussion thread used to be called Discussion, whereas now it has changed to Comment Stream. Just make sure you change this terminology in your instructions!

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Copying items in ANGEL

Let's say you are adding new material in ANGEL, and you want to create an item very similar to one you already have. There are several ways to do this. One would be to copy the HTML code of an item and paste it into a new item.
Another way is to duplicate your original.
First, find your original item (to be duplicated) and choose its Utilities link. Now select Copy Item. I overlooked this method for a long time because the subtitle states that you will copy the item to another section (implying that copying it to the same section was not possible). However, take a look at this screen.Make your two choices (Destination Course, Destination Folder) and then finish by clicking Copy.
This creates an exact copy, ready to edit. No (1) after the duplicate. It should appear directly below the original if you copied it to the same course and folder.

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Interactive Grammar and Writing Site

Not particularly fancy, this is a site rich with basic grammar and writing information laced with self-quizzes. The site was developed with a grant by a community college in Hartford, Connecticut. Why not take advantage of the great work someone else has developed? At first glance, I believed it could be a valuable resource for Fundamentals of English. However, on closer examination, I found that these folks have developed a good section on paragraph, essay and research papers, that could provide a boost for Comp students as well.
Not just English teachers, but any instructor who requires clear focused writing would find this a site worthwhile.

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Fair use

This blog post of NPR's Hearing Voices highlights several articles and workshops on Fair Use including one by Google/Youtube.
If you have worked with music, design or any kind of media professionally, you probably know that the master protector of their own work is Disney Studios. It is risky to use the simplest use of black circles to represent mouse ears without triggering the Disney watchdogs. With that in mind, you should take a few minutes to watch the tongue-in-cheek video compiled of microclips of Disney movies describing Fair Use.

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SpeakIt by Google

I like to follow Google's latest developments, and recently I found out about Google's new speech-to-text feature.

This newest feature is so easy to use and I think it would be extra helpful to foreign students who need to better understand the English language. All you have to do is highlight the text that you need read to you, click on the icon for the feature, and it will start reading the text to you. It works great on most Websites, and the text is read to you by a computerized voice.

SpeakIt is the name of this feature, and can be downloaded for free from the Google Chrome web store.

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