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Contributed by Linda Elman, Associate Professor of Modern Languages

Tablet PC technology has proven very effective in all of my Spanish classes. For the literature seminar, I am able to annotate pdfs of critical articles and post the annotated version to Moodle for my students to peruse. In the intermediate grammar course, I can project a document saved in pdf format and annotate it (called “inking”) in various colors, including highlighted text. Compare this Tablet technology to using a transparency with four different color markers (that often stain your fingers), a wet paper towel for erasing your marks, and no ability to highlight important points. Instead, with the Tablet PC, one stylus “inks” and erases with just a click on the tool bar required to change colors, line width or highlighter tools. A final feature, perhaps the best, is that when class ends, you can save the annotated document to a file to use again and, more importantly, to upload to Moodle or email to the students for their review and file.

In this article, I will share a sample of a document for Spanish 330, a conversation and phonetics course. To teach phonetic transcription, I previously relied upon sheets of transparencies (which I had to bold and enlarge in order to make them visible to the class) plus the aforementioned arsenal of transparency markers. As we all know, the overhead projector has its limitations: glare, heat and, inevitably, the times when your hand or body blocks the projected image from view. Alternately, I could write the sentences on the white board at the start of class (time-consuming), then use wet erase markers to write the phonetic symbols. The big disadvantage to this instructional strategy, is that at the end of the class period, all the valuable transcriptions are erased. Again, with the Tablet you can save all your work, then, recycle it for the following class session or exam review.

Here is the sample for your reference. I might add that it is appreciably simpler to write these phrases out by hand, rather than typing with symbols (some not available) and changing colors of text. You can focus on one sound-symbol across all sentences or follow a sequence of steps within one sentence. Prior to my final exam, I plan to prepare a sequence of these pdfs to upload into a power point presentation for our review.

Contributed by Art Evans Laurel H Turk, Professor of Modern Languages and Professor of Modern Languages

I have two very large Blackboards, developed over several years. And I now find myself (somewhat grumpily) in the process of having to “migrate” them to Moodle. One course is my Honor Scholar FY seminar on science fiction; the other is an upper-level French seminar on the history of French song (1940-present). Scheduled to teach the latter course again this spring, I spent most of Winter Term 2008 converting the materials for this French song class from Blackboard to Moodle. Here are some things I learned.

Moodle’s three-column architecture is very different from Blackboard’s. Whereas Blackboard requires a kind “Russian nesting dolls” structure for organizing your materials (box-within-a-box-within-a-box), Moodle’s structure is more wide-open: the main “topic” boxes containing your materials are next to one another, running vertically down the screen. Personally, I don’t care much for Moodle’s three-column interface, but it’s open structure makes it much easier to navigate through the entire site. It is important to realize, in switching over to Moodle, that you will probably need to make some basic design changes to your original Blackboard course.

I found that there is no easy way to import foreign-language files from Blackboard to Moodle without a lot of cleanup. Some materials can be imported directly into Moodle’s “Files” repository. But, for me, opening both systems side-by-side and simply cutting and pasting from one to the other proved to be the fastest and most reliable way. Blackboard has always been notoriously unstable concerning accents and other diacriticals (I had to reenter them twice over the past three years); Moodle does not seem to have this problem, happily.

In addition to text and graphics, this French song course also contains approximately 250 music recordings in “streaming audio” format. These presented a special challenge. They were not functioning well in Blackboard—e.g., students using Macs could not make them work properly and sometimes, even in Windows, they tended to activate at odd times. To solve this problem, the original CDs were re-ripped, and the sound files saved in .mp3 format and then stored on a special streaming server (thanks to Roni Pejril). Throughout this process I discovered that Moodle offered one improvement over Blackboard in that the button to activate each song now could be placed on the same page as the song’s lyrics, allowing the student to follow along while listening. Bottom line: we have so far experienced no glitches at all with the “streaming audio” component of this class, a constant source of difficulty when they were in Blackboard.

I also include daily online mini-quizzes on each of the 50+ singer-songwriters featured in this Moodle site. These quizzes are short, consist of several true-false questions, and are timed at 5 minutes each. Since certain upgrades were added to Moodle in January, these quizzes and the gradebook have also been working perfectly. The students seem especially to appreciate the “countdown clock” that appears on the screen when they are taking a quiz, letting them know exactly how much time they have remaining.

I have not yet experimented with many of the tools available in Moodle (wikis, forums, workshops, etc.). But I must confess that the more I work with Moodle, the less grumpy I am becoming about having to migrate away from Blackboard.

Contributed by Thomas S. Dickinson, Professor of Education Studies

The questions rise to the surface each semester—

• How do I communicate effectively to my students about their writing, both drafts and final papers?
• How do I handle the paper load effectively and efficiently?
• Will a checklist or scoring rubric assist my students in their writing and how can I incorporate that with my comments.

Like most instructors dealing with a range of student writing, whether in a W-competency class or not, I have struggled with these questions across my university teaching career. As well, as an instructor who is trying to incorporate new technologies into his teaching, I have been moving toward “paperless” classes by employing Blackboard and now Moodle, discussion boards, blogs, and email. How to deal with writing comments and the “storage” of student papers has become a major concern within my courses.

This semester I have had the opportunity to participate in The HP Technology for Teaching Leadership Grant under the direction of David Berque and Carol Smith. The grant has provided me with an HP tablet pc that I have been using in two sections of a W-competency course, EDUC 170 Foundations of Education. While I have been learning the use of this new tool (even after half a semester I am still trying to turn the screen around the wrong way!) I have also been learning how I might answer my questions about writing and commentary. To date, this is what I have found:

• By using the hand-writing feature on the tablet pc I have been able to provide detailed commentary on drafts and finished papers just as I would if I were commenting on paper copy with my own handwriting. Additionally, since I have a range of color options and a range of pen styles (both pen and highlighter), I have been able to use color to add to or emphasize points I want students to learn from.
• The tablet pc has a responsive “eraser” feature that will allow me to quickly and easily change my mind and either erase an entire section of commentary or one individual letter (I admit to mis-spelling words on my rough comments but this feature lets me correct them easily).
• If students chose to print the draft paper with comments, the reproductions have been very good, even in black-and-white. Color reproductions have been excellent as well.
• The initial response from students has been positive, especially to the personalization through the electronic means. This was particularly evident during writing conferences with drafts that I had commented on and had sent to the student prior to the conference. On these occasions we were able to sit side-by-side to read and discuss the comments and at that time I could make additional written comments and remarks on that edited draft in a different color to indicate when the commentary had occurred.
• I have been able to incorporate my writing rubrics by pasting a blank copy at the end of the student’s draft or final paper and then annotating that document just as I did with the draft. Again, I have used both the pen and the highlighter feature to respond with my assessment of student work.
• The “archive” question has been answered as well. I have used the Digital Drop Box on Blackboard and the Moodle assignment feature to receive electronic copies of both drafts and final papers. While I have to save/send the electronic copies that I have commented upon, both my students and I have permanent archive copies of the documents that we can get to regardless of where we are.

Going into this exercise with the tablet pc, I began a journal noting the time I was spending on the electronic editing compared to the time I was spending on editing via paper copies. To date the difference is negligible. While I have to save/send papers I don’t have to print them, stand in line at the copier, or even worry if it is down. I don’t carry a bulging briefcase home at night as I normally have although I do have a laptop case for the tablet pc (I haven’t totally integrated all of my affairs with technology—I plead to preferring a paper daily planner and handwritten to-do notes). At this point I am still learning but the tablet pc does bring a new tool to both old and new questions.