Keeping to a Schedule

The web-based timeline tools Shelley pointed out to us look very interesting. While I haven’t yet thought of a way to use these in class (without creating extra work for students which will distract them from the large number of assignments they already have in the course), I can certainly see ways to use these for personal enjoyment and management.

As for the timeline of going live with my online course in the fall, that’s pretty easy to manage without a timeline tool—a simple calendar will do, setting deadlines for myself to complete all 14 modules before the course begins.

Course element	Topic	Personal Deadline
Syllabus		Complete
Module l	Intro to Computers	Complete
Module 2	Windows XP	Complete
Module 3	Word PROJECT 1	Complete
Module 4	Word PROJECT 2	June 18, 2008
Module 5	Word PROJECT 3	June 25, 2008
Module 6	Excel PROJECT 1	Complete
Module 7	Excel PROJECT 2	July 11, 2008
Module 8	Excel PROJECT 3	July 18, 2008
Module 9	PowerPoint PROJECT 1	July 25, 2008
Module 10	PowerPoint PROJECT 2	August 12, 2008
Module 11	PowerPoint PROJECT 3 Individual PowerPoint Presentations	Complete
Module 12	Access PROJECT 1	August 15, 2008
Module 13	Access PROJECT 2	August 18, 2008
Module 14	Access PROJECT 3	August 21, 2008
Course Goes Live		August 23, 2008

An Expert Voice Provides Added Course Content

My favorite expert on Excel is Mr. Excel, Bill Jelen. His book Charts and Graphs for Microsoft Excel 2007 is my “bible” for creating charts of all kinds and making them graphically interesting. A favorite chapter, “Knowing When Someone is Lying to You with a Chart,” contains examples like these two charts—created from the same set of data—which send very different messages to viewers.

While I don’t have a budget that would let me hire Bill Jelen as a guest speaker for my online course, he has generously given me permission to recreate his charts for online educational use. His video podcasts are offered free, as well as a PDF version of his 486-page book, Learn Excel.

He explains why he shares the book freely online: “My goal is to get this version in the hands of 5 million people. You can help by downloading the book and passing it on to your co-workers, etc. Some percentage of people who get the book will buy a print copy or will buy a printable e-book, so I believe that the counter-intuitive strategy of giving the whole book away in one download will work fine.”

These resources from Mr. Excel provide excellent course content.

Week Six: Rubrics and Rubix

It’s only a coincidence that the Rubix cube and assessment rubrics share a similar name as well as a somewhat similar appearance.

• Visually, both present a rectangle divided into rows and columns of smaller rectangles.
• Designed to amuse (and to teach 3D thinking), the Rubix Cube is a brightly colored plastic puzzle developed in the 1970s by Erno Rubik, an Hungarian obsessed with 3D geometry. It became a popular toy craze around the world in the 1980s.
• Designed to evaluate student work, rubrics help us assess student performance along a continuum from exceptional to unsatisfactory. If rubrics are not exactly a craze among teachers, it’s probably because developing a good rubric for an assignment takes time and careful planning (and it probably takes a little longer to evaluate a student’s work using a rubric than giving a subjective grade based on the teacher’s over-all impression).

I found very good information on rubrics at Virtual Assessment Center and The Advantages of Rubrics and I felt successful in designing a rubric for the Individual PowerPoint Project I assign to students. Since Blackboard/WebCT has a grading form tool in which I can create a rubric and use it to automatically enter my assessment into students’ grade books, I definitely intend to try using these sophisticated grading rubrics in my online course.

Technology Resources

Again in Week 6 of CIS237 I am amazed at the online resources available. After seeing Shelley’s Jing demonstration of embedding an animoto video, I hope to use Jing to create my own instructional videos to demonstrate Microsoft Office tools that students most often find difficult to master. These demonstrations will be invaluable RLOs (reusable learning objects).

I especially liked Devon Adams listing of “Required technologies” and “Suggested Technologies” in the first week prompts that were shared with us via Google Docs. I plan to use this model to add to my own first week prompts. High on the list of “Suggested Technologies” I will share with students the resources for online storage that Shelley shared with us this week.

Internet Videos as Teaching Supplements

I gave my students a list of useful videos, pointing out that “Some of these tips and tricks videos will seem just like calling for tech support—you’ll need to adjust your ear to foreign accents!”

The majority of videos I found were not very useful because they were “talking heads” or because the resolution was so poor it was impossible to understand what was being demonstrated.

Rajure Sanjay provides close-up views as he describes how to accomplish various tasks in Windows XP, like this explanation of how to change screen resolution.

Since I am only providing links to videos posted on the Internet by their creators, I don’t think this violates any copyright guidelines.

LMS versus a Multitude of Tools

Using an LMS (Blackboard) suits my teaching style, allowing me to organize everything for students in one place while at the same time giving links to resources outside the LMS.

Blackboard lets me post my Instructor Notes and Student Assignments as Word documents, which allows me greater control over how they look (and how they print for students, if they chose to print). When I uploaded my Module 2 – Windows as a Google Doc, the images (and especially the arrows and shapes I had used to enhance images) ended up in places I didn’t intend. Most font formatting disappeared and I had to re-do it. I had to remove some of the images and shapes, since they were now meaningless and confusing.

