Some Student Work from this Term's EASL Classes

This is the time of the semester where I get to hear great stories from folks teaching in the EASL classrooms about how well it all went.
For example, in the CLA Perspectives publication at http://issuu.com/auburnliberalarts/docs/2014_15-perspectives/1, on page 5, you see one student commenting on how the EASL classroom experience helped her be more comfortable in boardroom meetings during an internship.  These kinds of "soft" skills may not be found in the course syllabus, but are valuable for students who are heading out into the work force.

student presentation in action

More tangible results of EASL work could be seen in an 18th century literature class where students used the space creatively for original theatre and puppet theatre productions, and quasi museum exhibits.  The Communication class focusing on Health Administration and Communication produced a series of student projects, consisting of posters, flyers, brochures, and PSAs.

18th century puppet show

Student presentation in CMJN

Student presentation in CMJN

And the Music in Physics course's final projects were musical instruments out of non-specialized materials that students collaborated on in the SCC EASL classroom and turned into a reality in a lab with the necessary tools.

Here some of these musical instruments:

Organ from scratch

Harp from scratch

cigar box electric guitar

Some Thoughts about the Recent ELI webinar on Redesigning Learning Spaces

For a couple of afternoons, we participated in this webinar that focused on redesigning learning spaces with different perspectives and dimensions for success.

One suggestion was the development of a learning spaces master plan that is rooted in the campus master plan and the institution's strategic plan.  The goal would be that all learning spaces, formal and informal, are in an inventory and can be assessed for upgrades, renovations, or reuse.  Over time, this would mean that the university needs to allocate resources to make this happen -- which may be a problem.  Currently, budget numbers seem to suggest that 4/5 of budget for upgrading classrooms goes towards technology while only 1/5 goes to furniture.  Indeed, one suggestion was that we should do with less technology as it needs to be replaced more rapidly than furniture.

We need to construct and redesign with brain and how we learn in mind.  We should consider the different levels of comfort zones.  Often, those spheres are seen as the most inner circle being the comfort zone with another circle the learning or growth zone, and moving to the outermost circle being the panic zone.  However, for this discussion, the zones were Intimate, personal, social, and public -- think of the physical space you are in and how close you let what kinds of people get. As one person put it, it is unethical for us to keep teaching in the traditional, teacher-centered way, unethical to keep building learning spaces this way with what we know about how our brains work.

Consider also that we are aiming for the t-shaped student:

T-shaped student

  T- shaped people have two kinds of abilities. The vertical bar of the T represents depth of expertise in a single field (being an engineer, biologist, computer scientist), whereas the horizontal stroke of the T is the ability to collaborate across the disciplines (being collaborative and empathetic)." http://asmarterplanet.com/studentsfor/blog/2013/07/why-do-you-need-to-become-t-shaped-person.html 








One argument about changing learning spaces from teacher to student centered, active learning spaces is that this will have a consequence fewer students per class.  Possibly so, but I believe that students will be more successful, leading to fewer W and F grades, better retention and graduation rates.  Is there research about this out there yet -- some, but not enough as it is of course rather difficult to show that taking a class in one particular space led to a student's increased success through her academic career.

A couple of other interesting ideas

 -- Maker spaces for prototyping are growing in numbers at other universities
 -- innovative library design:  http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/huntlibrary/photosandvideogallery at North Carolina State

 -- I think having tangram tables would be cool --

tangram

Learning Spaces at Auburn University

I have been exploring some other learning spaces at Auburn University, in particular in the College of Veterinary Medicine and in the College of Human Sciences.

The College of Veterinary Medicine has the interesting challenge that they teach all their students of one year as one cohort, which has led them to build four lecture halls, one for each year, and designing these spaces with an eye towards comfort for the students.  In particular, the chairs were chosen by the students as they spend up to eight hours in one of these rooms on any given weekday.
The tiers allow for collaboration because the chairs move.  Each table has power and a microphone (1 per 2 students) that are button activated for easy asking of questions during class.  The cameras can zoom in on any point in the classroom, Lecture or classroom capture is streamlined, using Panopto, and a couple of lamps in the back are on a timer that changes their color when the time in class is coming to an end.

demonstration classroom

control panel in lecture hall

This classroom allows for demonstration in the "arena", with the added functionality that the rows are close enough across from each other, making discussion across the aisles possible.











