The Learning & Applied Innovation Digital Garden – Page 2 – Planting Seeds to Grow Teaching and Learning at Colgate University

November 30, 2022

Wait! I didn’t mean to close that tab…

If you like keyboard shortcuts, you probably know the most common ones like CTRL+Z for Undo and CTRL+P for Print for the PC or CMD+Z for Undo and CMD+P for Print for the MAC, but did you know there was a keyboard shortcut to open the last browser tab that you closed? Read on…

How-To/Learning

November 1, 2022

Exploring the benefits of text-to-speech and speech-to-text tools

There are many situations where text-to-speech and speech-to-text tools can be very beneficial to you or someone you know. Text-to-speech technology reads text on your computer or mobile device out loud. You may find text-to-speech tools beneficial if you are experiencing eye strain from looking at the screen for too long or have low vision. People who are learning English...

How-To/Resources

October 31, 2022

Liquifying Faces and Other Adobe AI Fun

Adobe Sensei never ceases to amaze me. Over the past couple years, the Adobe backed AI research has had tremendous, practical implications on multiple creative applications. For those unaware, the strides are truly tremendous, and at times a bit scary. Take a look at the facial manipulation in Photoshop using the liquefy tool, or making things disappear with content aware...

Digital Life/Resources

October 24, 2022

UDL and Student Wellbeing

The Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning provides some terrific resources. I was especially intrigued by the resource titled Wellbeing in Course Design which starts out stating that “faculty members play an important role in proactively supporting student wellbeing… and can help create the conditions that support wellbeing.” They follow with a list of best practices grouped into four...

Resources

October 21, 2022

Activity Design Ideas for Social Annotation and Hypothes.is

I previously posted a showcase of webpages annotated with Hypothes.is, ideas for Hypothes.is assignments, instructions for creating Hypothes.is enabled readings in Moodle and other resources for getting started with social annotation and Hypothes.is. However, those resources only go so far in creating effective and engaging social annotation experiences for students. Simply requiring students to “make annotations using Hypothes.is” may not...

Resources

October 20, 2022

Give me some Slack…

Give me some Slack! Well…maybe not. In a podcast I listened to recently, Ezra Klein interviews Cal Newport, and the ideas they discuss about the evolving nature of work and communication are fascinating. Newport, who is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown, traces an historical arc of workplace communication from email through Slack, and in the process introduces...

Digital Life/Learning

October 17, 2022

Getting Started with Social Annotation and Hypothes.is

Social annotation enables multiple people to collaboratively annotate an article found on the web. Many Colgate faculty have adopted the tool Hypothes.is to integrate social annotation into their course readings. I’ve curated a list of resources to guide faculty in getting started with social annotation and Hypothes.is. Example Annotated Articles It may be helpful to see examples of social annotation...

Resources

October 14, 2022

Google Docs and Accessibility

Google Docs can create accessibility barriers for some users. The people most affected by the limitations of Google Docs are people who use screen reader technology. People who are blind and people who have a significant visual disability often use screen readers which use computer-generated speech to read aloud the text on the screen and unique keyboard combinations to navigate...

How-To

October 4, 2022

Quick Wins Using Adobe Express

Adobe Creative Cloud Express (formerly Adobe Spark) is a free, low barrier to entry tool that anyone can use. Registering for a free account using any of a number of quick sign-up options allows anyone to quickly spin up projects that autosave, and are accessible from anywhere with an internet connection. There are a number of great things to say...

Learning/Resources

September 30, 2022

Social Annotation for Scientific Articles

Social annotation technology enables students and instructors to collaboratively add notes, images, media and other annotations to the margins of a reading. Annotations can be seen, read and commented on by all members of the course. Social annotation can transform reading into a collaborative activity, make students’ thinking visible and enhance students’ comprehension of readings (see Kalir et al. 2020...

Learning