Aloha! The Educational Media Center (EMC) rounded up some tips and reminders to help you as you wrap up the semester.
- Publish Grades using Laulima Gradebook
- Delete Synchronous Recordings
- Educational Technology Tools Survey
- Coming in Spring 2021
Leeward Community College
Aloha! The Educational Media Center (EMC) rounded up some tips and reminders to help you as you wrap up the semester.
In this newsletter, we’ll provide you a round-up of what’s new, what’s going away, and professional development opportunities.
Mahalo to everyone who helped to make this year’s Tech It Out Day a success in this new format, too, synchronously online! It was so good to see everyone’s smiling faces and connect with you even at a distance. Tech It Out Day is always a fun way to kick off the new semester!
We had over 50 participants this year join us via Zoom and eight sessions of cool tools to support teaching and learning, and promoting interaction and engagement.
Mahalo also to our faculty who presented and shared their mana’o with us this year: Anika Gearheart, Junie Hayashi, Kelly Kennedy, Michael Cawdery, and Erin Thompson.
“All of the sessions were incredibly helpful for my new online classes! I particularly liked Iorad to help “technology challenged” students access all of the tools in the course.”
“I will be using Loom to record my course and syllabus intro and hope to use it for more difficult assignments. Love Jamboard and will use it in my synchronous meetings with students.”
“I’m excited to use H5P in my Laulima Lessons.”
“Tech-it-out days are always engaging and useful to hear about new technologies and platforms. Great job on the first Zoom version of the workshops! It was well organized and easy to follow!”
Did you miss Tech It Out Day or want to re-visit a session? You can access the session info, presenter info, resources, and recordings on our website. Also, don’t forget to request your Participant Badge and claim it by the end of this month if you haven’t already done so.
See you at next year’s Tech It Out Day! You might even have something awesome to share as a presenter!
By popular demand, we’ll be doing a full workshop on Loom, a free video screencasting tool. So many uses for teaching, learning, or work tasks, for screencasting how-to video tutorials, video presentations, mini lecture presentations, video feedback on students’ work, and more! Save the date: Friday, September 18, 2020 at 1:00-2:30pm. Watch for email from the Educational Media Center to register and for more workshops coming this semester.
Our CanDO PD (Classroom and Distance Online Professional Development) series is starting next week! Don’t miss out on this valuable opportunity to help you examine your course and explore approaches for online delivery. These will also help you in meeting the Baseline Recommended Actions for Distance-Delivered Instruction and even some of the Distance Education Guidelines. There are five, two-week online “mini courses” to choose from or sign up for all five!
Register today!
The Educational Technology unit within the EMC has had a busy spring and summer, tasked with professional development for educational technology during the rapid switch of most instruction to remote learning in Spring 2020. Then immediately transitioning to rapidly developing and delivering a 12-week series of two-week professional development courses in a series called, CanDO PD (Classroom and Distance Online Professional Development), to assist instructors in preparing their courses for a flexible Fall 2020 course delivery.
A total of 90 faculty members participated (three from other CC’s) with a total of 265 registrations for CanDO courses/modules: Teaching Approaches 1 (repeated), Learning Outcomes, Assessments, Laulima Lessons, and Communicating. When surveyed, 100% (67) of the faculty agreed or strongly agreed that the resources provided were useful and that their experience in the module was excellent or good.
A participant responded, “I have enjoyed every module as it is useful and exactly the training I needed to prepare for online learning in a clear, concise, simple manner. The tasks are manageable and attainable – giving me a great feel for what it is like for the students as they go through this process (similar to the newness of this online experience for myself).”
If you haven’t had the chance to participate in the CanDO PD series, you’ll have another chance this semester, Fall 2020. Register today! See below for more information on each of the five two-week courses of the series. You can register for one, two, or all five!
Have you started down the path toward teaching a hybrid class? Which hybrid modality is your reality? Leeward CC recognizes two categories for hybrid design, pure Hybrid and Split Hybrid. Details on each modality can be found on the Leeward Course Modalities page. When planning for hybrid synchronous or asynchronous you can leverage best practices for online teaching and best practices for in person facilitation. This post focuses on the challenges related to Split Hybrid Synchronous situations that involve live classroom instruction with simultaneous online instruction. The following articles from Beth McMurtrie of The Chronicle of Higher Education “Your Questions around Hybrid Teaching Answered”, Part 1 and Part 2 serve as a starting place for a few common questions and answers that arise. The reality of a Split Hybrid Synchronous course is that a portion of your class arrives in person to your classroom (socially distanced) and ready to learn, while the rest of your class simultaneously logs into your virtual classroom to join in the learning experience remotely.
Perhaps a good analogy is with someone spinning two basketballs, one on their left hand and one on their right. Keeping both balls spinning is vital, if one ball slows it will wobble and eventually fall. But how do you keep both balls spinning when both hands are busy and you don’t have assistance from the Harlem Globetrotters? Facilitating a great learning experience in class while simultaneously maintaining an equally engaging online experience takes practice, practice, practice (and planning).
Here are some things to consider for our Leeward CC classrooms:
Laulima: Invest time into building your Laulima site to support your teaching. In fact experts in this type of teaching (HyFlex design) go so far as to recommend having a comprehensive online course site as the spine of your course. This investment benefits both in class and online learners. Both groups benefit from having copies of resources available online, a single location for turning in assignments and grading etc.
