Jason Rhode, Ph.D.

I’m currently preparing for an online workshop I’m leading on Thu., Oct. 16th from 12-1pm CDT entitled, “Conducting Online Office Hours Using Wimba Classroom.”  Here’s the description of the session:

Whether teaching in a traditional face-to-face, hybrid, or online course, offering optional office hours provides students with the opportunity to seek further clarification and assistance, enriching the learning experience. The Wimba Classroom online collaboration suite is one technology that integrates seamlessly with Blackboard and can be utilized to offer online office hours, allowing students to communicate in real time with faculty at a mutually convenient time and location. This online workshop will provide a brief introduction of Wimba Classroom and explore best practices of conducting online office hours using Wimba Classroom.

Anyone else interested in joining us for this session?  Drop me an email at jrhode@niu.edu and I can provide the login information to join us.

Faculty who utilize the Wimba Classroom tool within Blackboard may want to invite a guest speaker to participate in a synchronous online session. It is possible to enable guest access to a Wimba Classroom so that a guest speaker can participate in a Wimba Classroom session without having an NIU AccountID or password.

This new 4 minute tutorial that I recorded highlights the steps to enabling guest access to a Wimba Classroom.The free QuickTime player is required. It is also available on YouTube or as a podcast.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDYMnOv96rE

This fall quarter I am teaching 2 courses for Seattle Pacific University and I’m incorporating an wide array of different Web 2.0 tools, including the Learning Objects Podcast, Wiki, and Blog tools that SPU has licensed into Blackboard as well as Google Calendar and Twitter.

If you’d like to take a listen to the podcasts for either courses or check out any of the other available resources, here’s all the info to access and/or subscribe either via RSS or iTunes:

EDTC 6535 – Issues and Advances in Educational Technology

• Course Podcast RSS Feed: http://tinyurl.com/4wo5cs
• Course Podcast iTunes Feed: http://tinyurl.com/3htqka
• Course Calendar/Schedule: http://tinyurl.com/44cpbh
• Course Tweets: http://twitter.com/edtc6535
• Course Bookmarks: http://delicious.com/tag/edtc6535

EDTC 6536 – Instructional Technology and Information Management

• Course Podcast RSS Feed: http://tinyurl.com/4764aa
• Course Podcast iTunes Feed: http://tinyurl.com/4pjd84
• Course Calendar/Schedule: http://tinyurl.com/4l76y2
• Course Tweets: http://twitter.com/edtc6536
• Course Bookmarks: http://delicious.com/tag/edtc6536

While I’m not newbie to any of these technologies, I am trying some new approaches to using these technologies in my courses this fall, including enhanced and video podcast episodes and syncing the course blog postings to the class twitter feed using twitterfeed.  So, if you’d like to take a peek, I’d love to hear any comments or suggestions for improvement in the future.  I plan to report back here as to my experience with these technologies this quarter.