For several months now I have been collecting many resources, tools, and ideas in an effort to provide these to faculty at Morningside College.  Now these resources are available on the new Educational Technology web page!

I’ve organized this site into three basic parts:

1. General information about professional development opportunities, communications, and contact information.
2. Research information on online and blended learning.
3. Tools for different types of activities (communication, writing/notetaking, Moodle, Softchalk, open educational resources, etc.)

It is my hope that this will serve as an important place for faculty to find and explore different tools and strategies for incorporating educational technology into their classrooms.  If you know of other resources or tools that should be added, please contact me with this information.  As always, I am available for individual consultations and you can use the link at the bottom of my landing page to schedule a meeting with me.

One more blog post concerning using video in the classroom.  Were you aware that there are a number of live web-cams around the world that you can access? Live cams of Paris, Times Square, Elephants in India, the Omaha Hawk Cam, yes even Cavalier, ND (I know you all were curious about that city!).  A number of zoos and aquariums also have their webcams linked at this site.  You can possibly see a whale shark swim by on the Ocean Voyager WebCam. These and hundreds of others can be found at EarthCam.com. There are also several nature cams that can be found at explore.org.

What might be some potential uses of these  webcams? One possible use might be to see important events that happen to be occurring in real-time.  This could be one way to view the scene during important events. Another use can simply to expose students to what that particular location is like at a point in time.  Some webcams allow for time-lapse video and others still can be maneuvered to get a wider view. However not all of the EarthCams are live video.  Some are static images that can be manipulated.

An annoyance to be aware of is that many of these cams make you watch an ad before you actually get to the live view, but a little patience and you are soon onto taking a gander at Temple Bar in Dublin.

Finally remember the old saying, “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas?” Well this set of live webcams dispel that belief.

Videos, so many videos!  As like my last post, the availability of video is a great asset for teaching and there are ways that we can manipulate video to be more useful for our students. Last time I discussed Vibby as a way to create shorter clips from video.  In this blog I introduce EDpuzzle a tool for embedding questions into video.

Why might instructors choose to embed questions into videos? There are probably two main reasons: 1) to check a students understanding and 2) to simply make sure they watched the video.  Edpuzzle provides a free and easy method for doing both.

EDpuzzle allows faculty to import any video (URL link, files), clip videos down, provide your own audio narration, and to embed questions.  If you create a class in EDpuzzle (students sign up for free and can self enroll into courses making the work on your end as simple as sending an e-mail with a link) you can view the progress of your students in terms of how much of the video they actually watched and how they performed on the questions.  Additionally, instructors can select options that make it impossible to skip forward in the video (so students actually have to let the video run.

Here is an example of an EDpuzzle video that you can try.

The instructor dashboard looks like this after a student has completed a video:

EDpuzzle can be integrated into Moodle by embedding it onto a page in Moodle or linking from Moodle.  However, there is not currently an integration with Moodle gradebook.  So if you want to have the EDpuzzle scores a part of your Moodle gradebook, this will need to be done manually.

EDpuzzle can help students engage more with the video and for instructors to track student progress. Best of all, it’s quite easy to use.