Interactive simulations for Physics & Math

MERLOT's Journal of Online Teaching and Learning had an article last month about using simulations in college physics courses. Interesting contrast with the College Board's concerns about virtual labs in the previous post here. High-Tech Tools for Teaching Physics: the Physics Education Technology Project by Noah Finkelstein et. al., discusses their project and how they've used simulations in various settings. The simulations they discuss are available for anyone to use online.

As more educational simulations are put online, they can be plugged into online and face to face courses by instructors to enhance teaching. Another example like this is the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives which is a collection of Java applets developed at Utah State University which cover a wide range of mathematical concepts aimed at preK-12 learners but which could also be used by adult learners. The great thing about both of these examples is that they are easily accessible online and cover discrete topics, so they aren't tied to a particular course and they aren't so big that they cover too much.

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Blackboard Podcasts

I've been searching for podcasts about Blackboard and have come across a few. Some are too site-specific while others could use a little more polish before I would recommend them to others. However, one podcast I did find to be useful and high quality is Teaching with Blackboard by Jason Rhode at Northern Illinois University. Episode 5, posted last week, discusses how to incorporate RSS feeds into Blackboard using Feed2JS , a website and tool for converting an RSS feed to JavaScript which can be copied and pasted into your Blackboard course. This gives you a relatively easy way to add dynamic content to a course. For many instructors, RSS may be a foreign language, but I think if you listen to the five minute podcast, you will learn enough to get the idea. If you want more, Jason's previous podcast covers RSS and podcasting in more detail.

QuickSource Guides to Blackboard

The Resource Network in Harrisonburg, Virginia, publishes fold out guides to various software applications like MS Office, WordPerfect, Adobe Acrobat and more. They have student and instructor guides to BlackBoard for $4.00 each. Prices are lower if you buy in bulk. I got mine yesterday and they look nice and are easy to read. Each one covers the important things you need to know to use Blackboard as a student or instructor. They are also available through Amazon.com for $4.95 each.

Avoiding lost work in Moodle

When students are working in our installation of Moodle, there are some common ways that their work can be lost. Because Moodle doesn't save what you've written until you click Save (assignments) or Post to Forum in Forums, anything that interrupts your connection to Moodle can lead to lost work and frustration. Interruptions include computer problems or network outages or disconnections. If you are writing anything longer than a paragraph, it's a good idea to use a text editor to do your writing and then copy and paste into Moodle so no matter what happens, you won't lose any of your work. If you combine your use of a text editor with an online backup plan, you'll have a secure backup of all of your work even after the class ends and you can no longer access it (see below). You could use a word processor like Microsoft Word, but you may need to save your work as plain text first to avoid seeing formatting errors when you copy and paste from Word into Moodle. A

Technology & Instruction for UNEX

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