Author: Matt U.

Website Wednesday

Website Wednesday is a regular feature in which we highlight one (or a couple) of sites from the Billions floating around the Intertoobz that just might help you with your Herculean task of educating inquiring minds. Any and all suggestions for future editions are welcome.

So I was surfing the cyberwaves in search of a good site for today’s post, Googling things like “cool websites for community college teachers.” Eventually I stumbled upon freerice.com. I nosed around for a bit and thought that it might be a good site to post, so I emailed the link to myself and planned to get to it later. Next I zipped over to CNN.com to get a quick dose of headline news. There I see a link to Time’s 50 Best Websites of 2011. I click it. I then scroll down to the education category. What site do I see first? Freerice.com. Mmmmhmmm.

So what is it? It’s a site run by United Nations World Food Programme that has two main goals: “Provide education to everyone for free, and help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.” They do this by having advertising sponsors who donate 10 grains of rice for every multiple-choice question answered correctly. Questions come from six different subjects (math, English, geography, chemistry, language learning, and humanities), with each category having multiple levels of difficulty. According to their totals page, they have currently donated 91864527800 grains of rice. I’m not sure how to pronounce that number, but I do know that it’s pretty darn impressive!

Website Wednesday

Website Wednesday is a regular feature in which we highlight one (or a couple) of sites from the Billions floating around the Intertoobz that just might help you with your Herculean task of educating inquiring minds. Any and all suggestions for future editions are welcome.

This can be considered a kind of companion post to last week’s Website Wednesday from PhiloDave. He introduced us to What Should I Read Next?, and to further help those of you getting your summer reading lists tuned-up, I’ll contribute this site: LibraryThing. Describing itself as “the world’s largest book club,” LibraryThing basically lets you create your own library (things you’ve read, things you want to read) and interact with fellow readers: a “social networking site for book lovers.” Take the tour–and happy reading!

Website Wednesday

Website Wednesday is a regular feature in which we highlight one (or a couple) of sites from the Billions floating around the Intertoobz that just might help you with your Herculean task of educating inquiring minds. Any and all suggestions for future editions are welcome.

Has anyone ever used a hoax website for a classroom lesson? I haven’t taught English 102 for a few semesters, but when I do, one topic we always cover is how to evaluate websites for credibility. I’ve thought about using hoax websites for this, but I just never got around to it. Still, I can see some of these working really well as critical thinking exercises for all kinds of disciplines. A few notable ones I’ve discovered: the movement to save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, Lake Michigan Whale Watching, Dog Island, the wildly popular Belgium Doesn’t Exist, Feline Reactions to Bearded Men, and (my personal favorite) Boilerplate: History of a Victorian Era Robot.

Here’s one teacher’s list of hoax websites and another teacher’s anatomy of a hoax site.

A little silly, but I think there’s definitely some learning waiting to happen here.

Website Wednesday

Website Wednesday is a regular feature in which we highlight one (or a couple) of sites from the Billions floating around the Intertoobz that just might help you with your Herculean task of educating inquiring minds. Any and all suggestions for future editions are welcome.

I recently came across the mind mapping program MindMeister on a “best of” list for free online teaching tools. I’ve never used it, but it looks like it could definitely be a useful brainstorming tool, especially for visual learners. I could also see it working as a great organizational application for students who are writing research papers. If anyone has used MindMeister, or can think of any good classroom applications, please chime in.

Website Wednesday

Now that we’re halfway through the spring semester, it’s safe to start thinking about summer travels. Need a unique destination? You might poke around on Atlas Obscura, which describes itself as “a compendium of the world’s wonders, curiosities, and esoterica.” There’s some absolutely fascinating stuff here, like the “Bone Church” in Kutna Hora, Czech Republic (I visited here a few years ago–simply amazing) and Vardzia Cave Monastery in Aspindza, Georgia (the country Georgia, that is). Closer to home, you can check out the Mutter Museum of “medical oddities” in Philadelphia or Chicago’s own esoterica. Safe travels, friends.

Website Wednesday

Website Wednesday is a regular feature in which we highlight one (or a couple) of sites from the Billions floating around the Intertoobz that just might help you with your Herculean task of educating inquiring minds. Any and all suggestions for future editions are welcome.

Truth be told, I had no idea what site to feature for this Wednesday, so I Googled something like “awesome websites.” Here’s one that I found: Get High Now. That’s right–no teaching and learning resource this Wednesday. Instead, I share with you “the multimedia appendage of the historic and thrilling book, Get High Now (without drugs)—an illustrated, mind-blowing magic carpet ride of more than 175 ways to alter human perception and consciousness (without drugs or alcohol).” The site features a handful of visual and auditory “highs,” as well as explanations of how these sensory illusions work. Here’s my favorite: Chronosynclastic-Infundibulum, which you might know by its more common name: the “rotating snake” (be sure to read the health warning beforehand!). Some of the audio ones take a while to load, but I’m sure they offer some fun “trips” as well. Log on, tune in, drop out.

Website Wednesday

Website Wednesday is a regular feature in which we highlight one (or a couple) of sites from the Billions floating around the Intertoobz that just might help you with your Herculean task of educating inquiring minds. Any and all suggestions for future editions are welcome.

If you’re looking to supplement your class with some engaging video clips, or just interested in watching some thoughtful discussion for kicks, you might try nosing around FORA.tv. Their “About” page describes the site as “the leading online destination for intelligent video programs on the people, issues, and ideas changing the world. We’ve gathered the web’s largest collection of unmediated video drawn from top conferences, universities, and public forums.”

