Technology & Instruction for UNEX

The Huffington Post started their Best of TED 2011  countdown recently. It's a top 18 list because TED talks have to be 18 minutes or less. There are a wide range of topics included so far, with six more talks currently waiting to be revealed. Of all the online resources I include in our courses for instructors, the TED talks always get the most use and generate the most interest, particularly among those who are not familiar with them. This happens even though most of the TED talks are not directly related to the topics that people are covering in their classes. I think there are three things that make the talks appealing as learning resources. First is the length -- long enough to get into some depth about an issue, but not so long that people will tune out or choose not to watch. Many of the resources on sites which are targeted at higher education include presentations/lectures which are an hour long or more. My experience is that finding the valuable section in a long video ...

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...