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.