Sharing campus info with students

Periodically I get emails about campus events that might interest my students. Instead of announcing these in class or forwarding the emails to my students, I decided to post the information inside my LMS course accounts using the News widget.

Then I thought of the implications. First, I would need to post these items in each of my course offerings. Also, my students might miss the class-related news items if those items are surrounded by non-class items.

To solve these problems, I created a blog just for campus events and posted a feed of that blog on my course account home pages. Now all I need to do is update the blog with each email and the information is there for my students automatically.

Taking roll with web app

Today I used the web app I created to take roll. It may have taken a few more minutes that just calling out names, but I was able to recognize a few faces. I went student by student instead of down the list, and I ended up missing a student somehow. The web page generates an email I send to myself, and I now have to decide how to record the attendance over the semester. I decided to create an attendance register inside our course offering, so I have to transcribe the attendance data after each class. At least I can apply a status to everyone and then change the status for individual students.

Frustrating LMS

Our learning management system felt like it was being overloaded the first day of the semester, and I was able to log in but not access my course. I wanted to show it to my students, and also inside were some images on web pages I wanted to share. So instead I talked through the LMS features and said I would do it again Thursday. The pages with images I was able to access via another source.

Cell phones in class

Here is a first-day stunt that did not work out so well: I set an alarm so my phone would ring in the middle of my lecture. I was talking about the syllabus and it rang, and I proceded to answer it and have a short conversation. I said that I thought everyone was looking at me and hung up, and then I stepped out of character and told the class to take calls outside and not disrupt class. Ten minutes later my phone "rang" again - I hit the snooze button instead of turning off the alarm. ;-)

Taking roll the first day

I used a Flip video camera to record my students' faces as I took roll today. I want to get to know their names, and it was mildly entertaining to them as I did it. Not everyone was easy to see. A better way to do it would have been to walk up and down the rows, asking each to say his or her name into the camera.

It was the most efficient to use QuickTime Pro to watch the video and then pause and export for each student. The problem was the files were in a .pct format, which I then had to open with the QuickTime Picture Viewer before I could export as a .jpg. The Flip software does not have a still export that I could find and anyway was not working on my desktop computer. The other video programs did not have still export. Next time I might just take screen captures and work with MS Picture Manager, as I still have to crop each file.

Cropping was not so bad. I opened MS Picture Manager and selected the crop tool and was able to do each picture in turn. The web page took a little bit of work to create. I created a form with a radio group yes/no for each student and added each picture to the page. I included the code

<meta name = "viewport" content = "width = device-width">

to make the page fit my iPhone well, and it works! So I can take roll with my iPhone and record the results in a spreadsheet and get an email.