Educational Technologies Newsletter | Issue 4 | November 2008

EdTech Merged with ITS

As a way to create new and dynamic synergies, EdTech has merged with Computing Services to create Information Technology Services. The merger took place in late September and was announced by new CIO, Dave Blum.

What does this mean? On the surface there will be no difference in services provided by Ed Tech, but behind the scenes greater efficiencies will be produced as more transparent lines of communication and teamwork will be formed with the newly merged entities.

EdTech personnel and offices are in the process of moving from Fisher Hall to Mason Hall during November to further enhance teamwork by co-locating all entities and personnel in ITS in the same building. New office assignments in Mason Hall are:
315 - Kevin Givler
317 - Randy Spears
331 - Christiana Cordiano
357 - Marc Menhart

All contact phone numbers and email addresses of the EdTech staff will remain the same.

Carmen Help Docs Online

EdTech has created a set of Carmen Help documents revised for Carmen 8.3  These PDFs cover a variety of topics such as how to Activate Your Course to Adding Content to How to Manage Your Carmen Grades.

All of these documents are 1-2 pages and use a simple step-by-step process.

Access these documents at:
Carmen Help Docs

Food For Thought:

Seven Principles of Effective (Online) Teaching

Best practice in teaching isn’t a new topic in education. It’s one that’s been explored for centuries. When it comes to online learning, many of the same principles that work in traditional, face-to-face classrooms can be transferred to online delivery. The link below takes you to an article where you can review seven foundational best practice methods in education and how they work in distance learning.

Article Link

Online Discussions - Greater and More In-Depth Interation

If you have assignments in which students must hand in papers to complete them, have you considered using the Dropbox feature in Carmen? The Dropbox allows you to set-up a specific folder in Carmen for students to submit assignments.

FIG 1: Carmen Dropbox in Actual Course

There are several advantages to using the Dropbox. First, it creates a central repository for documents to be stored. In other words, papers won’t be lost or have to be toted around. To access the Dropbox assignment all you have to do is log-on to Carmen and go to your Dropbox. Student’s submissions will be stored in the folder you have designated.

It’s a good idea to have students name their assignment in such a way that it can be easily identified – e.g. Smith_Homework1.doc.

The Carmen Dropbox can be set-up to only allow assignments to be submitted at a specific time with a defined cut-off date and time also. This will help you and your students manage deadlines.

We also suggest that students store their assignment in a safe place such as a network drive, a flash drive, or even email it to themselves to act as a back-up.

For Information on how add the Dropbox tool to your Carmen course, contact:
Christiana Cordiano (7-6946) cordiano.2
Randy Spears (8-8468) spears.4

Educational Technologies
Copyright © 2008 The Ohio State University

Feel free to visit our website at http://fisher.osu.edu/services/edtech for more information and resources