Educational Technology Blog » Genres and Styles

Webinars on audience response systems

Amod Lele — Thu, 09 May 2013 20:21:19 +0000

Want to learn more about using audience response systems in your classes – whether with traditional clickers or via mobile devices? Turning Technologies invites BU faculty and staff to a series of webinars from May 21st to 23rd, demonstrating several different aspects of these technologies. They have provided a flyer providing details on the webinars.

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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.

Using Facebook productively in class: Sophie Godley

Amod Lele — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 14:25:01 +0000

Sophie Godley often begins the semester in her community-health class by setting ground rules, including expectations for electronic media. She gently teases students that perhaps they can spare an hour or two away from communicating with others, with particular reference to Facebook, and instead focus on themselves and their learning. During one of these conversations, it struck her that Facebook also had potential as a positive learning resource. Prof. Godley’s students often emailed her links to articles relevant to the current class’s material, and she thought that Facebook offered an easy way for them to share those articles with each other directly.

In fall 2012, she created Facebook pages for her classes at both undergraduate and graduate levels, which she invited students to “like”. She made it clear that students did not have to be her Facebook “friend”, and that participation in the page was voluntary. She has now started three different pages for the three classes she teaches, and has reached 462 students. In addition to generating student content and discussion, past and present students can interact on the page. Prof. Godley can post jobs and internships, and include both current and former students. She can also ask questions about articles and generate back-and-forth in the comments. She has also found it “relatively painless” to manage the Facebook pages, compared to many other administrative tasks of teaching.

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.

NVivo qualitative data analysis software available campuswide

Amod Lele — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 14:57:26 +0000

Good news for social scientists: NVivo, the software package for qualitative and mixed-methods social-scientific research, is now available free of charge to all BU faculty, staff and students. NVivo allows you to take verbal interview data and use your computer’s power to analyze it for subtle trends and patterns. You can now go to the NVivo page on TechWeb and download the software to your computer. The page also provides links to the NVivo company’s supporting documentation.

For the moment, NVivo is only available for Windows. The company has promised a Mac version for fall 2013. In the meantime, NVivo will run on a Mac in virtual Windows emulation software like Boot Camp, Parallels Desktop, or VMware Fusion.

You should feel welcome to use NVivo in your classes. However, if you wish to use NVivo in a class with more than a handful of students, we request that you contact us at the Help Center so that we can add their additional licences without interruptions in availability.

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!

Flipped talk on flipped classrooms

Amod Lele — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 22:01:32 +0000

This Wednesday, BU engineering professor Lorena Barba will give a Teaching Talk on the topic of the “flipped” classroom, in which course content (such as lectures) is delivered online in order to free up class time for interactive participation. Practising what she preaches, Prof. Barba will be flipping the talk itself. She is asking attenders to view an interactive online presentation before they come to the talk. As a tool, Prof. Barba uses the free TED-Ed platform, which she also uses in her classes (see an example here).

Prof. Barba has written a longer piece in defence of the flipped classroom, with many links, available here.

Enhance and save time on your grading with Turnitin features

Amod Lele — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 20:13:13 +0000

At his Teaching Tech Talk today, Turnitin representative Shawn Lowney demonstrated some features of the Turnitin software that many users may be unaware of. Most faculty know Turnitin for its OriginalityCheck plagiarism detection function, and Lowney briefly addressed how it can perform this function well. But he also addressed other sides of Turnitin that may be less familiar.

Turnitin’s GradeMark portion contains many functions to make grading easier. Its QuickMark system allows you to save time on grading papers by dragging and dropping your most frequently used comments directly onto the paper. You can also add audio comments to convey the tone of your comments. Turnitin is integrated with Blackboard, so grades can be passed easily between the two systems.

Turnitin also includes PeerMark software to make student peer commenting easier by anonymizing their reviews. PeerMark is linked closely with OriginalityCheck and GradeMark so that you can move between the three kinds of reports easily and get a comprehensive view of a student’s work.

BU offers Turnitin via the Center for Excellence and Innovation in Teaching; these features are available to all BU faculty now. We do not yet have a structure in place for offering technical support to faculty, but hope to have one established soon.

Google Apps available for educational use

Amod Lele — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 15:18:15 +0000

BU has made the core set of Google Apps available to faculty and students for classroom use. Among the apps with the most educational promise are: Google Drive (formerly Google Docs), which allows easy commenting on student papers and collaboration work among students; Google Forms, which provides a quick way to solicit and tabulate student feedback; and Appointment Slots, an easy way to schedule office hours with students. All BU students have their email accounts through Google, so they are all able to use any of these tools without having to sign up for any additional services.

Because BU has a service agreement with Google, comments and grades on student papers can be provided in BU Google Apps without violating FERPA policy. (Commenting on student work through unsupported third-party services, like Dropbox, is usually illegal under FERPA.) To make sure you stay within FERPA guidelines, we highly recommend that you create a BU Google account to use Google Apps for educational purposes (rather than a personal Google/Gmail account). To create one, go to our account creation page and follow the instructions. You can log into this account by entering your BU email address as a username and not entering a password; Google will redirect you to the regular BU Kerberos login screen.

When you’re logged into a Google Account, you can access Google Drive via the Drive button in the black toolbar at the top of the screen. From Google Drive, the “Create” button will allow you to create forms. To use Appointment Slots, follow the instructions here: go to Google Calendar in your BU account, click on an empty space and click on Appointment Slots.

Teaching Talks and Teaching Tech Talks scheduled for Spring 2013

Amod Lele — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 21:51:47 +0000

CEIT has now posted its list of Teaching Talks and Teaching Tech Talks scheduled throughout the Spring 2013 semester. The talks are scheduled on various dates and times to make it possible for faculty to explore some talks whatever their schedule. Some scheduled talks with an emphasis on new technologies include:

Databases for non-majors (Jan. 10)
The top 5 things faculty need to know about Blackboard Learn (Jan. 10)
Read & Write Gold (Feb. 6)
Flipped classroom and Echo360 (Feb. 13)
Collaboration tools in Blackboard Learn (Feb. 20)
iPad applications in the classroom (Feb. 25)
Google Apps in your classroom (Feb. 25)
Increasing instructional interactivity with clickers (Mar. 19)
Virtual student exchanges (Apr. 3)
High-tech cheating (Apr. 3)
How to use ePortfolios (Apr. 5)
Making grading easier and more transparent with rubrics in Blackboard Learn (Apr. 11)
Dimensions of online courses and student perceptions (Apr. 17)

The CEIT site has a complete list of talks. If you’re interested, please sign up and reserve a space!