There I was, thinking myself so clever for coming up with “new” ways to grade papers. No wonder that new ways to handle the paper load, advances in efficiency in the production of response, have a long history in the teaching of college composition. The use of lay readers (called “reading assistants” at Vassar before […]
Author Archives: Jonathan Taylor
Reblogged from Online Teaching and Learning: –Jon Taylor The concept of “snippets” comes from the programming world: it’s a reusable bit of code to make programming faster. The concept has crossed over into any online work environment, though, to automate repetitive tasks. Snippet managers are programs that store and retrieve snippets to help save time. […]
The impetus for my poem “North” came from an Elizabeth Bishop poem, “The Moose.“ The premise of Bishop’s poem is that the speaker is riding a bus, leaving a familiar town, and a moose blocks the road in the countryside. The poem is memorable for the description of the moose, but the angle I was […]
Ode to the Midwest by Kevin Young : Poetry Magazine.
In a recent newsletter, I wrote about using Adobe Connect Pro web conferencing software to hold conferences with students in my online classes. One burden in this practice is scheduling. I started this summer with 60 students in my online classes and scheduling and managing that many conferences became a chore. I used FerrisConnect’s Groups […]
Tegrity Troubles After struggling with Tegrity, I’ve decided to switch to Jing for screen capture. Tegrity has had way too many problems. I’ve had lots of students complain about it. I’ve switched to using a laptop exclusively and spent two hours yesterday trying to install Tegrity on my laptop (Windows XP) and record a ten-minute […]
For about two years now, I’ve been touting the value of the grading conference in teaching writing to anyone who will listen. I’ve found that meeting students one-on-one to grade their work, in addition to the more traditional “draft” conferences has had enormous positive effects on my students’ work and my own work as well. […]
This semester, I am teaching my face-to-face LITR 286 course with the help of BlackBoard Learn 9.1 (henceforth “BB”), as part of a pilot testing group. Our current Learning Management System will eventually be phased out by BlackBoard, and this system is one possibility for replacing it. The best compliment I can give BB is […]
So yesterday was our all-day training session on BlackBoard 9.1 for those of us who are piloting classes in the system for this semester. I’ve had a couple questions via Facebook, so I’ll answer them here. What is the roll-out schedule for BlackBoard 9.1? The schedule, as far as I know, has not been set […]
I’m taking part in the BlackBoard Learn 9.1 pilot in Spring semester 2011 at Ferris. This is the system we are considering upgrading to, what some people are calling FerrisConnect 2. The information about this pilot is posted by the FerrisConnect Advisory Board here: http://www.ferris.edu/htmls/academics/center/ferrisconnect/fab/FC2-learningMgmtSystem.html Basically, the idea is that we’re trying Bb Learn 9.1 […]
