DIY

VoiceThread is a user-friendly way to share power point presentations, videos, photos, and other media. Students and professors can record video or audio responses, draw on the media to highlight certain points, and comment in text form. This site is useful for discussion outside of the classroom, allowing students to focus on the topic at hand and reflect in a collaborative way.

Want to Learn More?
Read how VoiceThread describes its capabilities.

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Capabilities

Through VoiceThread...

Professors can:

• Upload power points
• Upload question slides for comment
• Comment on students’ writing in video, text, and visual formats

Students can:

MediaThread, a project created by the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning through the Digital Bridges Initiative is a service that allows you to blend your thoughts with multimedia sources and share them with others. MediaThread supports video, images, metadata, and many content websites listed below. Most compatible with Firefox, MediaThread is currently being used by Columbia, MIT, Wellesley, Dartmouth, The American University in Cairo, and many other institutions of higher education.

Who can do what with MediaThread? Through MediaThread...

In their collection of teaching strategies for higher education, Faculty Focus includes an article suggesting strategies to increase the efficiency of grading. Specifically, they address how to improve the efficiency of computerized (as opposed to analog, pen-and-paper) grading using what the article calls a “comment archive.” The article discusses strategies for taking advantage of the options built into your basic word processor to increase the speed and ease of your grading without sacrificing the quality of your comments. The most user friendly and simple option involves building your frequently used comments into the AutoCorrect feature of, for example, Microsoft Word. Then, instead of typing and retyping a comment each time you use it, simply use the shortcut you designated. The article includes step-by-step instructions and a video tutorial.

To start creating collections on OER Commons, you first need to register an account. Commons has the quickest registration process I’ve encountered – it doesn’t require any institutional affiliation or specialty information. Just fill in name, email, and password and wait for your activation email. Once logged in, go straight to the “My OER” link, which is part of the sticky box at the top of the page.

The page which opens tells you, essentially, that you have no saved resources of any kind. The category names, currently all showing as zero are links which take you to the same categories as the sidebar: saved items, submitted items, evaluated items, authored items, and remixed items. You will also see the option to “Add Resource” on the same page.

For now, skip past these options to and scroll down to the bottom of the left-hand sidebar. The very last item on the list says “My Collections” and below it you will see the option to “create collection.” Select this option and the entry field will immediately change to ask you for a Collection title. For our trial purposes, we’ll create a collection called “U.S. History.”

Many of our recent posts have focused on how to find and curate resources available in OER repositories that have been created by other users and institutions. However, sometimes you already have the material you need -- either you’ve created born-digital or digital-ready content, or you have traditional content you want to turn into a blended resource. In either case, your content needs a host, particularly if you want that material to be shared with other potential users. This post will compare the options to create and host content from various repositories and suggest which sites are best suited to various types of material. While there are any number of ways to create and share your educational content online, we will tackle them a few at a time. This post will start by comparing three - Connexions, MERLOT, and Molecular Workbench.

The wealth of available educational resources can be overwhelming and difficult to navigate. Sites which currate these resources all have some built-in mechanism for sorting -- by subject matter, level of difficulty, source, etc. However, these pre-packaged collections are no replacement for currating your own prefered resources and materials into sets that correspond to your interests and courses. This series of posts will provide tutorials on how to create your own collections from sites which offer currated resource lists. Collections in HippoCampus are called "Playlists," which reflects the extremely multi-media focus of HippoCampus's materials. 

Creating a collection of resources on HippoCampus, as on most sites, requires you to create an account. Because HippoCampus is, in part, targeting individual learners, the sign-up process is quick and not very demanding. As soon as your account is saved, you’re ready to start creating a collection, which HippoCampus refers to as a “Playlist.” Once you create an account, you will find yourself as your own HippoCampus homepage. This page doesn’t look much different from the public homepage, though it does provide you with a link you can use to link directly to your account page from, for example, a course page. For our test playlist, we will make a playlist for an introductory level creative writing class.

The wealth of available educational resources can be overwhelming and difficult to navigate. Sites which currate these resources all have some built-in mechanism for sorting -- by subject matter, level of difficulty, source, etc. However, these pre-packaged collections are no replacement for currating your own prefered resources and materials into sets that correspond to your interests and courses. This series of posts will provide tutorials on how to create your own collections from sites which offer currated resource lists. While collections in MERLOT are formatted to work as a repository of related links, collections in Connexions are intended to cohere into something like a textbook – the modules are grouped together in a defined order, and can even be exported to PDFs that can be read through much like a traditional textbook would be. Much like an ebook, when viewed online the pages are arranged sequentially with a table of contents.

In order to create collections, you first need to register an account. The account is free and the information required to register is minimal, though you do need a valid email address since the account is useless until you activate it through their activation email and create a password. Once you create an account, you will find yourself at MyCNX Home, where one of the options listed under “Create and edit content” is “Create a new collection.”

The wealth of available educational resources can be overwhelming and difficult to navigate. Sites which currate these resources all have some built-in mechanism for sorting -- by subject matter, level of difficulty, source, etc. However, these pre-packaged collections are no replacement for currating your own prefered resources and materials into sets that correspond to your interests and courses. This series of posts will provide tutorials on how to create your own collections from sites which offer currated resource lists. This post will focus on MERLOT.

If you would like to create your own interactive materials, Moodle offers several advantages. In addition to being relatively easy to use, even without coding ability, Moodle's extensive wiki "MoodleDocs" is full of instructions, explanations, and best practice suggestions.

Related resources:
Creating Quizzes on Moodle
Creating Flashcards on Moodle
Moodle Scheduler

Math is a difficult subject to learn without guidance, and those who attempt to learn new mathematical concepts or reinforce what they learned in the classroom are often left to struggle. Complete modules like Washington State University Math Lessons and Calculus on the Web provide tutorials which help teach and practice math tutorials to both new learners and those wishing to refresh their knowledge.

Resources covered:
Washington State University Math Lessons
Calculus on the Web (COW)

Washington State University Math Lessons are a series of applied math tutorials. While the scope of the tutorials is somewhat limited, they address some interesting applied topics such as the math behind voting, fair division of assets, and understanding graphs with regard to supply and demand issues. The site also provides snippets about the history of math and an important female mathematician.