Upcoming Faculty Workshops

and Training Activites in the CIT Lab

- November 2009 -

Mon., Nov. 9: 1:00 am - 4:00 pm in the CIT (Wallace 222)

Faculty Introduction to WebCT: A Non-Geek's Guide to WebCT (3 hours)

This workshop should be taken before you take any of the five hands-on workshops that follow. It provides an overview of Web Course Tools (WebCT), the software program we use on campus to create and maintain web sites specialized for teaching.

The workshop is subtitled "The Non-Geeks' Guide To WebCT As A Teaching Tool" because the focus is on pedagogy not geekagogy. The aim is to provide you a non-technical explanation of ways WebCT can support your classroom teaching.

We begin by considering some pedagogical reasons you might want to use the six WebCT components most popular with instructors:

an online syllabus
a course handouts page
course-specific email
a course discussion area
the tool for making online quizzes and surveys
and the online gradebook.

We follow the overview with some hands-on exploration of the six tools in realistic teaching contexts so that you can get a feel for how they match up with your own teaching needs. And we end with information on where and how you can learn more, if you are interested.

No previous experience with WebCT is required for this workshop. If you want to attend, please send an email to Dr. Daryl Grider at griderda@wvstateu.edu or call me at 766-5702 and I'll reserve a place for you.

Wed., Nov. 11: 1:00 pm - 2:15 pm in the CIT (Wallace 222)

WebCT Syllabus Workshop

In this workshop you will learn how to set up the WebCT Syllabus page and import an already existing syllabus as an Adobe pdf file that can be read with the free Acrobat reader. Students will then be able to go online and check the course syllabus at any time and with any computer (on campus or off) from which they can access the Internet. Students will also be able to save the file to their own computers or print it exactly as you have formatted it.

You will also learn how easy it is to make corrections and additions to your syllabus once you have learned how to place it on your course site. You will simply contiune to edit it as a normal document in MS Word. Then when you have made changes, you save the revised syllabus again as a pdf file. Then you load the new syllabus pdf file to your course site and save it over the previous file, a process that takes less than two minutes!

By using a "live" syllabus on WebCT, you can avoid having to wait for "contact time" with students in order to communicate crucial changes, additions or deletions to course business. The Course site lets you go to them without leaving your office.

The suggested prerequisite for this workshop is completion of the WebCT Introductory Workshop or some previous experience with a version of WebCT. Although we gladly accept walk-ins, if you know you are going to attend attend, please send an email to Dr. Daryl Grider at griderda@wvstateu.edu or call me at 766-5702 and I'll reserve a place for you.

Wed., Nov. 11: 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm in the CIT (Wallace 222)

WebCT Course Handouts Using WebDAV Workshop

In this workshop you will learn how to create an area where you can place all your course handouts in formats that your students can download to their own computers. Consequently, your students will be able to get any handout they need outside of class, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, without needing to call on you.

Constructing the Course Handouts area will require that you learn how to use a WebCT tool called the Content Module. To make the effort easier, you will also learn how to drag and drop files to your course site by making use of WebDAV.

If you need (or think you may need at some point) to load large numbers of files to one or more of your course sites, justing learning to use WebDAV may repay you many times over for the time you spend in this workshop. WebDAV (web-based distributed authoring and versioning) is small, specialized program for loading files and folders from the computer desktop to a website directory. Once it is linked to your WebCT course site, it is possible to overcome the WebCT restriction that only allows one file to be uploaded at a time. In this workshop, you will learn how to do the one-time-only setup for WebDAV necesaary for each course site, a 'workaround' that will allow you to drag-and-drop multiple files and even whole folders from your desktop to the directory of each of your WebCT class sites.

Thurs. Nov. 19: 1:30 pm - 4:30 pm in the CIT (Wallace 222)

WebCT Discussions Area Workshop

The Discussions Area is one of the most popular and widely used of all WebCT Tools. It is flexible enough to be used for everything from whole class discussions to small group projects to individual private journals (the contents of which are visible only to you and the journal writer). In this workshop, you will get practice in setting up a variety of public and private areas (called Topics) and will learn the strengths and limitations of each as tools for teaching and learning.

You will also get hands-on practice creating and posting Messages to Topic areas, experience in reading and managing Messages, and practice organizing Messages and Topics. And you will learn to use the time saving features of the WebCT Discussion area: the Search, Compile, and Download functions.

The Discussions are can be expecially useful when you want to create parallel, independent, small group discussions. When you break the class into smaller groups, the discussions in those groups are private: each group will only see the postings by its group members. So, for instance, the same discussion topic is far less likely to be exhausted before members on one group have contributed something.

