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Today’s Faculty Focus article is on using mind maps to get students to engage with the course material. While the author recommends using a large sheet of a paper, I would ask faculty to consider pointing their students to SpiderScribe.net. Earlier this year I wrote about SpiderScribe. (See this blog post.) It has a very short learning curve, and with the ability to include text, images, URLs, and documents, the maps that students create could be very powerful study aids. Using the share feature, students could work in pairs or groups to create the maps. No need to print them off. Students can add theirRead More →

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“Ellen Finkelstein invites you to join this free webinar series to learn how to eliminate Death by PowerPoint and make your presentations come to life. Listen to guest experts share their best techniques and answer your questions!” There will be seven sessions on Wednesdays at 11am PT/2pm ET beginning tomorrow, September 6, 2011 and running through October 26th (no session on September 21st). Visit the PowerPoint blog to see the list of speakers.  Or visit the OutstandingPresentationsWorkshops.com website. Register here. Hope to see you there!Read More →

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Of all the tech tools I’ve written about, there’s one that garners the most praise from my readers: YouCanBook.Me. There are three faculty members on my campus that, whenever I see them, mention how much they love it. Last month I was at the American Psychological Association Convention, and one of the attendees was a reader of this blog. She told me how great she though this tool was, and that several faculty on her campus concurred. What makes it so great? It automates a task that otherwise requires several emails and a lot of time. Without YouCanBook.Me: Student: I’d like to make an appointmentRead More →

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Do you play Jeopardy in class as a test review? Jeopardy Labs makes it easy to create a web-based Jeopardy game. Here is one created for the “Biological Bases of Behavior” chapter in an Advanced Placement Psych class. In the opening screen, decide how many teams will be playing. You can choose up to 12. Click “Start” to bring up the board. Clicking “100” under “The Neuron” produces this question. Students buzz in by whatever method you’d like. After the team responds, click “Correct Response” to show the correct answer. At the bottom of the screen, click +/- to add/subtract points to the responding team’sRead More →

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New blog feature: Quick Tech Tips (QTT). These will be short and sweet. Think of them as a technological amuse bouche. Windows users: To minimize all of your windows, press the windows key on your keyboard and simultaneously press M. Windows keyRead More →

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[Update: See a more recent post on new features.] This is the tool I’ve been waiting for. Socrative turns your students’ smartphones into a powerful student response system. It’s like PollEverywhere (see this earlier post), but with greater flexibility and ease-of-use, the ability to attach student names to electronic quizzes, and free – even when you have more than 30 students. This promises to be a real challenge to the makers of student response systems. You and your students have options for accessing Socrative. Access it via the website using a computer or any web-enabled mobile device. For the mobile devices, you can either justRead More →

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TitanPad allows you to quickly collaborate. Create a public pad, copy the URL, and email it to your collaborators. They follow the link, then just start typing in the pad. In the top right corner, new visitors are assigned a color and are named “unnamed”. Clicking in the “unnamed” box will allow them to enter their name. Attached a name to a color allows you and your collaborators to see who added what. If others are logged in at the same time as you, you’ll see their changes as they type. Changes are automatically saved. With the chat window, text will stay there even whenRead More →

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[Update 12/15/2012 : Effective January 2013, appointment slots will no longer be an option.  Try YouCanBook.Me instead.] Google Calendar now lets you let others schedule appointments in your calendar. With YouCanBook.Me, any open time can be scheduled. With Google Calendar’s new feature, you decide which times are open to scheduling. In Google Calendar, click on an open time slot like you normally do to add a new event. Click on “Appointment slots”. Call it what you’d like, say, “Office Hours”, then I selected “Offer as slots of 30 minutes.” Change the time to another amount if you’d like, such as 15 minutes. That’s it. EditRead More →

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There’s a lot to be said for a good old-fashioned email list. One address emails a bunch of people. Fiesta.cc makes it easy to create an email list and makes it easy to manage it. I use an email list for each of my classes. I live inside of my email, so it’s easy for me to send an email to all the students in a class, and easy for them to respond. While most course management systems have the same functionality, you have to log into it to send an email. The email list software I have been using is hosted by my college,Read More →