The control panel for the lecture hall may appear intimidating, but faculty learn quickly which controls apply for their teaching style, keeping the room flexible for all.










The second set of spaces are in Spidle Hall, home of Auburn University's College of Human Sciences.  One of their programs is Interior Design, so it of course makes sense to do something special.  The college found the time and funds to change a couple of student spaces radically, turning one into a computer lab and the other into a work/digital resource room.  In addition to the redesign of those spaces, faculty offices were also redesigned to become examples of different design styles, giving everyone the opportunity to experience how furniture can create different atmospheres.

computer lab floor

The floor of the computer lab is a faux wood floor -- I am thinking this something to consider for the next round of EASL spaces.

computer lab

Each computer has its own individual lighting, allowing for more focused lighting to work on projects.  The walls and the tables are erasable surfaces, with a milky feel to the table tops to cut down on the glare.

Digital Resource room

Students have a variety of sitting options in the Digital Resources room, adding to the flexibility of the space and the experience of different design scenarios.

material column

 The walls are covered with magnetized glassboards and sets of tiles and fabric so that students can experience what these materials feel and look like.  The space also contains multiple sets of lighting that are configured differently to simulate different light situations.

student working corner

materials columns with glassboards

This is one of the faculty offices, designed with a Mediascape table for collaboration.

faculty office with Mediascape

Educause Day 4

The final day of the conference brought innovation, eportfolios for teaching and a rude wake-up call from SUNY.

"Student-Empowered Learning Analytics Through the Quantified Self" described an experiment that is going on at Purdue right now -- and they are looking for others to join in.  The idea is essentially that we are changing certain kinds of behavior through data analysis:  exercise behavior, spending behavior, consumption behavior, Apps like fitbit, vessyl, run keeper, checky either allow us to enter data or set these apps up to collect data automatically -- and the analysis of this data then allows us to make changes to our behavior, whether that is changing exercise routines, running routes, how often we check our phones.
The idea at Purdue is to apply these principles to student learning behavior -- have students provide data on when and where they work on different parts of an assignment and how they feel about their accomplishments.  Then the assignments are graded, and the students received data on how much time they spent on different parts of the assignment (research, writing, etc) and how their amount of work stacks up to what other students have done and how their grades stack up as well.  The idea is that students can compare themselves to other students in similar learning situations (of course anonymously) and improve their learning behaviors through this comparison.  An interesting idea!

Questions raised were self reporting issues, motivational issues, when would faculty see the data.

"Breaking through Bottleneck Courses:  CSU's Proven Course Redesign Program" showcased what the California State University system is doing to encourage faculty to redesign courses that have a high D, W, or F rate -- the success of the program has shifted emphasis on active and engaged learning, has seen a drop in these rates, and is allowing faculty to show off their ideas through their teaching eportfolios.You can see some at http://courseredesign.csuprojects.org/wp/eportfolios/

The final keynote was deliverd by the Chancellor of the SUNY system, discussing that system's attempts to come to terms with the gaps in achievement they are seeing and the huge number of students who are not successful in their education, starting from 9th grade onwards.  the numbers are staggering, and I was hearing some of our international colleagues gasp when they saw how few students make it all the way from 9th grade to successful college graduation.

Educause Day 3

The exhibit hall was of course busy as usual, and I did find a couple of things that were interesting, most notably SMARTkapp

SMARTkapp sample

and Timestream

SMARTkapp has SMART technology embedded into a glassboard that allows for easy and clear sharing of what is written on the board through scanning a QR code. Now, it is of course as easy to just take a picture of the glassboard and share this via your phone, but the image may not be as crisp, the lighting not be optimal.  In addition, through the sharing of the QR code, you can get others to view what is going on on the board in real time, even though they may not be in the same room..  Check it out at smartkapp.com.







