New ITG workshops

For Summer and Fall semesters, the following new workshops are offered:

E-Portfolio, Teaching and Student Development
Emerson faculty is currently testing a e -portfolio tool, Digication. Come see how you can use this tool for showcasing and assessing student coursework and for coaching students with setting up a portfolio for their professional development.

Visual Imagery: Editing & Presenting
Learn how to use profession tools to edit and display images used for your teaching. We will show you the basics of Photoshop, and introduce you to the newest version of PowerPoint.

RSS Feeds
Discover how RSS feeds can bring dynamic content into course sites and encourage classroom discussion. In this session, we’ll look at the basics of RSS feeds through an education lens and examine easy techniques for integrating RSS into classes.

Digication

Digication (http://emerson.digication.com/) is currently being evaluated as a new e-portfolio management and an assessment tool. Already, 19 faculty members and 30 students are participating in this pilot program. We have e-Portfolios for Writing and Literature courses, Lighting Design, Performing Arts and Journalism courses. Faculty members, Magda Romanska, Scott Pinkney, Mirta Tocci, Elizabeth Parfitt, Janet Kolodzy are planning to use Digication as a component for their courses.

It's exciting to see how the Emerson community molds e-Portfolios for their own purposes. All Digication users can choose how to share their work; with their classmates, teachers, their school, or the World Wide Web. Thus, allowing users to connect communicate and collaborate with one another, creating a high impact on teaching and learning.

Faculty feedback is an important component for assessing this tool, and making purchasing decisions by end of Fall ’08 semester. If you are interested in being part of this exciting pilot-study please contact the Instructional Technology Group for a demonstration, and learn how Digication can be useful for your class/course. They will work with you to create, unique templates suited to your course/class, and provide any necessary technical support.

Tracking Student Responses and Participation using i-Clickers

In the Spring ’08 semester, the Instructional Technology Group tested i-Clickers (www.iclicker.com) on campus with the help of four faculty members: Wyatt Oswald, Michele Johnson, Paula Child and Carole Simpson.

Continue reading "Tracking Student Responses and Participation using i-Clickers" »

A Simple Way to Keep Course Sections Straight

Ever teach multiple sections of the same course? It's a confusing process -- all those students, all those assignments, all those different dates and times.

Krista Wilkinson, associate professor in the Communication Sciences and Disorders department, has devised a simple way to keep her sections straight: she color codes them within WebCT. Her "A" section features a yellow background while "B" is marked by light purple.

Here's how you can edit the background colors for your own courses:

1. Log in through webcms.emerson.edu
2. Select your course. Click the Build tab at the top of the browser.
3. Click the Page Options button on the right side of the screen. Select Customize Page Display.
4. Scroll down and look for the Background Color area. Click the Select Color button. A color palette will appear. Click a color and then click the Select button.
5. Click the Apply button. WebCT will reload your course home page with the selected color.

Note: This process changes the background color on your course home page. It does not change the color on additional pages.

Marxism Course Puts Theory into Practice

Visual Media Arts professor Jayson Baker is putting Marxism to the test in VM400: Marxist Media Criticism. He's basing 20 percent of each student's grade on the class' overall average.

"Marxism relies -- in theory -- on the collective needs over the individual needs," Baker says. "When I started thinking about what I wanted students to do in this class, I realized that if my assessment is individualistic, I'm not really modeling anything."

This fall represents the first time Baker will try this technique, so he's curious to see how it plays out. Students could seize the opportunity to collectively develop a unique learning process, Baker notes, or they could artificially manipulate the class average.

"They could all collude and give each other As in the course," Baker says. "But does that give them a rich and rewarding learning experience?"

Baker hopes transparency and peer evaluation will encourage students to deliver their best work. All papers and assignments will be posted through the course's WebCT discussion board, making every piece of work visible to every student in the course. "I want everyone in class to know what everyone is thinking at all times," Baker says.

Students will also be able to monitor the class average through WebCT. Baker plans on updating it after each assignment so students will have a clear sense of how they -- and the collective -- are progressing.

Class Management Tips

For important deadlines, assignments, and to assist with student time management, Janet Kolodzy of Journalism uses the calendar tool in WebCT, which augments her syllabus by providing a visual depiction of calendar weeks and months.

Taking advantage of rich online resources while encouraging student engagement, Journalism’s Melinda Robins designates a page in her WebCT course to post links to student-recommended websites.

Faculty Use Audio and Video to Enhance Teaching

Dan Kempler of Communication Sciences and Disorders uses streaming video for Voice Disorders to demonstrate the diagnoses of different types of voice disorders in class. Students then reference the video clips as study aids for examinations.

OPC’s Phil Glenn uses audio files in Conflict and Dispute Resolution. He has digitized recordings of dialogues and posts them as MP3 files alongside transcripts of the dialogue formatted as PDFs, allowing students to listen while they study the dialogues in written form.

WLP’s Flora Gonzalez uses WebCT in Politics, Film and Literature in Latin America to provide a visual connection among her course materials, emphasizing the interdisciplinary nature of her course. She weaves video clips from films essential to the course subject with Library e-reserves and specific discussion threads for each scene.

Discussion Boards Connect Faculty and Students

For his History of Media Arts class, David Kociemba asks students to submit their assigned papers on the discussion board for peer evaluation. He finds it rewards students who do exemplary work by allowing them a chance to showcase their work to the class. He also finds it helpful for students who do not excel at writing by providing model papers for them to examine before posting their own. It also provides a venue for students to connect one-on-one with a common purpose. Students learn something new by doing peer evaluations. “Teaching something is an excellent way to learn,” says Kociemba.

Former Emerson faculty member Robert MacDougall often printed out student posts (dubbed TOWS -- Thoughts of the Week) from his online discussion boards and brought them to class to weave into, or sometimes prompt, classroom sessions.

Cara Crandall implements what she calls Quotation Central. She posts a quotation from a text the class is reading, and students must respond to texts 10 times during the semester. Out of 14 weeks, they are responsible for only 10 postings; they can choose to post when they want. Students debate texts online, and she monitors the site so she can reference their comments during class.