Be on alert!

Conference alert it is! Are you subscribing to any conference alerts websites? This practice is very useful as all of us want to stay professionally active, present our research findings, learn from our colleagues, and network.  Did I mention never missing a submission deadline? Please access my diigo site with conference alerts (by area, country, etc.) and let me know if I need to add another link. Happy conferencing!

Publishing online books with your students

Students can present their work in a variety of formats, ways, and venues (wiki, blog, etc.). Why not books? But let’s even further and explore publishing multimedia books. Please access this blog post by Free Technology for Teachers and learn about three great tools for creating mutlimedia books online. And if you would like to explore more options, go to my diigo list. Happy publishing!

Grading, grading, grading

Typically, teaching is a very rewarding activity. However, there are those times during your semester when grading becomes too intense and stressful… Of course, correctly constructed assessment, rubrics, and availability of tools make your life a little bit more manageable.  Let’s see what we can do next semester to reduce grading headaches! Please start with the diigo collection of resources.

Do you do infographics?

They became quite popular a couple of years ago due to the fact that there are many easy to use and free tools to make them. You will use infographics (information+graphical presentation) to present complex information and data quickly and clearly. You can use infographics for teaching or your students can do them as part of their assignment. To get you started, let’s review the diigo collection on inforgraphics.

Twitter in the University classroom

I met with one of the faculty recently and he shared the idea of his students to tweet during the class (yes, using those  text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length). So, can Twitter be used as an instructional tool? In brief: yes! Want to know how? Please access my diigo collection on the topic and learn (at least) 50 ways Twitter can be used. Happy twitting!

I will be providing more resources on social media in instruction within the next couple of days. Stay tuned.

Search engines for academic and scientific research

We just successfully finished the research week. More work is ahead! There are many tools and technologies which can facilitate the research process. Where do you start? Probably with literature review and environmental scan… Access the latest publication of Emerging Ed Tech presenting search engines to get you started (Google Scholar , CiteSeerx  , GetCITED, Microsoft Academic Research, Bioline, International Directory of Open Access Journals , PLOS ONE, BioOne , Science and Technology of Advanced Materials, New Journal of Physics, ScienceDirect).

SummarizeThis

Ok, let’s admit: we have to do more, read more, process  more information in a shorter period of time. SummarizeThis might be  a simple starting point to make sense of the long article or a web post and deciding if you want to read it in detail. And it is really easy to use: you paste the text into the field and get “just the facts”. Of course you need to exercise your professional judgement… I would not call it a real productivity tool, but it might be quote useful in some cases. Want to try it?