UP Teaching & Learning Community Blog

UP Tech Tips

Up Tech Tips is a series of handy technology related hints, tips and tricks written especially for University of Portland faculty who are engaging with technology in the classroom or in hybrid and online classes. Tips are written and/or curated by Ben Kahn, Academic Technology Specialist and Trainer at the University.

Here is how you can keep up with new UP Tech Tips:

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Tips for Untethered Lecture Capture Rookies

Tips for Untethered Lecture Capture Rookies

At a recent TLC brownbag session, 4 faculty members from 4 disciplines shared tips for getting started with “Untethered Lecture Capture,” a tool for using an iPad or tablet to show slides and annotate them in real time during class, while moving around the room. They offered these tips to anyone considering adopting ULC, which also allows a teacher to upload a lecture for students to review after absences or simply for multiple exposures to critical content.

  • Don’t overdo it as you get started. It’s not the best tool for a whole course or for some sessions of a given course .
  • Fancy graphics on slides aren’t necessary. You’ll be adding to your slides as you teach the session, and often simpler text and graphic combos are more fertile grounds for that.
  • ULC is great to capture group work, possibly replacing posters and markers. Small groups of students can work on a regular piece of paper (eg in a notebook), and you can take a photo of that and upload it in real time to the room’s projector for reporting out and debriefing.
  • An untethered teacher keeps students off balance in a good way. There’s no more back row that has little contact with the professor if you are able to move around the room, so fewer digressions into social media.
  • ULC technology is not perfect, and making mistakes together with the tool, or being thwarted by the occasional bad connection helps build community, trust and empathy.
  • ULC can help professors keep the class moving when they are away from campus for professional travel; it’s also a way for athletes or other travelling students to have access to the professor’s content and the discussions that occur in class in their absence.
  • There are 52 professors on campus using ULC (so far). Chances are that peer wisdom lurks in your own hallway!
  • ULC is effective in helping students create and observe visual models of complex or unseen processes. A picture really can be better than a thousand eloquent words.
  • Student tutors can use the tool to capture explanations in a tutoring session and share on the Moodle page of the relevant class. Sometimes students grasp the vocabulary of another student when the more polished words of a professor still feel a bit foggy.
  • ULC is one tool, not THE tool, for being an effective teacher.

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#UPTechTip: Control When Moodle Assignment Grades Are Released With Workflow

A common question I get from instructors is “How can I make sure that grades for my assignments are not released to students until I’m ready?” Up until recently, there hasn’t been a great way to control this, but a new Moodle feature allows you to do just that – go through grading at your pace, and release grades to the entire class when you’re finished.

Please see this MoodleDocs article for details: MoodleDocs – Assignment Workflow

Notes: To enable this feature in your Moodle assignment:

  • Edit the Assignment settings
  • Under the Grades heading, click “Show More”
  • Enable Grading Workflow

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#UPTechTip: Turn Your Moodle into a You Can Book Me

Do you keep office hours or offer drop-in appointments for your students? Maybe you do advising and want avoid long back and forth email threads trying to find an amenable time for sessions? Do you sometimes have a line out the door, and other times wait around only for no one to show up? Or do you sometimes waste time going back and forth through email trying to find a time that works for everyone? Either way, your own and your student’s time could be used better. Today’s UP Tech Tip post on the Moodle Scheduler is for you!

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#UPTechTip: Set Accepted File Types in Moodle Assignments

The newest Moodle update at UP has a few nifty tricks. One of the best is the ability for instructors to specify what types of students are allowed to turn in to a Moodle assignment. Want to make sure students give you a Word doc so you can use Track Changes? Make it so. Or perhaps you want to use Moodle’s built-in PDF viewer and annotator to grade easily online. Enforce PDF only uploads with an iron fist of justice. Check it out:

Teachers can limit the file types that students are allowed to upload to an assignment submission. This is helpful to ensure that students are turning in a file that is appropriate for the assignment task (for example, if you want students to submit an image file instead of a Photoshop project file) or to accommodate a teacher’s grading workflow (for example, specifying Word documents so that track changes can be used, or PDFs so that submissions can be easily annotated)

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#UPTechTip: Get to Know the New Moodle

Hello, and welcome to the first #UPTechTip Friday of Fall 2018! I hope your new academic year is off to a great start. You’ve probably noticed that Moodle has a fresh new look for Fall. If you haven’t yet, now is a great time to take a few minutes to get acquainted with the new Moodle!

Please use the link below for a quick visual guide that my colleague Stephen Loutzenhiser put together. Some highlights:

  • The new navigation drawer on the left can be hidden or shown via the “hamburger menu” (the three horizontal lines)
  • The navigation menu has quick links that will jump you to each week of your course (no more long scrolling to get to later weeks!)
  • Settings are now found under the “gear” icon – the gear opens links to turn editing on, set-up your gradebook, import content from another course, and more!

Take a look: New Moodle Quick Guide