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http://www.magnapubs.com/issues/magnapubs_tp/archives.html

Follow this link to The Teaching Professor archives for a great article I just re-read about grading student essays:

Incorporating process pedagogy into grading student essays, The Teaching Professor, May 2008.

A must-have link: http://www.zamzar.com

Ever need to convert a file (video, audio, document) to another format?

You need look no further than Zamzar. I had planned to list all the “converted from” and “converted to” formats they handle right here, but you just won’t believe the number of ways your file can be converted. Too many for this post!

Zamzar conversions are free for filesizes up to 100MB. For larger files, there is a charge.

Here are some tips for finishing out the semester–it is almost that time!

End Notes: Distinctive Ways to Wrap-Up a College Course

May, 2008
By Margaret Walsh, Keene State College, New Hampshire

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The ending of a course is worthy of greater attention than it typically receives. Endless time and energy are expended on crafting beautiful syllabi complete with assignment descriptions, an outline of topics and readings, and due dates. We have thoroughly ritualized the start of a new semester, but, typically somewhere between weeks 11 and 14, what seemed like reasonable plans are regretfully sidelined and we launch into catch-up overdrive. It is a time of high stress for teachers and students.

However, if you want students to remember your words, the influential ideas reflected in carefully selected readings, and the work they did to earn their grades, keep these tips in mind when considering the end of a course, whether you are creating a new course or revising an old one. They are ideas easily adapted to courses of different size and in different disciplines.

1. Catching up, reflections, and new directions

Avoid the end of semester crunch problem by putting an “open” date on your course outline. Building in time for catching up about two-thirds of the way through a course takes the pressure off at the end. If it turns out that you do not need the time, enrich the content with a lively discussion, a guest speaker, an in-class reading and writing session, or a timely film clip. Set aside time in the final class or two to reflect and connect knowledge learned through the entire course.

2. Class presentations: puff or powerful?

I overheard a student talking on his cell, saying that his classes were “done” except for presentations. His comment got me thinking. Ten-minute presentations by everyone in class can be an exciting time for the student presenting, but they can be a bore fest for the rest of the class. What are students doing while they are not making their own presentations? Make sure they are engaged listeners, interacting, taking notes, and genuinely learning from the experience.

There is nothing worse than sitting through amateur PowerPoint presentations. Give the students guidelines and resources for making effective presentations, show them by example, and reward creativity as well as content. Also, consider spacing the presentations so they don’t happen all at once. This makes it easier to thoughtfully integrate them into the readings or class content.

3. Class “products” may be suitable for public viewing.

Consider the possibility of creating a larger audience for student work. If students are producing new knowledge, are there others who might benefit from what your students have learned? Your campus outreach office might have ideas about audiences interested in the knowledge produced in your course. Set up a blog, compile an electronic newsletter, design an informational pamphlet, or find another low-cost alternative for sharing key findings of course research. Consult the institutional review board at your institution for approval. Involve students in all aspects of this work and ensure that they earn credit as authors.

4. Motivate students to keep a portfolio.

Portfolios are commonly used in graphic design, film, writing, and education. Other fields can adapt this way of preserving progress and showcasing representative work. Lead your students (especially advisees) to think about their papers as having a life beyond their immediate purpose. Crisp position papers can be used as writing samples for graduate school admission. Long after graduation, they are evidence of a student’s best work and serve as welcome reminders to professors asked to write a letter of recommendation for a new job prospect.

5. Plan a celebratory event with a take-home message.

Successfully completing a challenging course is a terrific reason to celebrate. When I was an undergraduate, one of my chemistry lab professors invited her class (about 20 students) to her home for dinner. We were treated to a delicious formal dinner, complete with china plates and crystal water glasses. I remember the entire evening, now more than 15 years later. Over the years I have tried to follow this shining example (OK—minus the crystal) at least once a year. We have celebrations in and out of class, and the conversation is as important as the food.

6. Suggest readings and resources for the future.

On the last day of class, hand out a list of suggested readings from your own bookshelf, along with a brief commentary on why you’re recommending them. Keep the students’ background and abilities in mind when making these lists. Give students books you cherish but no longer use (feel-good recycling). Distribute a carefully compiled list of campus or community organizations that will support their desire to learn more or do more. Create a blog where students can share their own suggestions, and keep it open awhile after the semester ends, to see if there is sustained interest in continuing the discussion. Last semester my students took the initiative to begin a book club, and they are reading new nonfiction on social inequality—some of which I may include next time I teach the course.

In sum, when you plan your courses, think about the last days as much as you think about the first days. Work to create memorable experiences that will stay with the students and fuel their continued learning like a good source of protein.

