Idea Warehouse

Securexam

Technology does NOT solve every problem. I don't know what to make of Securexam.....

Kill Switch for Technology Use in Classroom

A recent Chronicle article reports that Bentley College has an on/off switch installed in their wired classrooms with 5 options:

• Turn Off Internet Access But Allow E-Mail Access
• Turn Off E-Mail Access But Allow Internet Access
• Disable Internet and E-Mail Access but Allow Computers to Reach Campus Web Pages
• Shut Off All Access
• Allow All Access

With wireless classrooms, you can also have a 6th option: Turn Off Wireless Access. (Or maybe it's part of the "Shut Off All Access" option; it's hard to tell the way the article reads, but it's not that important a difference). What I was interested in is this Kill Switch in general. Maybe it's SynchronEyes that they're talking about ....where we can monitor each of the the students' screens from the instructor's station and toggle settings there. I'll have to check that out.

Blogging, Podcasting, and Wikis

Forgive me, blog readers, for I have sinned. It has been 6 months since my last entry.  But I've been busy helping my students work on their research projects and blogs and plan to (upon being granted permission) link student work on their hypertext research projects to this site, as well. Their projects are due Monday and Wednesday in their respective classes, so within that week, they will be posted. Meanwhile, I've been contemplating how and why podcasting might be employed. Quite a few more of my students live and breathe by their IPods.

Also, I'd like to know what kinds of discussions educators have about the use/citation of wikipedia entriess in their students' research projects. More and more entries are becoming quite credible, and I hate to dismiss that obvious area of research. Just as we baby-boomers used to (or at least I did) pore over our World Book Encyclopedias and learn a lot that way, this generation seems to get most of their information from the web and wikipedia info.

Reading --Print and Online

Prepping for today's 101 class ended up taking about 8 hours yesterday, but only because I ended up getting really into going to different links, reading different articles, reading various web sites, pulling books off the shelves, etc. Just plain old got into it, I guess. I ended up getting Wendy Bishop's reading survey from one of the "hint sheets" in The Subject is Reading, which turned out to be a pretty interesting jump-start into our critical reading mini-unit which willl segue into the position papers.  But since this semester we're using Envision, I've been focusing a whole lot on "visual rhetoric" and they just got finished writing a rhetorical analysis of advertisements or editorial cartoons. So, I'm having them read a chapter from Frank Smith: "What Happens When You Read?" and then 3 online articles mentioned on the daily agenda blog for the class--http://collegewritingskills.blogspot.com--OR the Burbules article "Rhetorics of the Web." I'll be curious to see what they end up thinking of these pieces, and what their opinion of online reading is like. One thing is nice is that most students in that first class are art majors of one type or another or English majors, so the visual rhetoric angle works well for them. The second group is primarily psychology majors (or is it the other way around?). Anyway, I enjoy being able to tap into my understandings from the Reading Theory class at IUP. Thanks, McAndrew, for such a good class, even though we only had 3 students that semester!