Timestream ( http://www.ntrepidcorp.com/timestream/ )is a timeline software that allows for more complex display of connections, filtering, searches and other interesting ways of bringing a historical, political or other time line to life.  People can work jointly on a project, turning this into a potentially powerful tool.  I want to share this with a couple of faculty members in History and Political Science for starters to see what they think of  it.  Let me know if you are interested

My presentations for Wednesday covered Student success, digital collections, a history lesson, and open textbooks

"Student Success is Everybody's Business" was presented by Student Affairs, Assessment and IT folks from University of South Carolina and Grinnell (Carleton College could unfortunately not come).  The main take aways for the presentation were that different groups of stakeholders need to agree on a common vocabulary to ensure that communication across multiple units is successful.  Their primary focus was on gathering data and assessing student performance and life outside the classroom, closing the loop between sending someone to advising, showing how this improved a grade, showing how extracurricular activities impact student performance, and making this data available to those folks who can benefit from it the most.  I am not sure that I heard them say students would have access to the data -- but I may just not remember correctly.
The common language would also allow to break through those data silos that we are all so familiar with.  One key recognition was that if we approached student records similar to health records, we can learn from how health care systems deal with information and how they make use of it in various settings, for different outcomes.
They mentioned Angela Duckworth's TEDtalk "The key to success? Grit":  http://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_the_key_to_success_grit as inspiration for some of this work
Their list of points to remember from this session were

• Mine your data
• Develop near real time alerts
• Predictive modeling with right data streams
• Train people to create rich records and to close the loop
• Design and build systems that fit your institution
• Create systems that resonate and scale
• Work together because student success is everybody's business.

"The Browning Letters Project" covered the history of the digitization of the Browning letters, in particular at Wellesley and Baylor.  The key takeaway really was that folks who have valuable, original resources need to consider working together to allow a broader access to such resources through an open access, web based interface to make life easier for everyone.  I had not thought about the issue of insurance when sending 19th century documents via snail mail...

The keynote by Doris Kearns focused on lessons from her book The Pitbull on Leadership Lessons of History from the American Presidents..  Her stories, and she is a great story teller, centered around various obstacles Lincoln, the Roosevelts, and Johnson had to overcome -- and how they did this.  Quite entertaining.
One of the things I did not realize was what effect the GI bill from June 22, 1944, had on the creation/widening of the US middle class.  She stated it as a creation of the middle class.

My highlight presentation of the day, though, was the SUNY talk on open textbooks.  The talk focused on shifting library responsibilities from curating other content to creating and curating their own content - -and the first step was a grant to create free open digital textbooks to save the students of the SUNY system money.  The numbers speak for themselves, as they are spending about $3000 on payment for the faculty who writes the manuscript, with the help of a librarian and instructional designer.  Librarians also find peer reviewers, copy and manage edits and publish the final book.  While the books themselves are not necessarily perfect at this point (eg, accessibility was apparently not considered, and interactivity was deemed not necessary), the process is rather straightforward and the benefits appear to be quite obvious.
http://opensuny.org/omp/index.php/SUNYOpenTextbooks
Note that these are not necessarily texts for large enrollment classes -- but small classes, specialized topics also need textbooks, and these tend to be just as expensive as interactive, 3d Biology or World History books.

And then there is my 60 second giraffe that I built in the exhibit hall...

Lego giraffe

Educause Day 2

My second day at last week's Educause was a busy running around from one session to the next, with my poster presentation in the middle of the day, some new cool ideas from the exhibit hall, and some very interesting ideas from other institutions.

Lots of big infographics with various types of information on them are sprinkled throughout the conference:

Faculty and early Warning

Numbers on Engagement

The day started off with a key note by Clayton Christensen, Professor at the Harvard School of Business and one of the thinkers about disruptive innovations.

Now, if you have been at Educause before, you have heard talks about disruptive innovation before, but he did give it a different spin with some memorable pointers such as -- disruptive innovations come from the bottom, so don't look at the Tessla car but at the GEMcars and golf carts as innovation drivers.  It is not a question about being better than the competition but about being better than nothing.
Modular architecture allows for innovation, while proprietary architecture allows for profit - the mix of both is driving a lot of successful innovations.
Outsourcing often sets disruptive in motion disruptive business model liquidation - his example is how Acer chipped away at Dell's personal computer business until only the brand was left -- and at that point, Acer could create its own brand and be profitable.
His example of distance education was interesting -- a colleague had to teach a class distance because of special circumstances.  he used a button device for his students -- button 1 when pressed indicated to him that this student wanted to contribute to the threat of discussion, button 2 indicated to him when a student wanted to start a new discussion threat, and button 3 indicated that someone wanted to move on.  While the class was synchronous, they were in a very different place, and this tool allowed for the instructor to gauge the direction of the discussion.  In addition, he used one of the little robots on wheels with an ipad attached to it so that he could facetime into class and be mobile on the robot.

