Category Archives: Tools
Qualtrics Offers New Features for Mobile Compatibility Checker, Multi-Click Heat Maps, Goals Lines for Graphs and More…
May 14, 2013
Qualtrics recently added a series of features that you will see listed as you log into Qualtrics, along with links to instructions and tutorials. To review a few of those features, let’s start with the Mobile Compatibility Checker. This checker allows you to optimize your survey to be viewed and taken on mobile devices. Mobile [...]
WAVE: A Free Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool
April 30, 2013
WAVE is a free tool created by WebAIM to help individuals evaluate, and thus improve, the accessibility of web pages. It is an automated tool, so by itself it cannot tell you if all aspects of your web content are accessible. (Knowledgeable humans are still necessary!) However, WAVE is a powerful tool that makes [...]
Evaluating Your Students- Blackboard Learn and its Underused Unique Feature- Part 1
March 12, 2013
Who viewed this item? What did students look at before test day? Are any of my students utilizing the resources I’ve posted? If you are the type of instructor who is asking these questions – it could be that you teach a large lecture course, maybe an online course with students all over the nation [...]
Interactive Video
February 6, 2013
When instructors are redesigning their courses to engage students in active learning, passively watching video clips isn’t a great pedagogy. Interactive video technique could be adopted to blend interaction and linear video. YouTube has Video Annotations feature for instructors to add interactive commentary to their own videos. It allows instructors to “add background information about the [...]
Considerations of Accepting Homework in Blackboard
January 25, 2013
If you’re considering accepting homework via Blackboard Learn, this can be a benefit to both you and and your students. You can reduce the amount of paper that you need to work with by accepting your assignments electronically, and your students can simply submit their homework to you when they’re finished and not have to [...]
Using the Word 2010 Accessibility Checker
December 14, 2012
Many of us are familiar with using the spelling checker to find possible spelling errors in our Word documents. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool like that to check for possible accessibility issues? Well, there is! It’s called the Accessibility Checker, and it is available in Word, Excel and PowerPoint in Office [...]
Hiding Completed Tasks in Outlook 2010
November 26, 2012
I want to be more productive at work. I have been using the Tasks List in Outlook 2010 for several months now. There are many things I like about it, but I was frustrated that completed tasks continued to appear. To me, that was just adding clutter when I wanted to focus on what still [...]
Considering e-Texts for your class? Consider these points…
November 7, 2012
Many of us have a tendency to think that if we adopt an eText format for our class textbooks we will be more innovative and provide the students a cheaper service. Here are some common assumptions (if you are interested in the research behind these statements, please send me an email): eTexts cost less – [...]
Review of Blackboard’s Mobile Learn app
October 12, 2012
How can students use the Blackboard Mobile Learn app on their iPad? With the arrival of new technologies there is always the questions posed by higher education, “what could it do for us”? Blackboard Inc, the makers of the course management software we use at Purdue, has created a mobile application that allows students to [...]
Using Blackboard Learn to Take Your Class (Mostly) Paper-Free
October 5, 2012
As the costs of printing increases for both faculty and students, it is important to point out that Blackboard Learn offers a number of tools that will allow your course to go nearly paper-free. Here are some ideas to help reduce the amount of paper that your course may use during the term: Post Your [...]