NiceCast for Streaming Audio Broadcasts to Students

This tutorial shows how to use Nicecast to create a streaming audio broadcast to send to your students' computers. World Language teachers, this is for you! Use this process to facilitate in-class speaking assessments like in a language lab: you control the playback, and the students record their separate speaking responses. 

Here's the link to the related student tutorials.

Download the PDF tutorial

TurnItIn Tutorials

TurnItIn's signature feature is Originality Check, which compares student submissions against a database of 40+ billion websites, 300+ million student papers, and 100+ million academic books and publications. 

Yes, Originality Check will help you detect plagiarism. But really, Originality Check is an invaluable resource for teaching students to avoid plagiarism. 

The recommended best practice for Originality Check is to configure your assignment so that students may check drafts' originality repeatedly by submitting and overwriting drafts until the actual due date. Jump to directions for this configuration

TurnItIn Demonstrations:

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TurnItIn Training Videos:
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TurnItIn Instructor Training Pages:
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 Configuring so that students may check themselves over multiple drafts:

On the "New Assignment" page, click for "More Options." 

Then, under the menu, "Generate Originality Reports for Student Submissions," choose the second option, "Immediately (can overwrite reports until due date)." This link leads to the precise moment in the "Creating Assignments" video tutorial that demonstrates this configuration. Watch until 2:02.

Use Microsoft Word to See Exactly What's Changed Between Drafts

Reblogged from Ted's professional blog: Anything But Expert

INTERVIEWER: How much rewriting do you do?
HEMINGWAY: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
INTERVIEWER: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
HEMINGWAY: Getting the words right. 

(Ernest Hemingway, "The Art of Fiction," The Paris Review Interview, 1956)

I'm a firm believer that revision makes the writer. So as a writing teacher, I always require substantial revision (you can read here about how it manifests in my grading policy). But of course, reading several successive drafts of the same student essays can be downright impractical. 

Enter the "Compare Documents" feature in Microsoft Word. Stop trying to discern differences between drafts by holding them side-by-side. Let Word do it for you!

Using this feature allows me immediately to see what has changed from one draft to the next, and to flip  between the two versions. I can even see the digital comments I left on the original draft, and quickly assess whether revisions have addressed them. (Gone are the days of rereading an entire ten-page essay to determine the student only changed one sentence on page three...)

Check out the tutorial:

PDF Version of the Tutorial

Defining Custom Styles in Microsoft Word 2011 -- Makes Proofreading a Breeze!

Reblogged from Ted's professional blog: Anything But Expert

Here's a trick for defining custom styles to highlight errors in student work. Giving each custom style a shortcut key makes proofreading a breeze!



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