You may be wondering about the purpose and utility of the Search, Compile, and Download business. In essence, these are time-saving ways for you to sort out individual student contributions to discussions when you: (1) need to see if they are keeping up or (2) need to assign a grade for discussion participation.

Fri., Nov.. 20: 11:00 am - 12:00 noon in the CIT (Wallace 222)

Training on How to Use Turnitin, Our Licensed Online Plagiarism Detection Site

This workshop will get you set up with a Turnitin account and walk you through the process that will allow your students to submit assignments to the site for review. This review determines if they have properly identified and given credit for the words and ideas of others in their assignments.

You can have your students' work compared automatically against three types of Turnitin databases: (1) Internet sources, (2) traditional published books and articles, and (3) all the students papers ever submitted to Turnitin, not just at WVSU and WVSCTC, but at any college or university! Once the comparison is completed you will receive a detailed report of the results.

In the training you will learn (1) how to log on to the Turnitin site, (2) how create a class area within the Turnitin site, (3) how to create course assignment areas within the your class area, and (4) how you (or preferably your students) can submit student assignments for review and (5) how you can interpret the results of that review in the form of the Turnitin Originality Report--a comparison of a student paper against Turnitin's three databases of known sources. You will also learn where to find this training in the form of an online training video, so that you can review it again on your own whenever you want to.

Finally, you will be introduced to the extremely useful Turnitin companion site called Research Resources. The Research Resources site can be used by your students as a tool to avoid plagiarism in the first place.

If you would like to explore the Turnitin site ahead of time, here are some useful links:

The link below will take you directly to the Plagiarism area of the Turnitin site. WARNING: It is easy to get lost in sales pitches on other areas of the main Turnitin main site. They have several other products (their version of an online gradebook, for instance) that they are constantly trying to sell to anyone who wanders in. We don't use any of those products--just the Plagiarism service. The link takes you directly to that page and it is on that page that you will log in once you have your ID and password. And once you have logged in to the working area for Plagiarism the distractions stop.

http://www.turnitin.com/static/plagiarism.html

To visit the extremely useful Companion Research Resources Site aimed at teaching students how to AVOID plagiarizing, click here:

http://www.turnitin.com/research_site/e_home.html

If you would like to fine find the latest online versions of the citation handbook used in your field, go to the URL below and click on citation styles on the left. You'll have to scroll down a ways to get to the links leading to the various handbooks--APA, Chicago, MLA, and so forth.

http://www.turnitin.com/research_site/e_citation.html"

There are no prerequisites for this workshop.

Although we gladly accept walk-ins, if you know you are going to attend attend, please send an email to Dr. Daryl Grider at griderda@wvstateu.edu or call me at 766-5702 and I'll reserve a place for you.

- December 2009 -

Tues., Dec. 1: 1:30 pm - 4:30 pm in the CIT (Wallace 222)

WebCT Quiz Workshop

This workshop will teach you how to create a WebCT quiz from scratch and how to create one using already existing questions from a publisher's test bank. You will be using Respondus, a third party software program. Respondus saves you time by allowing you to create WebCT quizzes and surveys on your own computer, without being logged into WebCT. The finished quiz is then uploaded to WebCT, tested, and set for release to students.

You will also get practice in creating question sets. Questions sets randomized the order in which questions are presented to students. They also can be used to only select a subset of questions from a larger batch of available questions. That subset is also randomly different for each student.

We have a sitewide license for Respondus which allows you to use it both on your office and home computers. You will be shown how to download and install the latest version of Respondus and of its companion program StudyMate, a program for making self-study games (Jeopardy, Flashcards, etc.) from your quiz questions.

Thurs., Dec. 3: 1:30 pm - 4:30 pm in the CIT (Wallace 222)

WebCT Gradebook Workshop

In this workshop you will learn how to set up the WebCT online gradebook. Once you have the gradebook set up, you will learn how to download the WebCT gradebook to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet so that you can maintain your WebCT gradebook offline in Excel.

You then periodically load the grades back up to the WebCT gradebook so that students can view them in their individual My Grades areas. Students see only their individual grades and only if and when you choose to release those grades to them in the “My Grades” area unique to each student. Nobody but you sees all the student grades.

Keeping the grades in Excel is easier, more efficient, and safer than keeping them online. Even if you have no previous experience with spreadsheets, picking up only those spreadsheet basics needed to maintain a gradebook is fairly straightforward (hey, if an English type like me can muddle through it, how hard can it be!).

Unlike the WebCT gradebook, in Excel we can freeze columns (freeze panes) so that student names are always on the same screen as the grades we are working with. And we can more easily use powerful grading formulas such as the Small Function that lets you drop two or more of the lowest quiz or daily grade scores from an average.

The Gradebook is hands down the most popular tool with students. And once faculty learn to maintain the gradebook in Excel, it becomes one of their favorites too.

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