Some of the videos require a premium membership to view, but there are A LOT of freebies available. As an example, check out their Education section. Good stuff, no?

Website Wednesday

Website Wednesday is a regular feature in which we highlight one (or a couple) of sites from the Billions floating around the Intertoobz that just might help you with your Herculean task of educating inquiring minds. Any and all suggestions for future editions are welcome.

Sharing curriculum is something I don’t do enough of, and that’s probably the case for a lot of us. But Curriki is all about sharing curriculum. Its focus is K-12 materials, but after nosing around for just a few minutes, I was able to find some things that could be easily adapted for my classroom. Read more about Curriki’s mission and leadership here.

Website Wednesday

Website Wednesday is a regular feature in which we highlight one (or a couple) of sites from the Billions floating around the Intertoobz that just might help you with your Herculean task of educating inquiring minds. Any and all suggestions for future editions are welcome.

I don’t have much experience using social media in the classroom, but I was curious when I came across The Ultimate Teacher’s Guide to Social Media on the blog Edudemic, run by these folks. Coincidentally, when you open the Teacher’s Guide link and scroll down to access it in the document viewer, you can see how Issuu works, a useful tool for posting documents on Blackboard that was the subject of a Website Wednesday last semester.

Website Wednesday

I was struggling to find a worthwhile website to share this week. I don’t know exactly why, but I typed “teacher stories” into my Google search bar and found some pretty good reads, like the Teacher Case Story Collection from the National Network for Educational Renewal. The stories are from K-12 teachers, but their issues are ones most of us deal with regularly. When you have five free minutes (probably not happening this week), browse their collection of teacher stories, or if you’d prefer to start with a recommendation, check out “Can Classroom Assessment Foster Student Motivation.” Good stuff.

Website Wednesday

If you’re not hitting the highways or the friendly skies (pat-down!) for the Thanksgiving break, you might find yourself with some down time to catch your breath and do some pleasure reading. If so, don’t forget that all HWC employees have at-home access to an absolute treasure trove of periodicals through our library’s online databases. Once or twice a month I find myself scrolling through the 4000+ titles of ProQuest’s Research Library database, and I inevitably find something worthwhile to peruse in journals like the The Canadian Journal of Film Studies or Community College Review or Comparative Civilizations Review (and that’s just three of the 437 “C” titles). It’s not just academic publications either. If you want to hunker down with People or Vogue or American Cheerleader, they’re on there. I just downloaded some recipes from Vegetarian Times. The majority of titles offer full-content access, with individual articles available for download in PDF. Once you access ProQuest, click on the “Publications” tab to see an alphabetized list of all their periodical titles. Keep in mind, too, that ProQuest is just one of our library’s online databases. Check out all of them here. Remember that you’ll need to log-in with your CCC username/password to access any of the databases. HWC’s library log-in page for faculty, staff, and administrators is here. Happy reading!

Website Wednesday

Here’s a handy tool for sharing documents with students on your Blackboard sites:

Issuu is free a self-publishing tool that allows users to upload a file and then display it in an easy-to-read document viewer. Say you were teaching Macbeth, and to help introduce the play, you asked your students to read the Folger Shakespeare Library’s study guide to the play. The PDF file is available for download on the library’s website, so, using Blackboard, you could simply provide a link to it or upload it to your course site. Or using Issuu, you could embed the file directly into your Blackboard site and present it in a snazzy document viewer that offers full-screen display (and realistic page-flipping motions to boot).

Unfortunately the free version of WordPress (the site that hosts the Harold Lounge) doesn’t allow users to install the needed plug-in to embed Issuu files in blog posts, but you can get a sense of how the document viewer looks here. To embed an Issuu file directly in Blackboard (probably the most viewer-friendly means of sharing your documents), you will have to copy the embed code provided to you by Issuu after you upload your file and then paste it in your Blackboard content area after clicking the “Toggle HTML Source Mode” button (the one that looks like this: <>). You can choose from a few different layout and privacy choices, and include downloading and printing options as well. Files are limited to 100 MB and 500 pages, and the following file types can be used: pdf, doc, ppt, odt, wpd, sxw, rtf, odp, sxi.

Update to “Your Blackboard Site May be Viewable”

This October 22nd Lounge post informed us that our course sites are now viewable to anyone logged-in to Blackboard, unless the settings have been changed to not allow guess access. For comparison’s sake and because I can be nosy about certain things, I spent some time poking around the syllabi from different campuses. I did the same for CDL syllabi. Guess what I found in the CDL syllabus for one of the courses I teach at HWC? An entire section of my syllabus pasted into theirs–390 of my words, verbatim, that explain the different types of assignments students complete in the course.

After seeing this, I remembered a phone call I received from a CDL instructional designer early last year. He explained that they were updating the syllabus for this class because the textbook they had been using had gone out of print. He then asked me if I would email him my course materials–syllabus, assignments, rubrics, everything I had. I said no, explaining that CDL course design or redesign is something faculty are paid for. A few days later, I received an email from one of the deans at CDL, asking if I would be interested in redesigning the course for a stipend. I respectfully declined. And that was the last I heard about it, until last week when I took a peep at the syllabus on Blackboard and saw that imitation–I mean duplication–is apparently the sincerest form of flattery.

I guess the moral of this scene from Bizarro World is this: don’t ask for what should be offered; just take it.