Blogs are an excellent way to get your students talking to each other and you about their studies. If you have posts where you are asking your students questions or if you are requiring them to create their own posts you may require them to submit by a certain deadline (or to comment on fellow […]
Author: Janene McMahan
Top 10 Blogs for Educators
https://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/2012/03/top-10-technology-blogs-for-education.html lists the top ten blogs for education. Many of the folk who read my blog (Design Team members) will be familiar with all ten of these blogs. However, this post is for the folk who stumble across my blog. If you’re looking for good ideas, sometimes the best thing I can do is point […]
More on passive voice
I’ve often been a naysayer. I choose to excise passive in almost every case. However, it could be because I’ve been led down the wrong path. Alas! https://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497 I’ve known for years that I need to spruce up my grammar. I’ve held stubbornly to the concept that passive is harder to read. There is much […]
Mendeley and more
At the Center for Distance Education, we have a reading group. We use Mendeley (https://www.mendeley.com) to corral materials. Even the proudest designer or highest ranking techie needs a how-to. These are my notes because I was so tech-whelmed last week, I did not get into Mendeley to tell staff what I would be covering today. […]
A collection of all good things
30+ Open Wikis every educator should know about https://edudemic.com/2011/12/open-wikis/ : I spend 10-20 minutes each morning with Zite on my iPad. One of the topics I have collected via RSS feeds is on education. Open resources Huge list of links to open resources for educators. It must be a list of links kind of day. […]
Images and Blackboard
These materials came from a session I performed on 12/2 for the IAC faculty. Faculty Development Friday Sessions SUMMARY We covered the differences between GIF, JPEG and PNG. We discussed what each type was best used for. GIF: graphic, chart, line drawing, few colors and JPEG (JPG): photographs We discussed that a PNG can be […]
Light reading
https://www.npr.org/2011/02/09/133310978/in-college-a-lack-of-rigor-leaves-students-adrift Or light listening… Last week I enjoyed listening to NPR on my laptop, vs light music. What’s the photo got to do with the book? Nothing really. Unless you count a desolate, alone feeling that the first two paragraphs bring to mind. Let’s not fail our youth. Let’s not fail our country.
Finding your voice
As a teacher or an instructor it is important to know your audience and know yourself. As a new employee it can be a little more difficult to ‘find your voice.’ I’d argue that Toastmasters is an excellent resource for any employee (or person) to become a better speaker, a better listener, to practice how […]
On task (not project management)
Being asked to see what the individuals who make up the Design group are using to track projects or tasks is a great introduction to the team. Using SurveyMonkey allows for a quick Q&A. I will enhance/follow-up with one-on-one discussions. I’ll be intermixing survey results and on-on-one sessions to determine what the team might need […]
Passive text
Did you know that passive text reduces the readability of your message? If you find yourself using passive text, and you don’t have a proofreader to help you out (few of us do) you can use MS Word to measure these elements. Find out more: https://corporategeek.info/Measure-Readability-Documents-Emails While I was reading this, readability became the real […]
Tumblr – microblogging
While the majority of my days have been wrapping my mind around CDE and how we ‘do’ things here, I’ve been delighted to learn new tools. On day 2, I set up a Tumblr account (Alaskaknits) namely because I saw Tumblr listed in an online course Christen (hi Christen) teaches.
day 7: tools
Prepping for iTeach I came across beautifully illustrated and narrated examples of embedding video in Skip Via’s ED 329. I especially like the fact that he’s showing how to embed a VoiceThread project (in addition to YouTube) for GoogleSites and Blackboard. Skip Via’s explanation is clear; his use of images very supportive of learning the […]
retreat!
Day 4: A full day retreat held in downtown Fairbanks with my new team members = energizing, educating. So far the day has been amazing. I intend to go and look up and try out Evernote, Relevanssi, Shelfari. The photo taking and photo sharing was awesome!
day 3
Certainly I will not have day 3, day 17, day 293… I’d have to write a script for that. Instead you’ll see a, 2, finally–but only if I’m feeling disjointed. What’s a brand new designer to do? link checking find all the resources she will need to do her job begin collecting work Cross-polinate? Absolutely. […]