A faculty member reported problems accessing Youtube resources intermittently. We have these two ISPs (Charter and MoreNet) connecting us to the internet and network traffic is randomly split between the two (by my crude understanding). I checked with network services which reported that when going to the internet via out Charter connection we experience problems accessing Youtube resources. When going to the internet via the Morenet connection everything is hunky-dory.  Network services will try to route Youtube traffic via the morenet connection, but in the meantime, your Youtube videos “may” show up missing.

I don’t know if this works in every case, but I read that when a YouTube video does not play and you read the message “This video is no longer available” you can type &fmt=18 after the URL and the video should play.

Be one of the first to register for the Focus on Teaching with Technology Conference held at UMSL November 13 and 14. More information and the registration form can be found here:

http://www.umsl.edu/services/ctl/fac_programs/teach_with_tech/conference.html

I polled our students and got an overwhelming response. More than 500 responded on what their must have electronic device is.

Almost sixty percent said a cell phone, but I had also included “smart phone” as an option and that category got thirteen percent.  Only about 20% claimed laptop and almost none said their gaming device. Now we just need to give them all the same cell phone with unlimited texting and we will be able to communicate with them. (Yah right!)

Welcome back to class. It’s a bit rough on my end right now, but I don’t want to forget about a cool opportunity for you to present and attend a local (and free) conference hosted by UMSL November 13 and 14. The conference organizers are still looking for workshop and lecture-style presentation proposals. You can find more information here:

http://www.umsl.edu/services/ctl/fac_programs/teach_with_tech/index.html

Typically the audience is faculty and students, with technology specialists thrown in for good measure. Topics that were presented from our faculty last year were on hybrid courses, using blogs, digital communications.

Things to consider this year, again might be blogs, podcast creation, the WEC blended initiative, etc.

Feel free to forward this to others (I am really trying NOT to spam all faculty) and let them know about this opportunity. I’d love to talk to anyone about ideas they have for presenting as well.

we are having problems with all of the classroom computers (we think). Most rooms have reported problems when using powerpoint, especially version 2003. We are going to try a solution over the weekend in hopes of a fix. we apologize for the inconvenience

Instead of email blasts to the entire campus, it would make more sense if we just adopt a couple of blogs. That way the appropriate people can post items. Other people can comment and maybe even request permission to post. The best part is that then the audience can choose to read or not or even to subscribe to the feeds. Hmmm. Why are we not doing this on a larger scale?

I, like the author, am no fan of football. But football is just the placemarker in this essay. Really makes you wonder about how education is happening (or not) in and out of the classroom. I think we are in for a big change in how higher ed conducts itself in the next few years.

Due to popular demand, our department has created some quick guides for remembering how to do routine tasks in the D2L platform. Here is the quickguide for faculty. And here is the one for students.

I have updated my Edublogs student help document due to much interest in using the tool. Attached to this post is the summer 2008 document.

I also came across a user who has found a way to add student accounts without having the students sign up for them. Ingenious! You trick the system and send the account confirmations to a gmail account. Apparently gmail allows you to set xxx@gmail.com to also receive mail from xxx+yyy@gmail.com. What’s that do? well, you can use a unique email address (second one listed) on the Edublogs site and you (you and only you) can receive the email confirmations in your gmail account (first one listed). So you can set up your blog site for your students without them having to fuddle with emails being sent to spam filters and such. Way cool!