The session Mobility without Security gives you a failing Grade, presented by The Ohio State university and the University of North Carolina, and sponsored by Dell, discussed the well-known dilemma of wanting to make work easy and convenient to folks without sacrificing security -- and the trouble to find a happy medium.  While their final solution was a Dell product, they did discuss some Mobile Device Management issues and reminded us that daily uploads to Dropbox are in the millions -- and there is really nothing we can do about this.

The discussion round on Games and Learning was quite interesting and introduced to me a number of techniques and tools.
1.  To manage discussion in a room with a few vocal folks, or silent folks:  Give them each two two-colored chips.  If they want to to contribute to the ongoing discussion they hold up one color, of they want to start something new, they hold up the other color.  Once they contribute, they turn in one chip; no more chips, no more turns, giving the more quiet folks in class to chime in.,  This could be turned into a game of who all can get rid off all the chips by the end of class.
Just Press Play, developed at Rochester:  https://play.rit.edu/ is an online tool that allows folks to work through a library quest or other student-life related processes in a game-like fashion.
One person talked about using the game Pandemic:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic_(board_game) for Pharmacy courses.
A couple of folks discussed Aris Games, an open source platform, for developing online games:  http://arisgames.org/ with others mentioning http://www.blender.org/.
Someone has developed an online game about surviving an online course, with zombies as apparently everything works better with zombies these days (or with bacon).
One interesting observation about games and rules.  Many of us grew up with the sense that we follow the rules of the game in order to get the most out of the game -- but we see kids deliberately break the rules of online games, getting out of the frames - how does that affect gaming?  The most famous pop-incident may be in the second Hunger Games novel when Katniss shoots the sky and breaks the dome, the frame of the game.

And of course then there was my poster session:  https://www.educause.edu/annual-conference/2014/things-you-may-not-think-when-designing-21st-century-classroom

Educause, Day 1

I just came back from Educause but did not really have a lot of time to blog while I was there, so I am going to do this now, one day at a time.

My first day covered a couple of very useful workshops focused on wireless technologies in teaching situations.  One session helped us explore various wireless presentation systems while the other session helped us work through some of the issues of having a common mobile platform on one's campus.

Eric Kunnen, Associate Director of eLearning and Emerging Technologies, Grand Valley Stare University,  and Kevin Reeve, Head Explainer of Things at Utah State University facilitated a great session on "Wireless Presentation Systems:  Ad Hoc and Enterprise Solutions for the Interactive Classroom."

One of the hardware solutions

They set up the space into multiple groups with each table cluster having access to a monitor or projector, and each group got to test the wireless presentation systems that were set up at a particular table, write on a white board pros and cons, and then move on to the next table.  All in all, we tested nine different solutions.  The biggest drawbacks for all of them is that they do not easily, if at all, integrate into an enterprise wireless infrastructure, though Aruba Clearpass is making this a little easier now.  The next set of drawbacks was that a system would work well with one OS but not others, and as we had a nice mix of devices at each table, we tested from these various perspectives.  One of the more promising solutions appeared to be Mersive Solstice, as it was rather intuitive to use and worked well on all devices.  Systems ranged from Hardware based solutions, like Apple TV, Crestron, Air Media and Screenbeam, over Software based solutions, such as AirServer, Reflector and Solstice.  We did not get a chance to test Projector based solutions, offered by EPSON and NEC.

The second seminar focused on "A Roadmap for Using Mobile Technology to Transform the Teaching and Learning Experience," and took us through the considerations and planning process that Anderson University went through for implementing iPads as their common mobile platform.  The discussion covered the faculty perspective, represented through faculty from English and Art, upper administration through the Provost, instructional design through the Center for Innovation and Digital Learning, and information technology, through their CIO.  The worksheets were helpful, and their discussions of faculty development, inclusive conversations, and ideas for teaching were very helpful.

Media Coverage of EASL classrooms

The Open House on September 19, with about 50 folks coming by to check out what the Science Center Classroom EASL looks like also led to some media coverage.

