Need help with grading in Moodle? Grades need to be approved in SPIRE just before midnight on Tuesday, May 12. If you would like to meet with a Moodle Gradebook expert to review your gradebook before the end of the semester please contact the Instructional Media Lab at 413-545-2823, or instruct@umass.edu. Final grades from the Moodle…
If you’re looking for a Learning Management System option for a small, intimate classroom setting, Google Classroom may be the right fit. Classroom is Google’s most recent foray into educational technology, acting as hub for all of the work you are already doing with your students using Google Docs and Google Drive. Here is a 10…
Do you grade exclusively with letters and wish Moodle didn’t require you to enter numeric grade values then set them to display as letters? Did you know that there’s a new feature in Moodle that lets you enter or upload alphabetical letter grades into a manually created column in the Moodle Gradebook? This is especially…
We would like to invite you to a Lunch & Learn event on Friday, May 1st, 11:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. Our campus i>Clicker representative will join us to talk about the new i>Clicker 7, which we will use on campus this fall; REEF Polling, i>Clicker’s new mobile solution; and best practices for using i>Clicker…
If you’re interested in creating instructional videos, take a look at this great article from EDUCAUSE:
What Makes an Online Instructional Video Compelling?
You don’t have to Google too deeply to find examples of how technology in the classroom can go off the rails, sometimes spectacularly. While doing research on why iPad use in education sometimes fails, I came across an article from @thomasdaccord on Edudemic, 5 Critical Mistakes Schools Make With iPads (And How To Correct Them). Before reading the article, I could…
Summer & Fall 2015 Moodle Course Requests Open Primary instructors can now request courses in SPIRE for Fall and Summer 2015 classes. It’s easy to copy a course from a previous semester into your new empty course. Any changes you make in a course before the upgrade, will not be affected by the upgrade in…
Have you ever struggled with how to structure and administer peer review activities in your course? ELI Review published an excellent feature article (Designing Effective Reviews) on designing effective peer review activities, backed up with research and voices from instructors. Though ELI Review promotes their own peer review tool in this article, most of the faculty…
Around the office we’ve been thinking about the future. We have a new boss, some of us will be relocating to the Library in the next year, the UMass Amherst IT strategic planning process is going full tilt, and the New Media Consortium has just released their 2015 Horizon Report. At our most recent staff…
Turnitin Downtime – Saturday, March 7 Turnitin has announced that their services are expected to be unavailable during a scheduled maintenance period on Saturday, March 7, 2015, from 10 AM to 2 PM. Instructors are encouraged to modify assignment due dates to avoid the scheduled maintenance window. Scheduled maintenance windows are the first and third…
It seems, “to app or not to app…” is no longer the question. In a blink of an eye we turned into an app-savvy (or, some would argue app-dependent) society. Using apps in education became a common practice for many of us. It can be a great idea to have an app for some professional…
On February 9 — 11, you are invited to join members of the IT group at ELI Virtual Annual Meeting 2015. This conference is arranged by EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. We’ll be projecting the virtual meeting sessions in our 40-seat conference room in…