I was testing out my skills as an admin on Flipgrid yesterday, and was reminded of all the emails that can/will bombard students as a result of my posting, updating, and commenting. This led me to consider the magnitude of total emails a student might receive within and between courses. How many technology platforms is enough and when does it become too much?
Any text-based information I share with students I can do via the LMS, so I never found a real use for a blog. Being an itinerant visitor, I didn't need a stable home page for my research (which depends on students and available equipment). I do, however, use web-based materials for classes. Since computational tools are now readily available, I use some assignments with simplified versions. To this end, I write a lot of server-side code to access the computational tools so students need not install anything on a local machine. One such site I have been revisiting in preparation for the fall is a web-based queue system for running Monte Carlo calculations for statistical thermodynamics. Students access the main page which shows all jobs associated with the queue. A student can submit a new job- either a simple Ising model (magnetic system) or a rare-gas system. A web form lets them input the parameters: Data from completed jobs can be viewed Selecting...
Yes. I'm thinking about this, too, especially since students already don't want to check email. And they really won't check it if they're bombarded constantly. This is why I'm currently (you know, this week) into the idea of using hyperdocs. (Thanks, Stefani!) That way I can use multiple platforms but have the assignments contained in one slide deck. We'll see if I'm still enamored after I try to make one.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely start with a template to limit the insanity and potential rabbit hole of options at first.
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