RCampus: Online Rubrics

Online tools.
Free to individual faculty and students.
Rubrics, web sites, and ePortfolios.
Also, learning and content management systems.
Tutor connection, textbook exchange.
Classroom space with gradebook. Email alerts. Calendar. Student self-registration.

Well, you get the idea. RCampus is a free site and, even if you are not prepared to run real classes outside the vetted LMS on your campus, this suite of online tools provides good practice in online facilitation and could even serve as your personal portfolio host.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Tech Tip: Meeting Schedulers

Maybe the niftiest, most undervalued tool to emerge from Web 2.0 is the meeting scheduler.

Set aside any auto-pilot assumption that everyone uses Outlook to the extent that makes meeting notices easy. And, of course, keep in mind that the basic email approach only looks like two-way communication. There's still a hierarchy at work. There's a sender and there's a responder and a lot of the time, the sender is notifying, not inviting. When email is used more democratically to invite input about meeting times, it... well, it takes about 20 emails to establish anything.

Contrast the egalitarian meeting scheduler. We're all equal in our access and we all have access to the results. If all of us are willing to select multiple checkmarks, we'll gather the information about everyone who's slated for a meeting and produce a "best time" for the majority.

If you will recall the early days of surveymonkey, you'll probably recall your own or someone else's use of that software as a meeting scheduler. The power of sending a survey with meeting time options extended to sharing the view of results to all the participants. Feedback! Egalitarian!

We moved past the surveymonkey era with a lot of new scheduling tools. Some of them were specific—for activities like choosing a lunch spot with your friends. (Really, it was for that single purpose. And Google bought the smallish web site.)

And this month I experienced the best two online tools for meetings that I have run across. The tall graphic is the results page for a meeting for 8 people (names removed). Source: MeetingWizard.

The smaller graphic below is a segment of the results page for a meeting of 4 people. Source: doodle. Doodle calls their offering a poll.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

GI Yellow Ribbon Program - Map Links to Participating Institutions

With a list finalized this month, the GI Bill web site displays a map linking to Yellow Ribbon participating institutions.

Established as part of the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2008, Yellow Ribbon supports GI's returning to school with a new type of support that makes virtually any type of school possible. Essentially, the VA helps fund expenses when that school's tuition/fees exceed the highest public in-state tuition rate. Institutions (public college, private college, any approved college) share the "exceed" cost with the VA up to a limit set by the institution. The institution can also set a limit on the number of students it will support in the agreement.

Institutions' voluntary limits are included on the web pages linked from the map at the above link. Clicks through several state lists will produce a pattern quickly: online universities are participating at a high level (unlimited number of students will be welcomed).

(The program's full name is Yellow Ribbon GI Education Enhancement Program.)

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.