Tag: tools

Learning Design Summer Camp Breakout Session: Nearpod

An interesting take on interactive presentations that appear to be best suited for resident use. There are affordances for online delivery and faculty-learning design office support models. Unfortunately, the feature set really depends upon a paid license.

  • Website or app available
  • Allows for sharing presentations, even if the instructor doesn’t want to control the presentation
  • Lessons can be packaged and self-paced for online use
  • You can give students a code to enter the lesson, it is a way to track participation
  • You can use PowerPoint to build your presentations
  • Keeps metrics on if people drop out
  • Features Polleverywhere-like polling
  • Is there a way to keep notes within Nearpod?
  • There is a free and paid version available – actually there are four levels; Gold is limited to 50 students, Institutional levels allow for large 100+ students
  • There is a collaboration board feature as well – other features: quiz, draw it, FITB, memory test
  • How would we support Nearpods in our WC Online Delivery Course format; Cheryl doesn’t know, it’s not clear if a designer can create a Nearpod and share it with an instructor for use in their live course section

Learning Design Summer Camp Breakout Session: Piazza

Glenn Johnson, Tracey, Bruce

Will require some initial testing to see if we can access it outside of a live section. It seems like it will be possible. While links from within the Modules view are possible, those links point to the Piazza “home” page view and not a particular thread. It looks easy enough, but are our faculty ready and interested? Only time will tell. The tool does look promising.

  • Integrated into Canvas
  • Very easy setup
  • Piazza is half-way between a discussion forum and a ticket
  • There are different status indicators that help instructors to identify where they need to put their attention
  • Canvas discussions mark posts/comments as read even though you may not have read through a post, people like to scan through posts before reading through them
  • Piazza provides a timeline to show the history of a conversation
  • Demo of LaTeX: allows for coding equations into the WISYWIG, there is also a button-based interface if people do not know how to code in LaTeX
  • Students can also cut-and-paste code into the text editor to share their work in Piazza
  • Images are also easy to add
  • Piazza is very easy-to-use and doesn’t require training, it just works
  • This can be setup as a wiki where one student can post something, but others can edit, and instructors can also make edits
  • There is an announcement in Canvas that Piazza is now working:Piazza now working properly in Canvas courses
    Users were encountering an error when they tried to access Piazza anywhere in their courses other than through the main course navigation. This issue has been corrected. Piazza can now be accessed in all areas of Canvas.Links that are not working should be deleted and recreated.
  • There generally are not any issues with students editing each other’s work since you can use the revision history bar to view previous versions of the post
  • You do have access to metrics like how quickly does someone respond in addition to some other overall things like how many posts, etc. They are useful from a high-level, but you’re not going to get accurate data all the time; you can find out when students are most active during the day
  • Does the app integrate with the student’s courses in Canvas?
  • May not be not available to other than live courses; may be available to Master Courses
  • Not connected to the gradebook

Back to Blogging

Apparently I haven’t made a post since October 2012!

It’s about time to start publishing again. Since then, I’ve relied on a variety to tools to document my strategies, tactics, and deliverables.

In alphabetical order:

  • Box.psu.edu – relatively new resource that has allowed me to transition from using a variety of cloud-based, network-based, and locally stored repositories.
  • Evernote
  • Google Docs
  • Toodledo
  • YouTube

I think this blog is a good place to bring those together and provide some contextualization and reflection.

I need to:

  • sort out the use of categories and tags
  • develop the UX and graphic design
  • back-fill older posts that reflect work that I’ve already done