Contact Margaret Walsh at mwalsh@keene.edu.

This entry was originally published on the CFD blog early last year. An issue worth repeating here.

Should Instructors Provide Students with Complete Notes?

October 6, 2008
By Maryellen Weimer

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Course management software programs make it especially easy for instructors to provide students with a set of complete lecture notes. It seems that more instructors are doing this, as witnessed in the regularity with which students ask that the instructor’s notes be posted. But is giving students a complete set of notes a good idea?

Previous findings (like those of Kenneth Kiewra, highlighted some years back in this newsletter) recommend against this practice. Kiewra’s research demonstrated both a process and a product benefit of note taking. The process benefit accrues when students make selections about what to note and when they use at least some of their own words to record that material. When students record lecture content using their words, it becomes easier for them to connect new material with things they already know. This process benefit is lost when students are provided with complete notes. Even so, students prefer teacher notes because they think that having the content in the instructor’s words will better prepare them for exam questions.

The product benefit of note taking obviously comes as a result of having a product, in this case a set of notes, that can be reviewed and studied subsequently. It is generally thought that instructor-provided notes enhance this benefit because students don’t have to worry about losing notes (they are always available online) and because the material in instructor-provided notes is sure to be accurate.

However, a recent study confirms Kiewra’s earlier findings—but with an interesting elaboration. In this study, psychology students received either a complete or a partial set of instructor notes. The partial notes included major headings and titles made up of definitions and concepts, but students needed to write in the additional information. In both cases, students were instructed to download the notes and bring them to class. About three-fourths of the students complied with this directive.

The researchers looked at the impact of the complete versus the partial notes on exam scores, final grades, and attendance. They found that those students who received partial notes performed better on the third and fourth exams and earned significantly higher course grades. They did not find “differential effects of note type on class attendance.” (p. 10)

There was one other “noteworthy” effect. On the final exam, the students who received partial notes performed better on conceptual questions, those questions that involved “application of a theoretical concept to an example that required additional mastery of the material beyond the definition.” (p. Researchers speculate that the students with partial notes had encoded material throughout the semester, and when confronted with the large amount of material they needed to know for the final, they understood more and so had to rely less on memorization.

Based on their findings, these researchers recommend providing students with partial notes. Giving students some notes conveys the instructor’s sensitivity to their concerns about getting the material they need from a lecture. If those notes provide the outline or structure of the material, students can concentrate on understanding the information rather than on trying to figure out how to prioritize and organize the material. Partial notes also clarify what students need to be writing and still retain the process benefit of note taking by forcing students to encode some of the content. The researchers summarize their results this way: “Partial notes … may provide a nice balance in terms of providing students with some notes, which they report as helpful, and still requiring encoding and higher-level processing of information, which will ultimately improve learning and performance.” (p. 11)

Reference: Cornelius, T.L., and Owen-DeSchryver, J. (2008). Differential effects of full and partial notes on learning outcomes and attendance. Teaching of Psychology, 35 (1), 6-12.

Originally published in The Teaching Professor, June/July 2008

Top 8 Websites With Cool Free Tests That Measure Your Personality Traits
Nov. 8th, 2009 By Mahendra Palsule from MakeUseOf.com

Personality TestsOnline, free personality tests have been a favorite pastime in the past two decades, beginning with the mushrooming of personality test websites and followed by the current popularity of Facebook Quizzes. Are you a navel-gazing narcissist? Optimist or pessimist? Argumentative or agreeable? Everyone likes to know how their friends perceive them and these tests often provide a glimpse that can help you introspect.
Needless to say, all free personality tests should be taken with a grain of salt, which is to say, not very seriously, and certainly not as a replacement for professional psychologists. With that disclaimer out of the way, we can now present our hand-picked selection of the Top 8 Websites with cool tests that measure your Personality Traits!

#1: Signal Patterns Big Five Test: The Big Five is the leading industry personality model, shown to work across different cultures, geographies, and languages. It is the model most used in psychology and by human resource professionals. In this model, the personality attributes of a person are “measured” in five traits: Extroversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability and Openness/Intellect. The Signal Patterns test extends the model to 45 facets, each mixing two of the Big 5 traits. The free personality test takes about 10 minutes and you get a nice visual representation of the results. You can also take this test as an application on Facebook or iPhone. From here, you can also take the Parenting Style test to find out what kind of a parent you are.

#2: Human Metrics MBTI Test: The MBTI is the precursor to the Big Five and remains the most widely administered personality test, with about 2 million tests taken every year. This is the granddaddy of all personality tests! According to the MBTI, all people are classified using four criteria: Extroversion – Introversion, Sensing – iNtuition, Thinking – Feeling, and Judging – Perceiving. Your “type” is then made up of four alphabets depending upon your score in these four criteria, for example ESFP or INTP. There is a lot of typology information as well as several other tests available on the web, including websites devoted exclusively to each of the sixteen MBTI personality types. The Myers-Briggs Foundation site is the authentic source for further information.

