Educational Technology Blog » Blogging

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Amod Lele — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 16:06:43 +0000

Are you interested in educational technology at BU but can’t come to regularly check the blog page? We’ve had our Twitter feed @edtechbu up as one way to keep up, but now there’s another way. If you scroll down to the lower right on this site, you’ll see new Subscribe options available where you can subscribe to our announcements, case studies, or some of our most popular genres of technology. Click on the Email option to have new posts delivered to your email inbox. (If you use an RSS reader, you can also receive new posts that way.)

These subscriptions are made possible by Google’s FeedBurner service. You can use FeedBurner on your BU WordPress websites as well.

WordPress trainings resume

Amod Lele — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 18:43:28 +0000

WordPress is a straightforward and state-of-the-art technology for designing websites and blogs. If you’re interested in learning it, we’re pleased to announce that WordPress training sessions have now resumed. Trainings on the Charles River campus have been scheduled starting this Thursday, March 7, with additional trainings available in April and May. Trainings on the Medical campus will be announced soon. All trainings are hands-on events where you will have the opportunity to explore WordPress on our computers yourself. You can see our schedule and sign up for trainings here.

Welcome to our new home!

Amod Lele — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 20:56:08 +0000

The Educational Technology Blog has moved to a new home at sites.bu.edu/edtech/. We hope you like the new look. Please update any links in your browser accordingly, but the old blogs.bu links will redirect you here. The move is part of an exciting upcoming transition from the old blogs.bu.edu WordPress server to a new and more powerful sites.bu.edu WordPress service, providing the full power of BU’s departmental WordPress installation to faculty and staff. (blogs.bu.edu will remain as an option available to students.) We expect the sites.bu.edu service will be available within the next few weeks; stay tuned on this blog for more details!

Blackboard Learn: What can it do for you?

Kacie Cleary — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 22:16:23 +0000

In continuation of CEIT’s and IS&T’s efforts to engage faculty in the LMS migration, CEIT hosted a presentation on Blackboard Learn that focused on how faculty can use it for their course. Participants from the Blackboard Learn pilot were present to share their ideas and experience with the new environment. Some topics included:

- Collaboration tools in Blackboard: With this new system comes new tools and features. In terms of student collaboration, the three that are most significant are blogs, journals and wikis. Blogs allow students to share their personal thoughts with their classmates and gives them their own voice in the class. Journals, on the other hand, are designed to be a private communication between an instructor and a student. Finally, wikis are collaborative documents that allow students to edit each other’s work.

- Assignments and Rubrics: Faculty now have the ability to attached rubrics to their assignments, making grading more transparent to the students and much simpler for the instructor. Additionally, assignments are the new and improved way of accepting documents from students.

For more information on the presentation, please feel free to reach out to CEIT (cent@bu.edu) or the presenter, Kacie Cleary (kmcleary@bu.edu).

Student-created blogs

Amod Lele — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 20:29:05 +0000

In his course on investments, management professor Zvi Bodie uses student-created blogs. Students are grouped into teams, with each team creating a blog of its own. The blogs allow students to report quickly on current events in the world of finance, which the course teaches them to analyze. Student teams have made their blogs publicly available and some of them can be viewed here and here.

Prof. Bodie’s students use Google’s free blogging software, Blogger (which provides URLs in the blogspot.com domain). Similar (BU-supported) student blog functions will be available in the new Blackboard Learn system (aka Blackboard 9.1), available now to faculty wishing to use it in Spring 2012 courses.