Cool Tools to Keep You Organized

In our CUTL 5106 course Advancing Teaching and Learning with Technology we benefited from a presentation by Information Literacy Librarian Ingrid Iton on Using ICT Tools for Professional Development and Research (and Teaching). It was a great introduction to the wide range of resources that are available via the Campus Library's network, including introducing the new UWI-wide information portal UWIlinC.   This new portal, provides one point of access to information resources from across the English-speaking Caribbean in all formats including UWI's intellectual output, subscribed resources (electronic journals, databases, electronic books) and the catalogues for all four UWI campuses. To check out the portal, CLICK HERE.

On the subject of tools that support professional development and research by helping you to keep you organized, I thought I would share two of my favourites, DROPBOX and EVERNOTE.

DROPBOX:
With dropbox, you never again have to worry about forgetting your USB drive/flash drive at work with that document you wanted to work on (or forgetting to email a file to yourself)!  With Dropbox, you save your documents in a cloud application which allows you to access them from anywhere that you have access to the Internet.  You can download dropbox to all your computers and mobile devices (for you IPad, Iphone and BB users), and any files saved to the dropbox on one device will be automatically synchronised to all your devices.  For a more comprehensive overview of the tool, CLICK HERE for a review by TechGeek.  To set up a Dropbox account and download the app, CLICK HERE.


EVERNOTE
Evernote is promoted as a program designed to make your life easier. It is one of a number of  web-based tools (another popular one being OneNote) that allows you to keep and organise notes in one program that syncs to just about any device, making it easy to access your notes from anywhere.  For a student, these might be lecture and study notes; for faculty, they might be notes on research projects, course notes or even "Notes to self".  Notes can be in text format, audio or video. You can even add your own handwritten notes if you use a tablet; add images that you take with your mobile phone or other digital device; add links directly from  relevant web sites or send email messages directly to your Evernote folders which are called notebooks etc. The idea is that you create notebooks for all the categories of notes you are going to keep, and then you can easily "throw" notes into those notebooks ( or access them) from your home computer, your work computer, or your mobile devices once you have Internet access.  For a full overview of the tool here's  link to the source, the Evernote site where you can setup and account!

Would "Flipping the Classroom" Work for Your Course?

 "Andrew P. Martin loves it when his lectures break out in chaos."  The "chaos" usually results from his implementation of the teaching strategy know as "flipping", being implemented in a number of college classrooms, particularly in North America.  As the term implies, "flipping" involves the inversion of what one would expect  to happen in the traditional college lecture. Activities that would normally be done as "homework" are done in class, and much of what would traditionally be covered in the lecture is done by students outside of the classroom, often supported by technology.  "Flipping ... takes many forms, including interactive engagement, just-in-time teaching (in which students respond to Web-based questions before class, and the professor uses this feedback to inform his or her teaching), and peer instruction."  Some (both instructors and students) love it, some hate it, but apparently, a growing body of research, is showing that the method results in "more learning."

Read the full article which appeared recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education following a Teaching and Learning Conference at Harvard University where "flipping" was a regular buzzword." http://chronicle.com/article/How-Flipping-the-Classroom/130857/.  After you read the article, share your thought.  Would/could  "flipping" result in "more learning" in your course?  Would it be feasible? Why ever not????