RESOURCES FOR TEACHING IN THE AGE OF THE INTERNET Alark Joshi

Course Website  Course Website – an extremely helpful resource!  Classesv2 is amazing  Not the norm at most schools  Blackboard is not as easy to use  Develop and maintain your own course website  Not as hard as you think  Options to Regularly back up website  Complete control of the content

Course website  PBWorks – An online wiki-based resource to easily design and manage a course  Widely used in a large number of high schools and universities – Hosts 300,000 educational workspaces  Wiki-based design  Ensures Backup and ‘audit’ trail  Giving students write access can enrich the overall experience as they may contribute  Control the access level of your students for the entire workspace – Reader, Writer, Editor, Administrator (TA’s can have rights that students don’t)

Wiki-based Course Website  Wiki-based course webpage allows students to comment on required reading  Example course at UC Berkeley: sp10/wiki/index.php/Discussion_of_Good_and_Bad_Visualiz ations

Course Website  Demo PBWorks.com –  Plugins to add multimedia content such as images, videos, photo slideshows, and more!

Posting Slides online  Students can refer to slides after class  Slideshare – Students do not need to download the slides We don’t have to worry about others editing your files  PBWorks allows linking in Powerpoint slideshows on Slideshare

Newsgroups for class  Channel for communication amongst students, TA’s and instructors – Very useful for big courses  Yahoo Groups  Google Groups

Alternatives  Google Sites:  Lacks robustness of PBworks for educational purposes  Weebly:  Easy to setup  Fine-tuned for personal/commercial website development  Lacks educational focus

Student Feedback  If you are anything like me, you want feedback from your students  Ideally after every class  Anonymous feedback allows students to communicate what works/doesn’t work  Feedback about which group activities were found to be effective  Instructor’s teaching style/accent/preparation

Online Surveys  SurveyMonkey  Set up an online survey within minutes  Free version allows only 10 questions  Qualtrics  An excellent online source to setup a survey of any kind  Free for Yale students/faculty  Unlimited questions and configurable answers

Scheduling Optional Sessions  Scheduling optional sessions can be a pain  Large number of s going back and forth  Doodle –  When Is Good -

Screenshot for Doodle poll

Laptops in the Classroom  Electronic Devices can be a major distraction  Laptops can be used constructively  Class Website can be updated before class to include links to case studies, papers, processed data for analysis  Direct students in class to links and design group activities around it  Data analysis  Research and present results to the class

In-Class Activities  Discipline-Specific Sites  Chemistry, History, Physics and so on  Data Analysis Tasks  IBM Many Eyes – Upload data and analyze it   Demo Examples – ns/obama-state-of-the-union ns/geographically-visualizing-the-aid

Collaborative Editing  For collaboratively editing documents  Syllabus with a co-Instructor, Teaching Assistants  Creating Handouts, Quizzes or Exams  Research Papers  Etherpad –  Google Docs -

Blogs to Engage Students  Have students create their own blog  Students post their weekly reading response to their own blog  Students in the Data Visualization class designed their own blog and regularly post to their blog  Allows other students to keep up with the field and read each others point of view  Learn from each other and enrich material

Online Quiz/Tests  ClassMarker -  Easy to use quiz maker that marks your tests and quizzes for you.  ProProfs –  Easy to setup Polls, Flash Cards, Forums etc.

Academic Social Network  Create your own customized social network for the class  Ning –  Course blog  Discussion board  Events – Exams, Quiz, Invited Speaker talk  Instant messaging (Chat)  Post Photos/Videos  Demo of a sample social network for this class   Classroom

Summary  Plethora of resources for the modern teacher  Great ways to  get feedback  keep the students involved in the class material  help students with assignments  Innovative uses of technology can turn it into a boon for your course!  Text-messaging still a curse though!!