June 25, 2010

Happy Friday developers!

I hope you've had a great week...I'm sure it's been a bit hectic for all of you as the quarter comes to an end and many of you are busy correcting final exams and calculating final course grades. I'm sure you're all looking forward to the long break....maybe you're planning to use this time to really dive into the development of your course. :-)

Just a reminder that the 50% completion point for your developments is Monday. So, next week I'll be reviewing each of your course shells in Blackboard and providing you with feedback on your progress. I can't wait to see what you've done! Please let me know if there is anything specific about your course shell that you'd like me to look at and offer my feedback/assistance/input, etc.

At this point in the development cycle, you should have a pretty good idea of where you want to go with this course - if the 25% completion date was the "bare bones" version of the course, consider this point as "getting some meat" on those bones. :-) Bad metaphor? Sorry! In any case, if you're looking for some creative inspiration to spice up the course content you're designing, one of our online faculty forwarded me a link to a great ebook last week: Web Tools Applied to Teaching. Ok, so the title may not be all that catchy, but this book is short (20 pages) and easy to skim through until something catches your eye....plus, each chapter ends with a great bulleted list of how that particular web tool could be applied to teaching.

Even if you only have 5-10 minutes, I encourage you to take a look at this book...the content is straight-forward and useful - plus, there are tools that the author discusses that you may not have heard of before....and it just may spark the creativity you're looking for at this point in your development.

Have a great weekend everyone! I look forward to touching base with each of you next week.

Kelly