Finding My Voice

I was thinking that I wouldn’t need to use my voice in on-line teaching! But I guess I’ll need to get a microphone and try my hand at creating podcasts. At the very least, I need to learn how to record a voice commentary that can accompany slide shows like the one I provided students for the first module, Introduction to Computers.

(Schematic of podcast from http://edmarketing.apple.com/adcinstitute/wp-content/Missouri_Podcasting_White_Paper.pdf)

Podcasts might be useful to remind students of specific class requirements and to give tips as the need arises. However, I prefer to keep all instructions to students in one location, in my written “Instructor Notes” for each module. If students were getting instructions in multiple locations, it would be easier to overlook some instructions. (A valid use of podcasts might be to notify students of changes in written instructions so that they will download the most recent version).

As for podcasts about the content of the course, I don’t think podcasts will be very effective for teaching the skills of this course—a picture is definitely worth a thousand words when learning to use the graphic user interface (GUI) of today’s computer applications. I did some podcast sources on the Internet. Microsoft provides podcasts with instruction on all of the office applications, as well as on specific issues. Consultants like “Mr Excel” also offer podcast tutorials,

Generally, I think videos will be more helpful to students. Microsoft provides online video demos like this one for PowerPoint. Searching YouTube I found numerous videos on specific topics in Microsoft applications like these for Excel, “Working With Formulas,” “Working With Dates,” and “Using the IF Function in formulas” Unfortunately, their usefulness is limited by poor resolution.

It will be useful for me to develop a list of videos that students can consults as an alternate to spending all their time pouring over the textbook.

If Only There Were More Hours in the Day

Social Bookmarking and RSS feeds on Google Reader – both are exciting technologies for expanding personal knowledge and connectivity. I’m glad to know more about them and their possibilities for my online teaching. However, I’m overwhelmed by all the resources and technologies and the time and energy required to take full advantage of the Internet.

Will I Find Useful Course Content by Searching Blogs?

Perhaps….there are blogs for everything!

Basictemplates.com is an example of a blog sharing miscellaneous info on Excel, among other things. But like other blogs that Google found in a search for “Excel Blog,” many of the listings are for products offered for sale, including utilities and add-ins.

I am more likely to find supplemental material of instructional value on Microsoft’s web pages or web resources like these examples of information about Excel 2007 provided by consultants and developers.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Microsoft_Office_Excel_2007.png is image source. The site states that the use of a limited number of web-resolution screenshots qualifies as Fair Use for identification of the software.)

Maricopa District-required course competencies necessitate strict adherence to the prescribed course of study (Introduction to Windows XP and Office 2007). Time is extremely limited for exploring developing technology like the news items provided by ZDNet blogs like All About Microsoft.

Internet tools are among the most useful of inventions

Email makes it possible to conduct much business online. In my desktop publishing business, it’s rare that I have physical contact with my clients. They send me information for newsletters and I send a completed draft back to them. After a couple of back-and-forth iterations, I send them a PDF file that is ready to print.

I began my desktop publishing career in the mid1980s on a Mac Plus. (Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/schlaus/926911366/)

Good experiences on the Internet include

· Email improves speed and ease of communication.

· eCommerce facilitates finding just what you want and buying it with a button click.

· Searching the World Wide Web, one can find information on almost any subject.

· The power to influence via blogs has been demonstrated in many political and ideological campaigns.

· Using FTP, it’s possible to share movies and other large files with business or personal contacts.

There are downsides of course.

· Without visual and voice tone cues, it’s easy to misinterpret emails or fail to respond to the real meaning of inquiries. Since feedback isn’t instantaneous, frustration or misunderstanding can result from email exchanges.

· ECommerce makes it almost too easy to shop, and impulse buying becomes a real risk.

· Information posted on the World Wide Web is as likely to be biased or incorrect as any published information, yet people often seem more likely to accept it uncritically.

· The power to influence via blogs has been demonstrated in many political and ideological campaigns (a negative as well as a positive!)

· As we share large file, we tend to clutter and fill up our hard drives, saving even more “junk” than we do in the physical environment.

Cluttered desktop

I use WebShots to rotate family pictures on my computer desktop. The current view is a photo that includes most of the family, taken in summer 2007. You can see by the icons that I have a lot of files or shortcuts on the desktop for ease of access.
I’ve also stored this image at Picassa.
My physical desktop is usually cluttered with little piles of "to-do's," also arranged for easy access.

Exploring the Possibilities

I have been an adjunct faculty member at Mesa Community College since 1999, teaching Business Computing and Desktop Publishing. For two years I have worked with other staff and faculty in the Maricopa College District on a Digital Visual Literacy Project under a grant from the National Science Foundation. We have created a total of 12 instructional modules, and I developed the six modules which teach graphic design principles and the application of these principles while using the many tools in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, to create visually effective business communications.

I have many years of experience in desktop publishing, creating computer documents that will be printed to hard copy. CIS237 is a great opportunity to get acquainted with more Internet tools for publishing and sharing information.

For several years I have used WebCT (Blackboard) to teach my on-campus courses, and have been satisfied with the tools available in WebCT. Now I’m having to reach out beyond my “comfort zone” and learn more about the amazing technologies that will allow me to make my class richer in resources and more interesting in content. I’m excited at the prospects!