FITS Newsletter Home

Contributed by P. Foss, Classical Studies

Quite unintentionally at first, I’ve realized that the iPhone is a fantastic teaching and course management tool. From portable media, to grading and evaluation, to class communication, I can carry practically everything I need with me in one small and handy package. Not only can I take students and classroom technology anywhere, but I can also take my classroom with me wherever I go, and get things done in those small windows of opportunity that we have. I’ll present some of things I’ve used the iPhone for this term, and will be happy to discuss their pros and cons.

Features:

1. AUDIO FILES. In-class, whether in the classroom or after taking the students outside, I can play music files from iTunes (using the built-in speakers) for students that are directly relevant to class content, and which otherwise would have required firing up the whole tech classroom apparatus. For example, I’ve done this at the Nature Park to play Suzanne Vega’s Calypso and the Soggy Bottom Boys’ Man of Constant Sorrow when discussing the choice of Odysseus in Books 5-8 of the Odyssey whether: 1) to live forever with a goddess on an edenic island, or 2) endure great suffering and no guarantee of success in trying to return home to Ithaka and reclaim his house and family.
2. STILL and VIDEO IMAGES. When discussing Greek culture in the Iron Age (or some other subject with visual material), if I spontaneously think of an object I could show them but I don’t have the media projector and computer already working, I’ve pulled out the phone, done a quick Image search (using the fast Google App [Google, free]), zoomed in on the image, and walked it around the room to show students as I am talking, or to supplement a student’s presentation while they are talking. Searches are saved so they are faster the next time. You can even Save the image (by holding a finger down on the image) from the browser window, and it goes right into the Camera Roll album on the iPhone, so you can pull it or others up later for a slide show if you wish, make a flash card out of it (see below), or bring it over to my laptop the next time you sync the device. Panning or zooming is easy, using one or two fingers. You can also take ‘screen shots’ of anything on the iPhone by holding down the Home button, and then pushing the top button; the resulting image ends up in your Camera Roll album. The same can be done with YouTube clips from films (e.g., Monty Python’s Life of Brian clips for Latin or Roman Civ.); screen & audio quality are quite high, and clips can be bookmarked. Such images, including those you take with the built-in camera, can be combined with text and audio in a Flash Cards App (Jason Wentworth, $2.99) to be used for review or in-class pop quizzes. And if you want more people to see it, a mini media projector (8 x 10 x 6 cm)
with built-in speakers has been announced (Qingbar MP101) and should be available soon.

3. CLASS PARTICIPATION AND COMPETITIONS. Another App is called TallyCount (itention!, $1.99), which basically makes tallies. I have each one of my students as a separate tally, and then in-class or after class, when a student makes a great comment or contribution to class, I can ‘add a tally’ to their total, and thereby keep track of class participation
over the course of the term without worrying if I have a paper and pen handy. I can also easily keep track in a Latin class when I divide up the class into two or three competing groups over a collective translation or grammar contest.

4. MARKING PAPERS. Students are emailing me their papers as PDF files, and I use another App called Annotater (Jim
Brink, $4.99), which allows me to transfer the PDFs to my phone, where I can use the touch screen to mark up the papers
with transparicized lines, checks, circles, comments, and typed notes of any color I choose, and I email the
papers back, thus saving a few trees, and I can do my grading wherever I get a chance, and without having to carry around a stack of papers.

5. READING. Various programs such as AirSharing (Avatron, $6.99) or FileMagnet (Magnetism Studios, $4.99) connect wirelessly to your computer and allow you to transfer PDF, Word, Excel, RTF, Powerpoint, html files, etc. to your iPhone,
where you can read them at your convenience in portrait or landscape format. The legibility is excellent, and you can look over the readings you’ve assigned or catch up on that journal article without having to lug around the laptop or the printout. You can also use Annotater to mark notes on those files if you convert them to PDF.

6. GRADING ON MOODLE. I also can access Moodle on the iPhone, so I can easily grade posts to the discussion forum,
journals; see who has been accessing the assigned readings, consult the syllabus and course documents, etc.

Epilogue
Not only can I take students, and many elements of classroom technology, anywhere (manyplaces outside on campus have good WiFi), but I can also take my classroom with me, in one convenient device that I am going to carry around anyway. It is like the ultimate educational Swiss-army knife. One can also keep in touch by email, texting, and of course, phone.
There are other functions as well; Its built-in GPS and Maps App, with road and satellite coverage, allowing the placing of ‘pins’ to bookmark places as in GoogleEarth, could leverage geographical concepts and contexts. The camera can capture documents, images, persons, artworks, etc. (I could email students pictures of an unknown object as a pop quiz in an archaeology course, or lines from a poem to examine in a lit class.) There is a built-in accelerometer and gyroscope, so it always knows where in space it is oriented, and how fast it is moving (used mostly for gaming). It offers the potential of much spontaneity, and as we are in the early days of the Apps, all sorts of cool utilities are imaginable, and I’m sure I’ve not thought of everything one could do with the Apps that currently exist. But here are just three other useful Apps:

1. Writing Pad (Norman Wang, free): a novel and fast way to take notes, by ‘drawing’ the words.
2. TouchRPN (Daniel Staudigel, $7.99): a full-featured RPN calculator, like those great old HP models.
3. Recorder (Dan Walton, $0.99): a easy and clean voice-note recorder

There are flash-card programs for studying Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and sign language (among many more); graphing/plotting utilities; periodic table aids; astronomical maps, etc. Universities such as Stanford have made their web and e-services available for iPhone/touch.

