Technology and Resources from ACT

First off, ACT was amazing! It was my first time there, and I cannot stress enough how it exceeded my expectations in every way. While there, I learned about so many new technologies and resources! I compiled a list I thought others would like to know about. In no particular order, here they are!

LOOM
I went to a talk by Laura Terry and Bowen Laly where they discussed LOOM. LOOM is an online platform instructors can use to create their own videos. It seems really user friendly as she demonstrated during the talk. Terry has used it to create videos to deliver course content and also give individualized feedback to students. I’m definitely going to check it out!
 
Remind
Also, Laura Terry made a brief mention to remind.com. I have never heard of this before, but it’s a way to communicate with your students though an app. You can send students reminders straight to their phone, which is where their attention is largely focused anyway. You can even schedule reminders ahead of time. 
 
Vyond
Bridgette Martin-Hard brought up using Vyond . This is another video making platform, but this one is for making animated videos. The website advertises it’s for users of all skills types, and it’s dynamic allowing you to make videos to fit any context. Unlike LOOM, these videos can be interfaced with other platforms easily by creating MP4s or GIFs. 
 
Quality Matters Rubric
The Quality Matters Rubric was presented on by Lisa Hagan, Cheryl Sanders, Bethany Fleck, Bridget Murphy-Kelsey, and Kristy Lyons. This rubric was created to help instructors better design their online course. At its core there are 8 key standards that you can incorporate into your online course; however, they did mention you don’t have to incorporate all of them. As someone who has never taught an online course, this talk gave me a lot of things to think consider including in my future online courses!
 
ParticiPoll
During the Presidential Address, Sue Frantz used ParticiPoll. It’s an audience polling add-in program that works in Powerpoint. You don’t even have to leave presenter mode to take a poll or view the results. How convenient it that?!
 
Conference Hosting
Garth Neufeld brought up the importance of hosting a teaching conference in your area if there isn’t already one.  During his portion of the talk, he mentioned that we wrote a blog post about the steps it took for him to start up TIP Northwest. Of course, I looked for his post afterwards. Hosting a conference does sound a little bit like eating an elephant, but it definitely is a worthwhile endeavor.
 
myOpenMath
In a talk discussing open educational resources (OER) for statistics, Lisa Worthy brought up using myOpenMath. This is an OER for statistics that structured like an LMS. Worthy recommended it for folks who wanted to fully commit to an OER as it may not serve well as supplementary materials, but you can be the judge for yourself. I mean, it’s free so check it out!
 
jStat / JASP
Lisa Worthy also brought up a few statistics program that are part of the open science framework. One of these was JASP. The main appeal is its user-friendly interface and it offers standard analysis procedures in both their classical and Bayesian form. A similar program is jStat, is a JavaScript library for statistical operations. It aims to provide a JavaScript-based alternative to MATLAB or R. It’s not a finished product yet, but it’s getting there.
 
TweetDeck
TweetDeck was mentioned to me in a completely random conversation by Kameko Halfmann and our own Karly Schleicher. It is a social media dashboard application that you can use to manage your twitter accounts. TweetDeck allows you to create a custom experience where you can view multiple timelines in one interface, and it has advanced features like scheduling tweets ahead of time. I should have been using this for a while now…
 
HIPPR
In one of my favorite talks of the conference, Regan Gurung, Andrew Christopher, and Georjeanna Wilson-Doenges mention several noteworthy points, which I will be covering in a separate post later. They also mentioned some great resources. The Hub for Intro Psyc and Pedagogical Research (HIPPR) is a website where SoTL researchers can look for collaborators and offer up their classroom for others to do research in.
 
Project Assessment
The same folks (Regan Gurung, Andrew Christopher, and Georjeanna Wilson-Doenges) also mentioned Project Assessment, which is a compilation of assessments specifically designed to measure learning. This is definitely a resource I need to consult when designing future SoTL studies.

​
Did anyone hear about anything that I missed? Feel free to share! I can always add more to the list! 

​written by Jen Blush