The room was featured in the OA News on the front page of the Saturday, September 20 session.  You can see the text here:  http://www.oanow.com/news/auburnuniversity/article_8b9a47be-45d0-11e4-ba81-001a4bcf6878.html, featuring Lynn Mandeltort in Chemistry.  We also got an article in the Auburn Plainsman:  http://theplainsman.com/bookmark/25909833/article-Students%20learn%20in%20new%20interactive%20classrooms#.VDxHlc9GVXc.facebook

We also got some tv news coverage, featuring Katherine Perry, Mathematics, and Robert Locy, Biological Sciences and their showcasing of how to learn and teach in the EASL room.  The story (http://www.wtvm.com/story/26641479/au-unveils-innovative-active-learning-classroom) was carried by multiple local tv stations:

• WLOX-TV
• WAFF 48 News
• WTVM-TV
• WDAM Channel 7
• WSFA 12 News
• WFSG FOX 54
• WALB.com
• My FOXAl.com
• Mississippi News Now
• Wmc Tv

Thanks to Roland Dewitt, we also have some photo coverage:

Katherine Perry interviewed by the media

Faculty exploring the teaching station

John Gorden explaining the classroom technology

Lynn Mandeltort teaching from her phone

Engaged faculty

Stuart Loch discussing how he teaches Physics

CLA does Active Learning and Eric Mazur -- and we learned a lot

Today, we had a full day of talking about active learning and, student engagement.

The morning panels focused on learning spaces and how to teach in our EASL spaces.  Faculty gave some great ideas, and we had a lively discussion centering on group work, evaluation, pitfalls, and triumphs.
The Pearson session discussed Mylabs but also some of the new products Pearson is introducing, in particular Pearson Writer, a program that allows for automated grading and Pearson Revel, a program that connects textbooks more immediately with reinforcing activities.  The automated grading started sparking some interesting discussions in the room and on our backchannel. (We used padlet for our back channel for the folks who did not want to use twitter.)
Our final panel focused on engaging students in an online environment -- great teaching suggestions that can also help in face-to-face or hybrid classes, such as creating lists, for example a play list of musical pieces with explanation why these pieces are still relevant today.

Eric Mazur's talk focused on assessment -- and how we have to rethink assessment if we want to give our students better learning experiences.  We need to move away from grading for the sake of rankings; we need to move away from problems that the students memorize the way to find the solution for rather than exploring how to get to the solution.  We need to create assignments where the answers cannot be found on Google; we need to create projects where students learn knowledge because it leads them to the solution of the project -- projects as Trojan horses.

If you have missed Eric Mazur's talk, here is the Youtube link:  www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHs8rc6lBqM&feature=youtu.be

And if you are wondering what Mazur is telling students -- http://youtu.be/xkduVtwcr4A -- I am hoping that some of the students will take his words to heart and take ownership of his learning.

Looking forward to CLA does Active Learning and Eric Mazur

Some of you may already know that Eric Mazur is coming to Auburn University on September 19 to talk about active learning.

We have a full plate for that day, especially if you are in our College of Liberal Arts.  In the morning, three panels will discuss active learning and learning spaces, in connection with Pearson, and how to do it online.  Our panelists come from multiple departments across the college.

And at 12:30 we have lunch starting, and Dr. Mazur's talk at 1pm.

If you have not registered for the event -- here is the link -- hurry up because we need to get the head count to the caterers early next week.

http://cla.auburn.edu/activelearning/ provides you with more information and the link to both Eric Mazur and to the registration page.

Second EASL Room is in Full Swing

Auburn University's second EASL room has been open for business since the beginning of this term.  After two weeks of classes and some minor glitches, faculty and student responses have been very positive.

SCC EASL in action

The room, located in SCC118, holds 72 students at 12 tables with 6 students at each table.  Each table is connected to a Christie Brio Presentation system and a large monitor so that students can not only connect their own devices (laptops, Androids, iOS) to the monitor for sharing but also can use the digital white board that is part of the Brio system.
The instructor can choose to push content to all monitors at the same time or give students control over how they want to use their own monitor, and glassboards surround the spaces for additional writing spaces.
The classes taught in the room this term are Honors Biology, Chemistry, and Physics, Math Education, Physics in Music, Genomics, and a couple of upper level Biology courses.
One of the classes, the learning community of disease hunters, also participates in the ipad pilot, so all students have a university-owned ipad, making it much easier to get everyone comfortable with the technology in the room.

