PowerPoint Vs. Prezi

PowerPoint Vs. Prezi

by Landon Phillips

Prezi and Powerpoint both offer excellent solutions to your presentation needs. This video will explain the differences between them, so that you may choose the right tool to meet your goals.

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoJNShAQAnE


Additional Links
Prezi.com

Fostering Innovative Learning

Fostering Innovative Learning

by Hong Kha

Faculty are often asked to foster innovative learning. Well, what does that mean, what does it look like, and what are the desired outcomes? One way to achieve innovative learning is to allow students to be in control of what's important to them. To do this, the faculty role should be shifted towards coaching, guiding, and facilitating instead of providing direct lectures. With this method it becomes challenging for students to sort out what information is important to the course and when they are getting too broad, especially in an introductory course. To address this challenge, I recommend reading the articles "Moving up Bloom’s Taxonomy in an Introductory Course" and "7 Essential Principles of Innovative Learning" to help students achieve higher order thinking skills. The articles suggest that it may be important to cut out a lot of the factual details given in an introductory course. Factual information is often used to memorize and recite on a test and then easily forgotten after the exam is over. Instead of just giving facts to learners instructors should replace those lessons with lessons that connect concepts and transferring knowledge to practical activities. 

Articles:

"Moving up Bloom’s Taxonomy in an Introductory Course": What’s Being Done: http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-and-learning/moving-up-blooms-taxonomy-in-an-introductory-course-whats-being-done/

"7 Essential Principles of Innovative Learning": http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/02/7-essential-principles-of-innovative-learning/#more-26755

Browser Spell-Check and the Rich Text Editor

by Alan Regan

Using Browser-Based Spell-Check in the Rich Text Editor

A professor from GSEP wrote me asking why spell-check isn't working in Courses. When I asked for more detail, she explained that she was using the Forums tool and while writing a response to a student she couldn't right-click a misspelled word to pull up the browser's spelling suggestions.  When she right-clicks, other options are appearing (Cut, Copy, Paste) but not the spell-check capabilities.

The central issue is that the rich text editor in Courses (powered by Sakai) will display its contextual menu when you right-click on a misspelled word. There is a very easy workaround to force the rich text editor (CKEditor) to display the browser's contextual menu instead. All you need to do is Control+Right-Click the word.  On a Mac, you'd use either Command+Right-Click or Command+Control+Left-Click to accomplish the same goal.

If you use Mozilla Firefox or Apple Safari and need to use the built-in spell-check, this easy workaround will help you spell like a champ.