Faculty Best Practices: StudyMate

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An engaging way to reinforce key concepts in a course is to provide interactive learning activities and games, such flash cards, crossword puzzles, and challenge games. These types of activities encourage students to spend more time with course content because it doesn’t feel like “learning” to them. Developing these types of educational games and activities has been made easy to do using StudyMate Author. This software tool helps instructors create ten Flash-based activities and games using four simple templates.

  • Activities created using StudyMate can be used with D2L or posted on any website.
  • StudyMate Author will import items from MS Word files, publisher test banks, and directly from Respondus, making it easy to create interesting, interactive activities from existing content with no programming knowledge.
  • Educational Uses: Fact cards, flash cards, pick a letter, fill-in-the-blank, matching, crossword, challenge, and glossary.

More information is available here: StudyMate Wiki

Instructors’ Imaginations Ignited: Second Life at UW-W

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Learn about the innovative use of Second Life in higher education and learn about the work of a year-long, cross-disciplinary learning community of UW-Whitewater instructors focused on leveraging Second Life in their courses.

Day: Wednesday, Oct. 12
Time: Noon – 1 pm
Location: UC 275A

During this LEARN Center session, instructors involved in the Second Life Learning Community will discuss how they experimented with instructional strategies to leverage the use of Second Life in their coursework. Examples of actual course activities will be showcased and key success factors learned, ideas, strategies, and tools used by the learning community will also be shared. The learning community work was made possible through a UW System Curricular Redesign Grant administered through the Learning Technology Development Council.

Details at: http://www.uww.edu/learn/ws1112.php
Please register no later than October 11.

To reserve a place, please contact the LEARN Center:
262-472-5242 or learn@uww.edu (learn@uww.edu)
Register online at: http://signup.uww.edu using your Net-ID
The workshop is listed under “LEARN Center.”

Learn About D2L Rubrics

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The Learning Technology Center (LTC) is pleased to invite faculty and instructional staff to attend the next free session in the Snackable Series “Technology – One Byte at a Time.”  In the “Snackable Series” sessions,  a specific learning technology is spotlighted.  The next sessions will be held October 19 and 20 and focus on the use of D2L Rubrics.  Please bring your lunch and join your peers on the following days to learn about D2L Rubrics:"Rubrics" Cube

Desire2Learn’s Rubric Tool
Wednesday, 10/19: Noon to 1 pm
Thursday, 10/20: 11 am to Noon
iCIT Training Center, McGraw 112

D2L Rubrics are a useful tool for Instructors to provide clear criteria to students regarding what is expected for an assignment as well as effectively communicate feedback on why a grade was given. Most often formatted as a grid, a rubric can be organized in a variety of ways and reflect an infinite number of grading schemes.

Register online today for this “Snackable Series” session – seating is limited: https://signup.uww.edu

To submit ideas for future topics for the “Snackable Series”, please e-mail the UW-Whitewater Learning Technology Center at ltc@uww.edu.

New D2L Documentation for Students

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Desire2Learn has provided new documentation specifically for student (or “Learner”) audiences. We’ve edited this documentation to better reflect our instance of D2L, and it is now available for our students.

The documentation covers all the basic tools available in D2L courses, including Quizzes, Dropbox, Discussions, and more, and also covers basic tasks within these tools.

Please visit the Student D2L Documentation site to take a look!

What’s New in 9.2.1 and New Documentation

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Now that we’ve upgraded to version 9.2.1 for the Desire2Learn, we have some new features and updates we’d like you to be aware of, including an overview of our new login page and information sites. For more information, please see the “What’s New” wiki page.

In addition to the updating the D2L Learning Environment documentation for version 9.2.1, we have also added ePortfolio documentation. Please take a look at our D2L version 9.2.1 documentation site. (Please note that you may be prompted to log in when accessing this site.)

New for Clickers: ReponseWare

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ResponseWare is a web-based polling application from Turning Technologies that lets participants use the devices they use most, such as their mobile devices and computers. Participants using smartphones, laptops, and other Internet-connected devices can respond in real-time to interactive polling questions.

This application can be used as a replacement for a clicker keypad, and a ResponseWare license can be purchased directly from Turning Technologies via their “Student Store” website. Students who opt to use the ResponseWare enjoy the benefits of cost savings and are not required to keep track of and maintain a separate clicker keypad device.

Both ResponseWare and clicker keypads can be used in the classroom simultaneously, thereby allowing instructors to accommodate students with and without a personal mobile device.  To use both ResponseWare and clicker keypads, instructors simply enable use of ResponseWare within the Turning Point software that is already used.

For more information on ResponseWare, please see either the ResponseWare for Instructors wiki page or the ResponseWare for Students wiki page. For more information on clickers and TurningPoint, please see the Clicker Resources page.

Get a Jump Start Using D2L in Your Course!

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Don’t reinvent the wheel — use the “D2L Starter Course (v.2)” developed to allow you to quickly leverage D2L in an online, hybrid, or face-to-face class format.

The recently updated D2L Starter Course (v.2) is a D2L course that includes a number of useful templates and other resources available for you to copy and modify for use in your D2L courses. The templates provided meet Quality Matters guidelines. Faculty and Staff who have used the D2L “Start Module” in the past will be interested in exploring the new resources available, including the following items:

  • a D2L Rubric Tool for online discussions that can be linked to the gradebook or the dropbox
  • an “Are You Ready for Online” quiz intended to help students build their confidence and encourage success when taking an online course
  • a mid-course student evaluation survey to help you gauge that the course is meeting your (and your students’) expectations
  • a Lockdown Browser quiz to ensure your students are prepared to take a D2L quiz that is set up to use Lockdown Brower
  • suggested wording for News announcements to post in online, hybrid, and web-enhanced courses
  • discussion starter ideas for online discussions administered in the D2L discussion forum
  • activity templates for commentaries, assignments, and discussions

We welcome any suggestions or comments about the new starter course. Your feedback allows us to continuously improve the resources we provide to support faculty and staff. For questions of more information, please contact the Learning Technology Center at ltc@uww.edu or at 262-472-1004.

How to Register for Starter Course

To register for this course, log into D2L, click on the “Self-Registration” link (located in the upper-right hand corner of the page near the “Logout” link), and then click on the title “D2L Starter Course (v.2).” Once the “Self Registering Course Offerings” screen opens, click on “D2L Starter Course (v.2)” then click on the “Register” button at the bottom right of the screen. After registering you will see “D2L Starter Course (v.2)” appear within your “Instructor tab” in the folder entitled “OTHER – Courses With No Semester.”

Once registered, you may review the various tools and resources available to copy into your course. Please do not edit the original “D2L Starter Course (v.2)”. This is used by faculty across campus.