1. RESOURCES FOR TEACHING IN THE AGE OF THE INTERNET Alark Joshi

2. 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

3. 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)

4. Wiki-based Course Website  Wiki-based course webpage allows students to comment on required reading  Example course at UC Berkeley: http://vis.berkeley.edu/courses/cs294-10- sp10/wiki/index.php/Discussion_of_Good_and_Bad_Visualiz ations

5. Course Website  Demo PBWorks.com – http://coep-cg09.pbworks.com  Plugins to add multimedia content such as images, videos, photo slideshows, and more!

6. Posting Slides online  Students can refer to slides after class  Slideshare – http://slideshare.net 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

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

8. Alternatives  Google Sites: http://sites.google.com/  Lacks robustness of PBworks for educational purposes  Weebly: http://www.weebly.com  Easy to setup  Fine-tuned for personal/commercial website development  Lacks educational focus

9. 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

10. 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

11. Scheduling Optional Sessions  Scheduling optional sessions can be a pain  Large number of emails going back and forth  Doodle – http://www.doodle.com  When Is Good - www.whenisgood.net

12. Screenshot for Doodle poll

13. 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

14. In-Class Activities  Discipline-Specific Sites  Chemistry, History, Physics and so on  Data Analysis Tasks  IBM Many Eyes – Upload data and analyze it  http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/  Demo Examples – http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizatio ns/obama-state-of-the-union-2010 http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizatio ns/geographically-visualizing-the-aid

15. Collaborative Editing  For collaboratively editing documents  Syllabus with a co-Instructor, Teaching Assistants  Creating Handouts, Quizzes or Exams  Research Papers  Etherpad – http://www.etherpad.com  Google Docs - http://docs.google.com

16. 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

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

18. Academic Social Network  Create your own customized social network for the class  Ning – http://www.ning.com  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  http://futuresciencefaculty.ning.com/  Classroom 2.0 - http://www.classroom20.com

19. 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!!