Isabel Espinal, our colleague in the library, has put together a great list of library resources and information literacy enhancements that will be of particular interest to faculty using SPARK, blogs, and other online learning tools. Add a link to the library subject research guide for your discipline. If no subject guide is available, contact…
Category: Technology Survival Guide
Library Guides: Embedding the Library in your Sites
Library Guides (http://guides.library.umass.edu/) are Web sites created by Subject Specialist Librarians. These sites contain links and resources which help your students do research by highlighting books, databases and other resources that are most appropriate for the topic. Once a Library Guide has been created for your course, it is possible to “embed” a small, Flash-based…
Useful Content on YouTube (Really!)
Nearly lost among the funny animals, back yard science experiments, and music videos in YouTube are short videos that can be useful in the classroom. In some cases these are simply captured bits of pop culture or history that can be shown in class or embedded in course Web pages. There are also well-produced, short…
Mid-Semester = Mid-Terms and OpScan sheets
Well we’ve almost made it to the middle of the semester and for many people teaching large classes that means mid-term exams with bubble sheets being graded by the Optical Scan service at Whitmore. If you need to take grades from an OpScan data file and post them in SPARK make sure to check out…
TIP: Getting Started in SPARK
Here are some suggestions to make getting started in SPARK a little easier: If you plan to upload Word documents We strongly recommend converting any Word documents to PDF or html format prior to uploading them into SPARK. Files in PDF or html format will display in the student’s browser, while files in Word format…
TIP: Subscribe to RSS Feeds via Email
Once you get interested in following specific news sites or blogs (such as this one), it takes extra time and attention to remember to check in to look for new posts. RSS allows you to subscribe to the site and receive updates as soon as they are posted (which is great if you follow many…