Support Videos

I’ve decided I’ve got to embrace my “good enough” vs. “polished” distinction for multi-modal teaching in yet another way. I’m increasingly making videos for people when they email me with the quick request “I don’t understand how to....” These are videos for both my students and my colleagues. I’m also developing an increasingly longer list of “I need to make a video showing how to do .... with ....” So I guess I’m starting up and repurposing an older blog, ”Keeping up with the Jetsons.” …

...Continued | November 09 2008 | Comments
Posted in Techno Tips

Personal Portals

Personal portals allow individuals to construct an internet browser homepage (default page) with tools and links that are relevant and regularly used. Once you set up a personal portal account, you are able to customize your page/s with internet resources that are most useful to you. Most personal portal tools allow you to add specific windows, or flakes in Pageflakes, that are specialized tools. For example, you can have favorite links, to-do lists, note pad, important in materials from social bookmarking sites, social image (flickr) or video (YouTube) sites, etc. Once …

...Continued | February 09 2007 | Comments
Posted in Techno Tips

Web vs. Databases vs. Blogs

(Remember, I teach first year composition courses. In these courses, especially the ones with research agendas, I have to teach information literacy.) We are living in an age of information overload. You are probably already overloaded by all the of the information available on your general topic. To help you filter through that information, and to select some more reliable, and/or useful, sources, it helps to understand the distinction between the world wide web, library databases, and blogs. The Web—The “world wide web” is a mess of resources located …

...Continued | February 09 2007 | Comments
Posted in Techno Tips

What/Why Furl/Social Bookmark?

(if you are using another bookmarking tool like del.icio.us or Digg just change some verbage below) Furl is a social bookmarking website. If you’ve used “my favorites” in Internet Explorer, or bookmarks in Firefox, you will know the usefulness of bookmarks; however, bookmarks saved on your computer can not travel or be shared with anyone. For this course, you’ll primarily use bookmarking to help you keep track of the various resources you find while researching. You will want to “furl” or “bookmark” each online resource you find (including database …

...Continued | February 09 2007 | Comments
Posted in Techno Tips

Computer File Suffixes

(I’m sure some of you are saying, “come on, do you really need to explain this?” And the answer is “yes.” As I love to harp, not all of my students are Educause’s “net generation.” And even some of those who are still do not necessarily understand all of these distinctions.) Have you ever notices that computer files have three or four letter suffixes after their titles? Many audio files generally have mp3, wav, or wma. Digital image files usually have jpeg, gif, or tiff. Most documents have doc, …

...Continued | February 09 2007 | Comments
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Becoming a Collegial Mentor

Let’s be honest, the real reason I’ve gotten around to typing up these why/what blurbs has not been for my students (bad Shelley, baaaad Shelley); but, instead, for a group of part-time faculty in a program that is helping to “train” them to teach ENG102 (our second semester FYC course) online. Let me start by saying that I have thoroughly enjoyed working with my part-time colleagues. This solidifies what I’ve pretty much already know, I really dig doing professional development stuff. Although I’ve already done a bunch of professional development activities …

...Continued | January 29 2007 | Comments
Posted in Techno Tips