Rubric Study

This week we're featuring Tim O'Neil's study on adding a Rubric when using the discussion board in online classes. Tim would welcome you to actually register into this voicethread (can be done in under 30 seconds) and add to the discussion. Talking about rubrics is very timely with our upcoming D2L version upgrade where the rubrics tool has been vastly improved!

From Tim: This VoiceThread presentation is sharing the results from a 2009-2010 FIDG grant on Engaging and Assessing Online Dialectic. I try to run my online discussions very much like my face-to-face courses but the asynchronous environment has challenges for the back-and-forth dialectic that I prefer to use for teaching. The project compared two groups of students - two online sections in each group - over two semesters. The first group received the traditional, written instructions on excellent online participation, the second group received a rubric for assessment in addition.

You can access the presentation below and can pause it at any point to add your own comments or questions using text, microphone, webcam or telephone.

Picasa as Photo Editing Tool and More!

Looking for a fun way to organize and share your digital photos? Want to have access to a photo editor to do simple retouches, add effects, and build collages? Want a tool that integrates well with the pictures in iPhoto on your Mac? Want a program that does all this on the PC? Enough of these darn questions. If you answered "yes" to any of the above, then you owe it to yourself to check out Picasa, free photo editing software from Google. The video below explains some of the features of Picasa.

If you want to find out more information or want to download the program to your home computer, visit http://picasa.google.com