Ipads: Online Resources and Tips for Teaching with Ipads

Here are a couple of other useful references/tips I gathered during our Apple workshops:

Online Resources

You may not know how to get started and may not have the money to get the Apple experts to come to town.  No worries -- if you go into the itunes Store, in the iBooks section, you will find a bunch of useful reference guides created by Apple for free.  Look for the Apple Learning Series with such giudes as Pages fo iOS, Keynote for iOS, iPhoto for iOS.

Especially for Math and the natural sciences, check out the CK-12 iBooks that give a whole range of materials, examples, and ideas for those subject areas.

Tips for Teaching:

How do you get your students (all with their mobile devices) onto the same web page at the beginning of class?  Post on the classroom door a QR code, for example:

 so that students can scan this code on their mobile device with one of the free apps out there to do this.  That way, everyone is indeed on the same page.

Apps to do this would be, for example:
QR Reader for iphone or Scan - QR Code and Barcode Reader.

In order to create these codes yourself, check out a site like http://www.qrstuff.com/.


When you create an iBook, keep in mind that a tool like Google Sketchup allows you to create 3d files and images that can be embedded into your iBook -- together with your videos, text, image galleries, self-quizzes, and graphs.

If you want some more ideas about student learning, check out https://challengebasedlearning.org/pages/welcome for Challenge-based learning -- the key difference between it and problem-based learning is that PBL tends to stop with coming up with a solution, while CBL makes you test whether the solution actually works -- it challenges you.

Australia -- the people on the trip

lunch outside

Heather on the hill

Shannon and Emily petting the 'roo

Brittney Herring holding an owl at the Wildlife Preserve near the Blue Moutnains

Emily Grace

Heather with coala

Jo, Keith, Wiebke, Heather on the way to the Australia-South Africa soccer match

Ben and Ellen at lunch in Tasmania

Sheri Downer

enjoying the view in Tasmania

Heather and Heidi

Lee and Jo

enjoying fish and chips

at the Three Sisters

ready to go

Bonnie Sullivan is an assistant principal for the Elmore County Public School System. She has earned a bachelors in Early Childhood Education, masters in Elementary Education, Instructional  Leadership Certification, and Education Specialist in Elementary Education. She has experience in teaching second and fourth grade. 

Learning more about Creative Commons and itunesU

I have been working with a fun bunch of faculty, support folks and Apple experts these last few days, and learning bits and pieces more about how to use various iOS apps and what to consider when starting a course in itunes U.

So, here some of may take-aways"

Copyright, Fair Use Creative Commons

One of our concerns when putting content online is of course the responsible use of material/content created by other folks.  As our amazing Apple educator pointed out to us, it is easy for us to tell students that they should not use other people's materials for their own work, but even better if we model this behavior for them.

Consider this for a moment - how many of us go online and find the first image that works for us when we put together a presentation for class?  And do we then always have at the bottom of the slide or at the end of the presentation an attribution to the source?  One way of modeling to our students responsible use of other folks' content is to show very explicitly where we get our content from, and, possibly even more important, make sure that this content is marked Creative Commons.

Creative Commons image, Kristina Alexanderson, flickr

One web site that makes it quite easy to find Creative Commons content is CC Search (http://search.creativecommons.org/).  This search engine allows for keyword searches across multiple creative commons areas and for targeting particular kinds of media in this search.  Try it out and see if the search results work for you.

Notice then, that each of the items that come up through this search have a Creative Commons license.  These come in different levels and give you a sense of what kind of use you can get out of the material.  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ gives you an overview over the options.  These options are available to you as well, so if you believe that your content should be out there for other folks to use in some shape or form, get it out there in this kind of way.

Itunes U

You may have gone into itunes U in the past to marvel at the courses and podcast series that are being produced by other universities around the world.  Itunes U is a great spot to get a free course or free materials about a subject matter that otherwise may not be that easily available to you.  What is the course or subject you are going to pick?