Device: Strongly consider asking students that if they have a laptop it would be helpful to bring it to all in person meetings. If they don’t have a laptop chances are they have a smartphone or tablet (According to Educause data, the vast majority of students own mobile phones.) If they don’t have either inform them to plan ahead in order to borrow one from the Leeward CC Library (open Monday to Friday 8:00AM – 4:00PM during Fall semester) .
Wireless: Inform students that our campus has wireless coverage in most classrooms and many outdoor seating areas. The campus wireless network is identified as LEE and student may sign into it with their UH Username and Password. Students are highly encouraged to register their devices (laptops, smartphones, tablets) in order to access the LEE wireless network. Registered student devices will not be repeated asked to sign in to the LEE network each time. This will ensure internet connectivity while they are in your classroom. This is also something they can do from home prior to coming to campus. Support is available 24 hours a day 7 days a week through UH ITS Help Desk.
Zoom: Consider using Zoom as your a communication tool to bridge your in-person and online learners. Take some time to familiarize yourself with what works and what doesn’t. In the Split Hybrid Synchronous format you may lean heavily on this tool, practice with it so that it doesn’t become a distraction or stall your teaching rhythm.
Participation and Engagement: Consider how tools like Google Docs can promote collaboration, and participation. Also tools for live polling like Poll Everywhere can give you a feel for where you learners are at in the learning process and be great discussion starters.
With a little planning, preparation and practice you will be well on your way to engage both in person and online learners.
One last push as we head into finals weeks and grading. We are almost through the semester! In case you missed our workshops last week, we’ve got you covered. Also, we are working hard to provide a professional development series this summer to help you prepare for Fall semester. Don’t miss out on this opportunity; you CanDO it!
Gmail now has a button in the toolbar to add an email message to Tasks. Not only will it add to your Tasks list (conveniently in the right side panel of your Gmail) but it automatically puts a link to your email message so you can pull it up quickly from Tasks instead of rummaging through your emails.
Once you have the item in your Tasks, you can edit its title and put a due date (which puts an entry in your Google Calendar, too). When you’ve completed the task, click the radio button next to it to cross it off your list! ✔️
Google Meet, a video conferencing platform, is now conveniently in your Gmail making it quick to create or join a Meet. [How-to use Google Meet in Gmail]
Create signatures for different situations or audiences such as: personal, professional, condensed, etc. The “Insert signatures” button is in the Gmail message window when you compose a new message, reply, or forward a message. [How-to create a Gmail signature]
Google Meet is a video conferencing platform that many of us are using for remote meetings, office hours, and class sessions. Before you wouldn’t be able to share a streaming video in your session to your audience, but now you can! You can now share audio and video (with audio) by selecting the option to present an individual Chrome browser tab.
Google Meet can now show up to 16 webcams on the screen in tiled view. By default, Meet automatically displays the most active content and participants. Usually if you have three or more participants with webcams in a session and are not presenting (i.e. screen sharing), you will have the tiled layout shown.
Photo credit: Google
The new Google Sites is here! Classic Google Sites will be phasing out in 2021 so if you have any Google Sites you want to continue using, convert them to the new Google Sites before next year. The new Google Sites is modern and simplified with an adaptive interface allowing you to easily create professional-looking websites without having to code. [How to use the new Google Sites]
For those of you who have been using Google Sites as weekly or topic modules for your courses to present content, but use Laulima for assignments, quizzes, forums, etc., you may want to consider using Laulima Lessons, a tool to create/present content modules. Not only is Lessons easy to use and allows you to present your content in an organized and visual way (like being able to embed content), but the advantage over Google Sites is that it can integrate items you have in other Laulima tools. This allows you to pull everything together in Lessons. You can link-in specific assignments from Laulima Assignments, specific discussion topics from Laulima Forums, and more. Contact the Educational Technology unit for assistance.
As the semester winds down and much student learning has taken place, there is a common question being asked, what’s my grade? The answer should not come as surprise because a final grade is comprised of many smaller grades earned throughout the semester. Having an organized and well maintained gradebook communicates that much need feedback to your students. During a semester “grades” factor into decisions like to whether a student chooses to drop or withdraw from a class and instructors may look at grades to help identify students who need additional outreach and support. Maintaining an up to date and accurate gradebook is also a item on the Leeward CC DE Guidelines for sound course design (Leeward DE Guidelines 5.6). We recently held a webinar on this subject and are able to share the presentation, “What’s My Grade? Laulima Gradebook (12:48).”
Lastly, here are some summary points to remember:
Dashes don’t equal zeros.
As we approach the end of the semester, missed scores for Gradebook Items should be converted to zeros to provide the most accurate calculated grade to the student. There is a button in Course Grades (scroll to bottom of that page) to convert all dashes in your Gradebook to “0”s. (Best practice tip: Throughout the semester as assignments are graded, put in zeros for those who did not submit their assignments so students can see their actual course grade at any point during the semester since dashes do not count against their course grade.)
Three steps to successfully publishing (final grades).
If you are in doubt on your successful submission you can email LeeCC campus Registrar, Grant Helgeson (helgeson@hawaii.edu). Include: Subject & Course Number CRN (e.g. ENG 100, CRN: 12345)
We’ve made it through the transition of moving classes online and teaching remotely! Mahalo for your continued commitment to your teaching and your students. Are you ready for finals week and submitting grades? We have a few resources to help you wrap up the semester including alternative and online assessments, using Laulima Gradebook, professional development to prepare your classes for Fall semester, and more.
Instructors and students teaching and learning remotely can benefit from both synchronous and asynchronous methods.