Category: General
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Wiggio: Online Group Collaborative Learning Tool Coming to Desire2Learn
In March, Desire2Learn acquired the company, Wiggio (http://wiggio.com/). Wiggio creates a product to help students self-organize campus groups. Desire2Learn is working on integrating Wiggio into their Learning Suite, and are aiming to make Wiggio available to all clients in the Fall (although a specific date has not yet been given). So what exactly is Wiggio…
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Achieving Better Balance: Learning First, Technology Second
There is a better balance yet to be achieved – between technology and learning in higher education (well K-16 education for that matter). I don’t believe we are there yet. There is a lot of “technology talk” these days….. technology training, technology tweets, technology blog posts, technology spending, technology conference keynotes, technology hype, technology expenses,…
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Design Alchemy: Transforming the Way We Think about Teaching and Learning – in Online Courses
Review of Talk: EdMedia (Victoria, BC, June 2013) Keynote: Design Alchemy: Transforming the Way We Think about Teaching and Learning Presenter: Dr. Rod Sims (Senior Lecturer, Online Learning), University of South Queensland YouTube Capture of Keynote: One of my staff attended the EdMedia Conference and was telling me about this keynote talk. Wow…what a great…
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Technology-Mediated Student Feedback: Obtaining Formative Assessment
I developed a little one hour session on how to use 5 technology tools to get formative assessment – and used all 5 of them as a demonstration in a lab training environment. The trick was to not prepare ahead of time (oh horrors, I know but just wing it as it is part of…
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Signature Pedagogies: Three Program Level Projects to Improve Learning
At Vancouver Island University, the Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning is working on three projects related to signature pedagogies, professional learning and knowledge networks. VIU is engaged in a teaching and learning institutional-wide project for enhancing teaching of our faculty and engaging them in current best practices around signature pedagogies and discipline-specific teaching…
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Course (Re)Design Institute: Redesigning with Blended Approach
During May 2013, nine Vancouver Island University teaching faculty took part in our first offering of a Course (Re)Design Institute. VIU had never offered such an institute and we went on the hunt for best practices and a model to offer it in a way to include more learning prior to F2F sessions and extend…
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Deploying Kaltura at VIU – ETUG 2013 Presentation
I presented at the ETUG conference this year about our experience deploying Kaltura on campus over the past year. There was lots of interest from the community about Kaltura with the shared service being hosted by UBC coming early next year. I appreciated some really tough questions from the community about: ownership of content after…
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ETUG Spring Workshop 2013
This years’ spring Educational Technology User Group (ETUG) conference was held at Simon Fraser University with the theme “Tell it on the mountain: Teaching, Engaging, Learning and Leading ”. I came to the ETUG conference for the first time last year and was really happy to see the collegiality and knowledge sharing which happens within…
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Photo editing online – free!
Last month I facilitated a 1.5 hour workshop on photo editing. Although I use Adobe Photoshop CS6 for my own photo editing, I knew that not all VIU faculty/staff would have Adobe Photoshop available to them. So, after a bit of research and experimentation online, I recommend the following, totally free to use, online photo…
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Adopting Open Textbooks Workshop
On May 27th I attended a workshop organized by BC Campus titled Adopting Open Textbooks held at Camosun College in Victoria. BC Campus has been running a series of these workshops starting off at Thompson Rivers University, University of Northern British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, Kwantlen Polytechnic and now Camosun College. The event was predominately attended by…
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Gamification – Article and Infographic
I came across a couple of interesting (and short) articles on gamification in education today. Although the language makes it seem like gamification is something only the K-12 sector is working on it is becoming a trend in post-secondary as well as job training. In fact, there are over five different seminars on gamification of…
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Group Restricted Content
Are you interested in using the Groups tool in to create project discussion areas for students? Perhaps you have readings that only certain students should have access to, or what to release additional information for specific learners needing more support. The Groups tool in D2L will help you organize your course and personalize student learning.…