What you may not know is that you can also design your very own itunes U course.  While it may not be as easily distributed if you cannot connect it with a particular institution (and I am sure it is worth checking out if your institution already has an itunes U presence), you can still send folks an enrollment code.  To get started, go to https://www.apple.com/support/itunes-u/course-manager/ as this is the place that gives you an overview what is possible and the starting point to create your own course.  While you can just go ahead and click on Creating a New Course, it may make more sense for you to map out what you want your course to be like.  Best course of action:
1.  Look at the organization of some other itunes U courses.  Note that they all have an Overview, Posts, and Assignments.  Map out what you want to put into these different chunks.
2.  Think of Overview as the Outline, Posts as what you want to say to your students, and Assignments as what you want your students to do.
3.  Remember that you can embed into assignments web links (either off a regular web site or from other parts of itunes, including chapters out of books or segments out of other courses), your own materials, links to apps, links to video and audio files.
4.  You have to have a square image of yourself that is at least 300x300 pixels and a square image for your course that is at least 600x600 pixels -- so make both of these images a little larger than needed to be on the safe side.
5. You can add up to 4 other designers to your course so that you do not have to do this all alone.

Learning stuff about my ipad

I am sure there are plenty of web sites out there explaining all the great features you find on your ipad, so I am not going to cover everything in great detail, but just a few things I learned about today that I had not discovered on my own.

You may have been wondering how folks can send emoticons and other icons from their iOS devices.  Turns out this is one of the keyboards you can select.  You find the keyboard called Emoji under Settings, General, Keyboard, Keyboards.  Select any and all languages you think you may use at some point, including Emoji.  Now, when you are in an app, like Notes or email, and you want to change the keyboard to, say, German for an Umlaut, or Emoji for an icon, click the globe key on your keyboard (you will only have this as an option if you have more than one keyboard selected) to toggle to the next keyboard layout.  And then emote away.

You may have also been wondering about how you can have your iOS device read to you.  Under Settings, General, Accessibility, you have Voiceover that allows you to have the device read to you.  You also have Speak Selection in this area that, when enabled, will highlight a word when it is spoken.  This may be useful for folks with reading difficulties

For the ones among us who need to be able to increase the size of items, you have two choices.  If you simply want to adjust the default size of text displayed, you will find an option for adjusting Text Size under Settings, General, Accessibility, called Larger Text.  Under Accessibility, you also have the ZOOM functionality, though it may take some getting used to this one.

If you want to delete something you have written, a vigorous shake will Undo.

If you want to be able to dictate notes, make sure you have Siri turned on.  Siri can also be customized under Settings, General -- you can change accent, Gender and a couple of other things about Siri.

If you have too many apps on your iOS device, remember that a swipe from the top brings up the Search bar - -and this is a search that also looks at content, not just at the name of the app.  Also, if you have too many apps, you can pull them into categories - -and you can have multiple screens within one category.

You may have heard that you need to close your apps in order for the ipad not to lose its battery life so quickly.  This is a myth. Apps do not use any power unless they are on the screen.  The only exceptions are the Music app and some mapping apps.  However, if one of your apps does not behave the way you want it, closing it out completely will force the app to restart.  To do this, double-click on the home button (the button that allows you to shift between apps), and when you see the apps that are open on your screen, drag the misbehaving one to the top to see it disappear out of the list.

Australia: Last and Longest Day...

and lessons learned from traveling

The final day was a very long day of traveling.  Forget June 21 as the longest day of the year; this year, it was for our group June 15.  We started out at 8am, June 15, left towards California, landed after 13 hours flight at 8am, June 15, and just kept going until we were home at 10pm, June 15, in Atlanta.  That turned our usual 24 hour day into pretty much a 39 hour day!

waiting for the last flight

waiting for the last flight

Here some lessons learned from traveling -- if you know that the location you are going to has a washer and dryer, pack less.  And I mean considerably less, so that you will not need to buy a third suitcase at the end of the trip because you already started with very full suitcases from the start.

If you really need a hair dryer and other electric devices, remember that not only the plugs but also the voltage are different -- I think our group killed at least 4 hair dryers. It is highly likely that your hotel will have one in the room, or that you can borrow one.

If you are on a budget, take the budgeting sheet from Study Abroad seriously -- most developed countries are considerably more expensive than the US, so you will spend more money, whether you like it or not.

Pack and wear comfortable shoes -- flip flops will not work after mile 3 of walking.

Be adventurous -- try new foods, talk to people around you, go to a museum or a sports event, even if this is not your usual thing.