#3: The Big Five Test: This site has a free personality test based on 45 questions from the Big Five Inventory, with more background information provided here. Rate yourself on a 5 point scale from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree to discover your inclination on five personality dimensions.

#4: Keirsey Temperament Sorter is closely related to the MBTI, and uses four temperaments extended to eight roles to model your personality. KTS is also a popular assessment test, taken by 40 million people across universities and companies worldwide. The site requires a free registration to take the KTS-II test.
Find out if you are an Artisan, Guardian, Idealist or Rationalist with this test. Wikipedia provides further information about KTS, including a comparison with MBTI.

#5: The Color Quiz: Whether you agree with the results of this color quiz or not, this is surely a fun quiz to take! Simply go on choosing the color you like the most, in a two step process. In the results, you get an assessment of your existing situation, stress sources, restrained characteristics, desired objective, and actual problem.

#6: TESTdex Personality & Intelligence Tests: This site offers a large variety of personality tests. You can choose from the Big Five, Jungian, Enneagram, Brain Hemisphere, and others. The nice thing about this site is you can choose your test based on how much time you wish to spend, as you know the number of questions in each test beforehand. Apart from personality tests, you will also find a handful of Intelligence, Amusing, and Compatibility tests here.

#7: Queendom: Land of Tests: Queendom is a website maintained by a company providing psychometric services and psychological assessments. There are tests for everything under the sun on this website – Personality, Love, Health, IQ, Career, etc. Whether you are looking for serious tests for career or relationships, or fun tests for trivia, you will find them here.
Beyond the many tests that make this an attractive site, you will also find that there is an active community, articles, and advice related to all aspects of our life.

#8: Youniverse: This website is run by Imagini, a UK startup, to promote their VisualDNA concept. You can take a series of tests for Personality, Movies, Love, etc. in all of which you choose the best picture that matches a concept like my kind of bedroom, vacation, excitement, etc. It may not offer much psychological insight, but is a pleasant and interesting way to take quizzes. You need to register with the site to see your results. More than 15 million people have taken the VisualDNA test, which Imagini uses to sell VisualDNA Shops widgets for blog and website affiliate sales.

Here’s a link to the November issue of The Teaching Professor. Some great articles are here about alternative approaches to grading, other approaches to first-class-day activities, class participation, PPT based lectures, and the issue of how many tests to give.

http://www.magnapubs.com/issues/magnapubs_tp/23_9/news/602959-1.html

The use of sound effects can make or break a project, but sometimes finding that right, good-quality piece of audio can be difficult.

Flash Kit

Flash Kit’s Sound FX page is one of the best places to download free sound effects. The site has over 7,000 royalty-free tracks available for download You can search the collection manually or browse various categories, like nature or transportation, for the sound you’re looking for. If you come across a desirable sound effect, all of its information, including length, quality, and size, are available and you can easily preview the track before downloading. All tracks are downloadable as WAV, MP3, or Flashtrak files. Feel free to also contribute to the archive yourself by submitting your own original sounds.

Soungle

While Soungle may look and feel like just an audio search engine, it really isn’t. The website is touted as a mega online library and it only searches its impressive growing database of sound effects. Soungle keeps everything easy and straightforward. Search results simply include a preview, description, clip information, and if you like the sound effect, just download it. It’s as easy as that.

Soundboard

Soundboard has a massive supply of thousands of sound effects to choose from. You can either search the collection by keyword or explore the slew of soundboards, with everything from airplanes to circus animal sound effects. Once on a soundboard page, you can listen to the playlist and download whichever tracks you like. All sound effects are MP3 files.

SoundBible

Offering thousands of sound bites and effects, SoundBible is the encyclopedia of free sound clips. The site divides its content into free sound effects or royalty-free sounds. All the sounds are plainly listed with a preview listen button and what license each falls under. Royalty-free sounds consist of Creative Commons and public domain works.

Freesound Project

The Freesound Project is a repository of Creative Commons licensed audio samples. It’s a huge collaborative database of just sounds, so you’re bound to find what you need. You can search through all the content by keyword or browse the popular tags. Of course, you can always contribute to the database by adding your audio samples released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License.

This is a long HOW TO from MakeUseOf, but it’s a helpful one that takes you step by step as you create a calendar you can use month to month and even print.

Step #1 – Create The Header And Title

The first thing you’ll need to do is create the weekday header as well as the month title. This step will demonstrate the merge-and-fit feature as well as how to set the width of multiple columns at once.

