Did you know you can save time and effort by starting a Frequently Asked Questions Discussion Board in your course?

Do you get tired of answering the same student questions over and over? Save time and effort by starting a Frequent Asked Questions forum in your course! It is a public way for students to share questions and answers about technical problems they’re having, questions about deadlines, or even clarifying course readings. The more activity in your discussion boards, the more you can build a lasting knowledge base that addresses any question students might encounter. It won’t be long before you can simply say “Go check the FAQ” instead of staying up on Sunday night answering redundant emails from frantic students.

You can incentivize participation by letting students know they can get extra course points for participating in the help forums (either by asking or answering questions). By giving helpers and “helpees” equal points for using the forums, you remove the stigma of asking for help while motivating classmates to spend their precious time and energy being good Samaritans.

I gave students clear guidelines for the quality of questions and answers I was willing to reward, and which ones were obvious ploys for some free points. Then I quietly smirked to myself as they frantically gave and received help on a range of topics so they could get that “free” 5% in my course.

Technologically, you might look into using Google Groups or even Edmodo.com as tools to serve as a discussion board.

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Image by John and Keturah via Flickr

When you’re looking for work, keeping up with the online job listings is a job in itself. This tutorial will teach you how to automate your job search so you can quickly scan through lots of fresh, relevant job ads every day.

The Big Picture

We are going to put in a series of 5-10 different job search queries into our favorite job boards. The search results they return will have an RSS feed, enabling us to “subscribe” to the search results in a feed reader. After that, all we have to do is open the feed reader, and it will “re-search” all those sites and line up the freshest results in one list for us. From that point, you can just scan quickly down headlines, picking out your dream job. If this sounds too complicated, stay tuned– it’s easy.

You will need:
1) Your favorite RSS reader (I recommend Google Reader)
2) A few RSS-enabled job search websites (I used CraigsList and SimplyHired.com)

Step 1: Creating Good Search Queries

Let’s go to SimplyHired.com and type in a search for the perfect job we’re looking for.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

SimplyHired will return a list of search results fitting our query. This list is “RSS-enabled”, meaning you can subscribe to it in any feed reader (like Google Reader). Just right click ( or Ctrl+click for Mac) on “View RSS Feed” and select “Copy Link Location”.

Copy Link Location

Then you can paste that RSS feed URL into Google Reader’s “Add Subscription” button, and it will “subscribe” you to those search results.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

This means that you will have a long list of headlines for all the relevant job ads.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Step 2: REPEAT with different search results!

If I go back and repeat the process, typing similar search queries, such as “Computer Educator” or “Multimedia Teacher”, I can get several different feeds of good job results all aggregated in a list in my Google Reader.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Step 3: Easily Scan through as Many Job Listings as You Can  Handle– Even via iPhone!

Now, I have a folder of job searches I’ve subscribed to, so all I have to do is open the “Job Search” folder and I can scan through an aggregated, multi-threaded list of fresh job search results on my smartphonewhile I’m walking my dog in the morning.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

My method for keeping on top of them is to “Star” the ones that look promising while I’m scanning through, then follow up on the “Starred” ones later. That list of starred entries becomes my “application to-do” list.

Do you have a better way of scanning job ads? Discuss it in the comments!

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STEP 1

Choose a VOIP (voice over internet) application. Skype is a good choice because they have a desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Many other VOIP services I can think of (Jajah, Gizmo) work in a browser, so I don’t know how well they will work. You will see why in a minute.

STEP 2

Open the Preferences panel in Firefox. Go to the Applications tab.

STEP 3

Search for “callto”

STEP 4

Choose Skype (or your favorite VOIP app) to handle all callto links.

Voila! You’re done! Now telephone numbers on the sites you surf will automatically become callto links!

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I have spent my whole teaching career in small, high tech charter schools, and I have seen educational technology grow symbiotically alongside Web 2.0 advances. I have embraced blogs for their power to tackle a variety of classroom teachers’ challenges.

At our schools, there has always been the expectation that teachers will maintain an informative website so students can access homework, handouts, calendars, and other class information. My first school was using RapidWeaver, a desktop program where teachers designed websites whole and then uploaded them to the school servers. As the school year progressed, the upload times got longer and longer as teachers’ sites got more complex. As a result, busy teachers gradually fall off, leaving their websites as a wasteland of outdated and useless material.

I have discovered that blogs are the ideal way to provide information to your students. Why? Because:

• the most up to date information (like tonight’s homework or today’s assignment) is always at the top
• old posts are saved and can be organized in whatever ways you can imagine
• blogs are free and easy to operate
• teachers who don’t want the extra hassle of “updating a web page” can even post to blogs by email!
• Students can “follow” or “subscribe to” your blog posts so they never miss an assignment
• Blog feeds can be combined so, for example, assignments from all the school’s teachers can appear on the same page.
• Your blog feed can even be embedded in your school’s main web page.
• You can maintain various blogs for separate purposes. I even have a private blog that nobody can see that I use to  take notes on confidential student situations.

The beauty of them is that they are so flexible that you will continue to find new and interesting ways to use them. Blogs are a powerful technology that can be used in a variety of ways to make your classroom management more efficient.

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Evernote is a great note-taking application for Mac/PC and iPhone, as well as a powerful webapp. It gives you tons of ways to keep track of all the little bits of information in your life— that cool website you want to remember, your shopping list, a photo of your homework assignment, or the to do list you always want to have with you everywhere.

If you drag this button to your browser’s toolbar, it will allow you to clip any content from any webpage to your Evernote.

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In my literature classes, I found that one of the biggest challenges for students when they sit down to write a paper is finding good quotes from the text. A great solution is to put the full text of a novel on your website (or at least link to one). Students can then use their browser’s “Find Word” function (Ctrl+F on Win or Cmd+F on Mac) to search for main Keywords.

You can see above that I searched the text of Crime and Punishment for “agony” and can then find every instance in the book where that word appears. I find this really helps kids review main themes and find the most relevant quote easily.

You can find most classics at Gutenberg.org, Bibliomania.com, or by googling “full text” and the name of your novel.

Another way is to put a passage from the book in quotes in your google search, such as “My watch was still
unwound, and I am rigorously accustomed to wind it the last
thing before going to bed, and many such details.” (remember: the quotes make it so that you find this exact phrase). The likelihood that these words appear together outside of the desired text is nearly nil.

By making the full text available, you can move from students who slavishly insert the first quote they see– because they lack the stamina to search through page after page of quotes– towards students who are making critical decisions about a few easy-to-find choices.

Top 10 Tools to Get Blogging Done

Writing your blog should be a fun way to stretch your mind and stay
connected to trends, friends, and the greater world, not another
computer task that takes far too long to get done. But that’s exactly
what it can feel like if it takes you more time to find your post
ideas, tweak your markup, and make everything look right than to
actually get your thoughts down. Being somewhat experienced at this
blogging thing, your Lifehacker editors have pinpointed a few tools and
tricks that make our posts go faster and smoother. After the jump, we
round up 10 of them.