Tips and Mental Wanderings

Nice tip from professor Luis Cano on what to do if Blackboard Learn won't download.  He was trying to download the Grade Center before the annual purge and it just wouldn't work. He was doing all the steps correctly - and me being new at this - had little to offer.  His research turned up a problem with Firefox which was preventing the download. This link led to the fix
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/cant-download-or-save-files#w_remove-download-manager-plugins 

One project assigned to me by Rosie was to catalog the print materials people have in their offices.  Being a lazy sort who didn't want to write down all that information, I began looking for an app.  I wanted one which would snag all the relevant information from the ISBN and catalog it. That's a hard app to find - there were apps but it too awhile to find one which would do what I wanted it to do. I finally found BookManager  ($1.99 purchase).  It even allows for a tab delimited or comma delimited download for import to excel. I hope it will also upload to my bibliographic software. 

When I asked that question, I left this blog to find the answer.  The answer was a new even cooler tool that's free! I found the EasyBib app for iPhone.  Video of App

It will email me the bibliography in APA, Chicago or MLA format - how cool it that! In 3 minutes I scanned the ISBN codes of two shelves of books!   

I've decided that I've put so much energy into my never to be finished dissertation bibliography that I might as well put it together as a publication of sorts. Now where did I put that file?  I have multiple old computers with dissertation materials. I guess it's time to pull it all together. Stay tuned!

Today, I met with Patrice Cole, a professor teaching Sustainability: Reducing our Impact on Planet Earth   We had such fun talking about her course and how to use Blackboard Learn to enhance it.  We covered the technology introduction to Blackboard, which had been our goal, but then we talked about how to design the course for today's student. 

How do you build in a sense of community online? What active learning projects and assessments do you use to maintain attention? How can you leverage the hand held technology they all carry? What makes a good PowerPoint slide in a traditional lecture room with a 100+ students? It does get me excited to introduce online teaching and best practices to a faculty member who is excited to be teaching and loves their discipline as much as I love mine!