First, type in the weekdays in a row across the top, but leave one row blank for your title.  Format the text around 12 point and bold. You’ll notice that some of the weekdays extend beyond the limit of the column.

To fix this, just highlight the weekdays that you’ve typed and then select Format -> Column -> Width – and set the width for around 15 to 20.

Now that you’ve got your weekday header nicely formatted, it’s time to add the current month at the top of your calendar sheet. While you could just manually type in the month at the top of the sheet, this wouldn’t be very efficient, as you’d have to change it every time you wanted to print a new calendar sheet. It makes more sense to create an Excel calendar template that knows what month it is and changes the month title for you.

You do this by choosing any cell above your weekdays, and typing in the formula, “=TODAY()” – which tells Excel that you want today’s date in that field. After you do this, you’ll notice that it looks nothing like the month and it’s formatted all wrong. First, format the title with a font of around 20 to 22 and bold. Then, go into the Format -> Cells -> Number tab, select date and choose the format that you’d like for the month title.

Once you’ve got your title formatted correctly, you’ll still notice that it’s not centered properly and exists only within one cell at the top of the spreadsheet. In other words, it looks odd. To fix this, highlight all of the cells above your weekday header (including the one where your month is displayed) and click on the “merge and center” button.

Clicking “merge and center” turns all of the highlighted cells into one collective cell, and then centers your title in the middle of the highlighted region. Now you’ve got yourself a nicely formatted, automated calendar header.

Step #2 – Create The Calendar Days

The next step to make your calendar template in Excel is to once again use the “merge and center” feature, but this time you’ll merge a few empty cells in order to create one larger cell that represents a single day.

This step is where you’ll build the body of your calendar template, but it’s also the easiest step. First, highlight about 5 or 6 cells, and click on the “merge and center” button. This will form one cell the perfect size for one day on the calendar. Then, while this large cell is highlighted, copy it (control-c or Edit->Copy) and paste it into the other days (or just drag the lower right corner of the box over to the right). This will duplicate your box for every day of the week. Do this for five rows. Your calendar should now look like this:

Highlight your entire calendar click on the borders tool, and select the “grid” so that every grid line shows – essentially “drawing” out your calendar for you. Finally, you can either leave your template as it is (so you can write in the days yourself) and move ahead to step 3, or you can add in the days using Excel. Instead of going through and manually typing in “1″ to “30″, you can save a lot of time by using Excel’s auto-fill feature.

Using this technique, you simply enter in a formula for the first Monday and the second Sunday of the month. For example, if the 1st of the month is on Sunday, you’d enter “1″ into the first Sunday box (and of course nicely format it at 14-point and bold). Then, for Monday you’d type “=” then click on the day before it (A1) and type “+1″.

When you’re finished, highlight the box where you’ve entered this formula, and drag it across the entire week – this will correctly fill in all of the days of the week. Then, do the same thing for the following Sunday, but click on Saturday and add 1.

When you’re done, drag this box down each week so that every Sunday has the same formula (adding 1 to the previous Saturday). Drag the formula from the previous Monday down through the month as well – and then drag from Monday across each week. While it may sound confusing, as you give it a try you’ll find that filling in the days only requires a few clicks and less than 5 minutes.

Step #3 – Printing Your Calendar Template

Finally, you’re ready to print out your calendar to a nice clean paper so you can pin it up on your wall. By this point, your calendar should look like this.

While this looks absolutely fantastic within the Excel sheet, it won’t print properly because the edge of the calendar template goes beyond the printable page, so you’ll end up with parts of it on two pages. To fix this, go to File -> Page Setup, click the Page tab, and make sure it’s configured as shown here.

Set the format for landscape, and fit the entire calendar to 1 page wide by 1 page high. Click OK, and when you do a print preview you’ll find that your calendar template is formatted on one sheet and ready to print!

The next month, just open up the same Excel file (the month will already be correct), renumber the days and click Print – it’s as simple as that!

How about an alternative to watching NCAA on TV? This is just in from MakeUseOf.

NCAA.com. That is the NCAA’s on demand site.

If you browse on over there you will see this:

So if you want to be emailed and have access to all the NCAA games starting from the first round all the way to the NCAA championships simply fill out the form above. Once you do that you will see this confirmation:

Here’s a quick look at what the service has looked like before:

You get the full action on your computer or mobile device and best of all you can hit that magic
boss button at the top right hand side of the screen to minimize your action and display a fake Excel-like spreadsheet.

Another advantage to watching online instead of regular television is that you can click around the web while you are doing it. You can look up facts or even save the video for another viewing.

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