Two New Tutorials for Your Students

Do you use a WordPress blog in your courses? If you do, and are inviting students to post with the role of ‘author,’ then the two tutorials below may help your student create and edit their posts. To view the tutorials visit the Tutorial page on the Tips for Student Success blog.

	Create Posts in WordPress This short tutorial will show you how to quickly create posts on a WordPress blog when you are granted access as an author. September 2013. Duration: 15-20 minutes.
	Edit Your Posts in WordPress This short tutorial will show you how to quickly edit your posts on a WordPress blog when you are granted access as an author. September 2013. Duration: 10-15 minutes.

We Have a Blog For Your Students Too!

Don’t let your students miss out on great posted tips and tutorials! Let them know about the Tips for Student Success blog. Check out the latest post to see how easy it is to sign up and forward the link to your students! (Of course you’re welcome to sign up too!)

We’ll have two new tutorials posted this week – Creating Posts in WordPress and Editing Your Posts in WordPress. On the list for upcoming posts and tutorials are:

• Uploading and Inserting Media in WordPress
• Pop-up Blockers
• Graphing with Excel
• Citations and References

Do you have a need for a student tutorial? If we can’t find one that’s already developed, we may be able to create it for you. Let us know!

How to Subscribe to Comments

When you leave a comment on a WordPress.com blog, you can choose to automatically receive email updates about other comments on that specific post by checking the ‘Notify me of follow-up comments via email’ checkbox that appears in the comment form.

If you did not leave a comment but would like to be notified when comments are posted to the Faculty Learning Corner, view the short demo below to find out how to change your settings!

iTeach Juneau 2013 a Success

We recently completed a very productive iTeach 2013 in Juneau. Twelve faculty participated. You can read some of our posts by searching Twitter with the hashtag: #iteachak.

Guest presenter from UAF, Heidi Olson

Some of the tools that were explored and enjoyed included:

• Adobe Presenter
• Voki
• Pixton
• Jing
• Google Apps for Educators
• Creating movies with YouTube
• Elluminate Live

We had great discussions around choosing teaching strategies and tools that best help students meet their learning objectives while at the same time are engaging and fun both for content creation and content viewing. We also had good dialogues about the importance of writing attainable goals and objectives and aligning them to assessments and activities.

It was an intense week and the iTeach staff thank all the faculty attendees for their participation. As always, we learned lots from our faculty participants, and we hope our faculty had a challenging and productive time. Next, we’re gearing up for iTeach Sitka!

Does Social Media Make You (and Your Students) More Self-Aware?

There is an interesting post What is a Learning Technologist (part 9): Ignorance is bliss? which makes a good argument for social media. The author of this blog post, David Hopkins states that regardless of whether anyone comments on his blog, regardless of whether anyone even reads the blog, just by publishing, by contributing to Twitter or Google+ or LinkedIn or Facebook, or some form of public platform you are thinking and learning more than if you operate in a vacuum, all alone. He quotes Semple, 2011, from “Organizations Don’t Tweet, People Do: a Manager’s Guide to the Social Web” stating:

“There is something about the process of blogging that makes you more self-aware. You become more thoughtful about yourself and your place in the world. In the reactions of others to your writing you get a different perspective, possibly for the first time, on how others see you.”

I think David is right. When we share out with our colleagues and when our colleagues respond with comments or links or photos, we’re engaged thinkers. We begin to establish our personal learning environment, our connections to others that help shape our thinking, revise our opinions, and shape our ideas.

I’d love to hear from you– what are the tools in your personal learning environment that make you a better learner, that engage you, and make you question and think, or as David puts it, more “self-aware”?

Are Blogs Relevant in Higher Education in 2013?

Recently TLTR (both Sitka and regional) have discussed blogs. While the conversation centered specifically on the rationale for using a blog hosted external to the university’s course management system (like this WordPress blog) instead of a university supported tool (like the blog inside of Blackboard), we felt this might be a good time to talk about blogs in general. Why they might be used, how they differ from discussion boards, and just some pros and cons of using a blog inside of Blackboard or a blog external to your course.  At the conclusion of this post, we’d love you to comment, tell us your experience with blogs, positive or negative. Share with us what you like about blogs and how you are using them in your classes.

How Do They Differ from Discussion Boards?
First, let’s be clear, a blog can be used in many, many different ways. However, typically a blog is used by a person or group to publish ideas or information and solicit comments. In other words 1 post, many comments. Most blogs have 2 or 3 columns. The first often column contains content and comments; the second may have a list of recent posts and categories; finally, the last column may have a word cloud to help you find a topic quickly and a search bar. Of course this varies widely, as you choose the template and create the look and feel of your blog.

In contrast, the usual threaded discussion has posts that may have equal ranking from many people, and comments can generate their own small discussions. Unlike a blog which is quite chronological in nature, our Blackboard discussion boards, for example, can be organized by person, by topic, by date etc.

So if discussion boards are so flexible, why would we want to blog?