Digital Story Telling

Silhouette cartoon figures listening to a storytellerDigital story telling is an instructional practice that is used to tell stories by using computer-based tools. For example, individuals or groups may tell a story by using a variety of multimedia such as audio, graphics, voice, text, and video. For centuries, many people have learned messages from stories that were either passed down orally or written in a book. We now live in such a technological advanced society that learners can now comprehend an intended message by using technological products of the 21st century.

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Tried and True Technologies, Part 2: Google

In August, I posted the first of this “Tried and True Technologies” series. That post focused on how you can use mail merging in Word to make life a little easier. This time around, I figured we should just go for a big one: Google.

Google has a ton of apps—not just Mail, Docs, and Sheets either. They have a full repertoire of tools, called the “G Suite.” From this suite, there are few tools that I love and find incredibly easy to use. In this post, I’ll cover a tool I find to be underused: Google Keep.

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Ockham’s Razor and Online Learning

Rube Goldberg's Self-Operating NapkinI’ve always loved Rube Goldberg’s drawings. They lent a certain sense of the absurd to everyday tasks, creating a ridiculously complicated machine to handle something most of us could do without even thinking about it. Like many young people, I also delighted in building machines similar to Goldberg’s, using every toy at my disposal to produce something that, let’s be honest, may have been more satisfying to design and build than to actually deploy most of the time. A few hours’ work for ten seconds of payoff? Not a big deal, when you’re a kid.

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Spectre and Meltdown and The Art of Communicating Bad News

Newspaper headline "Bad News"In 2017, consumers were frequently on the receiving end of bad news: Wells Fargo continued to grapple with the fallout from fake accounts. Equifax compromised data. Apple slowed down phones.

And to kick off 2018, there are vulnerabilities in computer chips that will affect “almost all computers, servers, cloud operating systems, and cellphones made in the past two decades.” Disheartening, no?

I’ve been thinking about the nomenclature employed in this case. Calling the two vulnerabilities “Spectre” and “Meltdown” accomplishes a couple things. Taken together, the names seem appropriately technology-adjacent, but I was most interested in Spectre, which evokes something elusive, ghostlike, and therefore understandably difficult to detect—which explains how the vulnerability went undiscovered for more than 20 years.

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One Instructional Technology Consultant’s Holiday Wish

Boy Writing LeetterSince it’s the holiday season, and I’m fresh out of deep, pedagogically significant ideas to post, I’m offering this letter-to-Santa missive as my final contribution of the year.

Dear Santa,

I know it’s a busy time of year for you, what with bringing toys and goodies to all the faculty and instructional designers that beavered all year to make online and hybrid learning effective, efficient, and enjoyable, but I have a few things to ask of you.

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Rethinking School

Lately I have been doing a lot of walking and have used that time to catch up on a number of podcasts, including a recent episode of the TED Radio Hour titled Rethinking School. A couple of things in this episode really caught my attention and made me think about what we are doing here at DePaul—and how perhaps we can rethink our own practices.

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Imposter Syndrome, Creation and Negotiation of Identity, and Freshman Fear of Failing

“What if they find out who I really am?”

Every quarter, I meet a new group of (mostly) freshmen students in my First Year Writing courses, and every quarter, there’s one conversation I can’t wait to have. I always make sure that we have a discussion of “Discourse Communities” and what it means to become a “professional” within any of the fields the students might be studying.

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Tips for Accommodating Different Learning Styles

As educators, we should always be looking to meet the needs of accommodating various learning styles.  Often times, as instructors we tend to be creatures of habit, using the same content over and over again. Instructors should be open to using and selecting the appropriate tool that will help students achieve the learning objective. I recently had an instructor that wanted more information or training about how to select the best tool for a particular learning style. I imagine other instructors would have this same question. So here goes. Continue reading

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Manipulating Learning with Tools and Rules

Three months ago, I published a blog entry called “Summer Math Class with Khan Academy: A Case of ‘Manipulated’ Learning”. Ever since then, I have tried a few more rounds of manipulation on my IRB-free research objects—my two kids. As a proud mother of manipulation, I’d like to report on a couple of cases of manipulating learning—and behavior—with tools and rules.

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Creating Safe Environments for Difficult Conversations

A few weeks back I attended the Fall Forum on Teaching and Learning. This year the theme was Race & Social Identity. This is obviously a very important topic—especially given  the polarizing climate that we currently find ourselves in. The Keynote speaker, Terrell Strayhorn, spent a fair amount of time talking about how to create environments in our classrooms that are safe and welcoming for students who come from diverse backgrounds of experiences.

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