Table of Contents:

• From Blackboard to Moodle
• FITS Spring Moodle Workshop - March 15th
  
• Two New Moodle Features
• Utilizing START for Class Projects
  
• Staff Spotlight: Lynda LaRoche, FITS Specialist and Moodle Support Coordinator
  

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 Lynda LaRoche, FITS Specialist & Moodle Support Coordinator

This year’s FITS Spring Workshop will be on Saturday, March 15th from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. in the Julian Center.

The workshop will focus on Moodle and provide opportunities for both faculty members just starting to use Moodle as well as those wishing to enhance their current Moodle expertise. Breakout sessions will focus on topics such as the Moodle gradebook, steps in Moodle page design, an introduction to Moodle, copyright issues, and more. Also, there will be hands-on sessions where participants can work on their individual course with the aid of instructional technologists. By the end of the workshop, participants should feel comfortable enough with Moodle to build course sites.

To register for the 2008 FITS Spring Workshop on March 15th, please complete the short survey at http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB227HQ7YZKGC by March 11, 2008. Your feedback on this survey will help us identify on which features to focus during breakout sessions.

Also, we regret that this workshop is scheduled on the same date as the Women in Science Reunion. If you are involved with Women in Science, we encourage you to attend the reunion and we will be happy to find another time to help you with Moodle. Additional Moodle opportunities are listed at http://www.depauw.edu/univ/fits/events/events.asp#oncampus. You are also welcome to email us at  moodle at depauw.edu to request a department visit or a one-on-one session.

We hope to see you there!

Contributed by Michael Gough, Instructional Technologist and Coordinator of START

During winter term, FITS added two new enhancements to Moodle that faculty members expressed great interest in at the Moodle User Group (MUG) discussion sessions.

Gradebook Plus add-on

The “out of the box” Moodle gradebook proved functional, but was limited in that you could only add an assignment generated outside of Moodle by adding an “offline activity”, which adds an icon to the course site. While these offline activity icons could serve as reminders to students, they also can clutter up the course space. Another limitation was the original gradebook did not allow for easy grade changes. Faculty members wanting to change a grade had to open the submitted assignment to change the grade. This was somewhat unintuitive and an inconvenient step for instructors who naturally would go to the gradebook to make grade changes.

The new gradebook,” Gradebook Plus,” solves both of these problems. First, it has a “Manage Graded Events” tab. This allows instructors to add an assignment to the gradebook without the need for an offline activity. This enhancement did not replace the offline activity option, as some users still use it as a reminder tool for students. Second, the new gradebook has an “Edit Grades” tab. When you click on this tab, the gradebook loads the grades into editable text boxes where you can change a grade quickly and easily without having to leave the gradebook to go to an individual assignment.

If “use advanced options” is turned on, you will see 2 new tabs, Edit Grades and Manage Grade Events.

Finally, the new gradebook came with enhanced statistics as a fringe benefit. You can now view statistics on individual assignments as well as the overall final grades by clicking on the stats button next to the assignment. Students can also view these statistics if they wish.

The Feedback Module

The Feedback Module, our newest enhancement to Moodle, offers you the ability to build customized surveys for your students. You can choose from an assortment of different online question types to build your survey. You can also choose to make your survey anonymous and show or withhold results with the students. This could be a great way to gather quick informal feedback, or even build your own course evaluation survey.

If you have any questions about these new features or Moodle in general, please email  moodle at depauw.edu.

Contributed by Michael Gough, Instructional Technologist and Coordinator of START

Student Technology Assessment and Resources Training (START) offers more than just technology support for students. It also offers customized training sessions for your students on various course projects that use technology.

For large projects, we encourage interested faculty members to contact us well in advance to allow enough time to put together a project team that can provide the best possible support. A model team would consist of the instructor who provides their learning goals and objectives and serves as the content expert, a technologist whose expertise aligns with the technology that will be used, support staff who, along with conducting workshops, offer open lab times to support students with technical questions should they have any. Depending on the scope of the projects, built in check points and regular team meetings might be set up to confirm that we are on target to meet the learning objectives of the projects and to evaluate the effectiveness of the support and training sessions.

If you have a technology driven projected planed for one of your classes and would like a dedicated workshop and support team, please contact start@depauw.edu to set up a consultation.

Expertise: Moodle, DyKnow, Project Management, Microsoft Office, Databases, Reflective Writing.

Biography: Lynda joined FITS in September 2001. She earned an associate of applied science degree in Computer Information Systems from IVY Tech State College in December 2005. Her greatest achievement is being a mom to three terrific sons – a U.S. Marine, a beekeeper, and a video game enthusiast. Lynda enjoys spending time with her kids, cooking, writing, crocheting, and taking walks on the beach (which can be a challenge living in Indiana).

Fun Fact: Lynda once took tae-kwon-do lessons with her children.