pab's potpourri: feedback

Showing posts with label feedback. Show all posts

Sunday, February 03, 2013

Google Search for "online teaching"

A Google Search this morning (online teaching), turned up a couple of interesting hits. That is, they were interesting enough for me to review and then tag them in Diigo, a social bookmarking system that I use for micro-blogging instead of Twitter. I've replicated the two tagged entries below.

The first, Starter.co.nz, I thought may be of interest to teachers of young learners, who can browse previews of available resources, and decide whether such a subscription service would be of value to them or their schools. So I posted it to the Classroom 2.0 group, as I was adding it to my list of Educational Technology items.

Home | starters.co.nz

A follow-on to the no longer active http://www.teachingonline.org/ site, "starters.co.nz is a web-based subscription resource for schools featuring over 1600 quality pdf, ready-to-use lesson plans including digital resources such as videos and websites that enhance and add depth to the lessons. / Our lessons are based on and cover all areas of the New Zealand Curriculum and are grouped for Yrs 1–4 and Yrs 4–9+. / starters is particularly useful for printing out easy-to-follow quality lessons for relieving teachers" (deck, 2013.02.03).

Designing for Learning: Ten Best Practices for Teaching Online: Quick Guide for New Online Faculty

On this page, Boettcher explains, "ten best practices for anyone just getting started in the online environment. Research and experience suggest that these practices contribute to an effective, efficient and satisfying teaching and learning experience for both faculty and students" (para. 2, retrieved 2012.02.03 ["Minor revisions May 2011"]).

Monday, March 30, 2009

One of these mornings...

From a message on my Blended Learning and Instruction comment wall (BL&I), I learned that the iCal event I'd collected from BL&I over the weekend had failed to optimize itself into my local time zone (JST). Though the new event was visible in desktop views (Day/Week/Month) at 13:30 JST, 2009.03.28, hidden in the background was the event's actual UTC (GMT), and accurate JST calculations of starting and ending times. Need I add that I missed the event?

[caption id="attachment_44" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Event displayed at 13:30 JST, 2009.03.28"]

[/caption]

Since I recalled that WiZiQ featuring recordings, I re-drilled the BL&I website (Ning) from top to announcements, to events, to the one I'd missed, and looked for a link to or mention of a recording. Though there was nothing like that visible on-site, there was a WiZiQ sign-in box barely peeking around the edge of my browser window (Safari default size, about a hand-span in breadth).

So after dredging up a suitable mail address and password for the WiZiQ site, and logging in, I found just what I'd been looking for, a "View Recording" button in the center of the window!

The story continues from there, ...:

I tried to "View [the] Recording" (rectangular button below the Tags, Embed[ding] Code, and URL; above). However, the first four out of five times I tried, after successful sign in to WiziQ. I got messages displaying, "You are not authorized to view this recording." Much to my surprise, as I was returning to that recording page to collect evidence of what was going on, it finally loaded! I'm looking forward to watching the show now, and wondering whether anyone can explain the flukiness of access to the recording of it.

(comment yet to appear on WiZiQ,

Integrating Technology into the Classroom Using Moodle and Wikis)

... and resumes here, well, actually, resumed as a draft posted in Safari, and continues now in Firefox:

I started this post in Safari, and got as far as pasting in an overt URL and typing the page of the WiZiQ page (above). In Visual editing mode, twice I tried to insert the link, covered by the display text I'd selected. However, after the page background faded, the link dialog box never un-faded, , and all page controls below the bloxi URL became useless. The only option was to reload at the browser control level, hoping the auto-save had done its thing.

Fortunately it had, but paragraph divisions between default formatted passages (aligned left) above and below the block quotation and reference weren't appearing in the post display, not even in Firefox, until after I came back and hand-encoded them in HTML view. Whenever I get through a troublesome online session like that, I wonder whether ordinary learners or run-of-the-mill site visitors would ever go through all the bother, or ever come back again, much less tell you about it.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Pre-Course Experience

Though I'm torn with regard to whether this blog, or another that I maintain, is an appropriate venue to spill gut feelings, I've decided to do so here. This will be a reflective piece regarding preliminaries to one of the first online courses to which I enrolled.

As soon as I had logged in to the course, a day or so before it was scheduled to begin, I discovered literally hundreds of unread messages. Regardless of ... [unswerving] family support, ... [and all the rest that enabled me to get where I was at the time]

I never wish[-ed] to create such an imposing presence [, or rather overwhelming burden of interpersonal data to digest from ill-threaded discussions, waiting to greet new-comers to a course that hadn't started]. Though I was striving to adjust to a new physical environment, in an unfamiliar country, the [massive novelty of online (only)] peer-to-peer ... [self-identification and relationship building was] phenomenal[-ly challenging].

[Original draft: 2007.03.24; retrieved and roughed out in retrospect: 2010.07.09]

pab's potpourri