Distraction Free Reading

You are not alone if you have struggled to keep your focus reading through articles on the web that are bombarded with still and animated ads. For example, reading Why One Millennial Musician Is Working To Save Music Education) is a challenge as shown in the brief animation below.



Millenial musician article with ads

Readers are easy to use with many benefits

However, there are a surprising number of readers who are either not aware of or do not attempt to apply reader tools built-in or readily available in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. Through a simple click these tools enable distraction free reading of most web pages by stripping everything but the article’s text and relevant images.

Using a tool's appearance options text can be enlargened, font style changed, and background color modified. As a result readers feel empowered to focus on reading in a calming environment, providing an opportunity to more effectively retain information. Distraction free reading is visual accessibility.  A list of other benefits:

• You can reduce the text size to print the information that you need to read in a much more compact format, thus reducing paper waste.
• Print or save the rendered page as a PDF document for filing or reading later with a smart phone or tablet.
• Use a browser reader to remove busy, animated web pages to show only text and relevant images will significantly reduce the drain on your device’s battery (laptop, smart phone, tablet).

The section below shows how to enable Reader tools including installing an extension in Chrome.

Safari (iOS, Mac) and Firefox (iOS, Android, Mac, Windows)

Safari for Mac and iOS devices have the built-in Safari Reader. Firefox Reader View is also built-in the web browser and works equally well on both iOS and Android devices. Both tools will automatically display for pages that they can successfully reformat. Some pages including multiple column home pages are not suitable for reformatting.

For example go to the NYTimes page: Would Carrots by Any Other Name Taste as Sweet? (Links to an external site.) and apply Safari Reader or Firefox Reader View.

Chrome (Mac and Windows)

Google Chrome does not include a built-in reader like Safari and Firefox but installing the recommended Mercury Reader extension (Links to an external site.) provides a button on the Chrome toolbar that provides the same functionality as Reader and Reader View.

For example go to the NYTimes page: Would Carrots by Any Other Name Taste as Sweet? (Links to an external site.) and click  Mercury Reader [1].

Firefox Reader View includes narration

In Firefox Reader View use appearance options [1] to change the font type, font size, margin width, spacing between lines, and background color. Readers can also choose Narrate [2] to to narrate text and change the speed or choose from a variety of voices.



Millenial musician article - distraction free with larger text

Quality Assurance in Blending Learning

ONE SENTENCE SUMMARY

Standards-based instruments with course component checklists are useful for reviewing instructional course design but can not adequately assess instructor experience and student-teacher interaction.

REACTION    

The BlendKit Reader Chapter 5: Quality Assurance is a fitting conclusion to an already excellent series of chapters. The chapter presents a balanced view on the merits and limitations of course standards review instruments and encourages a holistic approach as part of the evaluation process.  

Caveat emptor - course design rubrics and checklists

Course design rubrics such as UCF’s Blended Course Peer Review form (PDF) and the OSCQR Rubric and Process (page links to a list of excellent resources including rubrics and examples) are important tools for assessing course design. UCF’s rubric is designed for peer review and lists criteria for implementation of a blended course. Peer review can result in engaging and "meaningful dialog about the course and teaching/learning process". 

Checklists and rubrics/review forms are especially helpful to faculty who are new to blended or online learning or would like to do more than a simple document transfer from traditional to online. Based on cumulative experiences these tools address most aspects of course design and serve as a reminder to what might be considered for inclusion. They are typically broken down into easily assessed components. 

However, as the BlendKit Reader points out there are limitations.  

A caveat in using the same standards rubric repeatedly over time:

We all like the ease of copying and pasting to repurpose documents such as revised syllabi but the BlendKitReader points out the danger of repurposing standards-based rubrics without critically evaluating each criteria: 

The challenge of implementing a one-size fits all rubric would be daunting: 

Complementing or blending checklists

The chapter discusses the merits but limitations of measuring instruments, which can lead to a "focus on the designed (online) environment of the course to the exclusion of the experience of instructors and students in the teaching/learning process (whether online or face-to-face). ” So what to do if these rubrics are not sufficient? One start is to examine the Monterey Institute course evaluation (PDF) provides a balance between "most checklist-based reviews and the intensity of the criticism model". This screenshot displays part of evaluation tool. The document was last updated in 2010 so downloading the file for personal archiving is recommended. As pointed out in the Faculty Development section below there are many opportunities to obtain feedback from peers and students such as the Muddiest Point. 

Effective teaching is difficult to measure with rubrics and is ideally assessed holistically to consider the student-teacher and student-student teaching and learning:

Faculty Development

In addition to taking the BlendKit course there are many teaching resources that can assist faculty with course design and teaching strategies. Most of these resources are written by faculty for faculty:

• Faculty Focus Course Design Ideas
• Twitter #CourseDesign hashtag
• ProfHacker Course Design archives
• MERLOTorg “Course Design” search
• Canvas.net (free online courses)
• The Teaching Professor Conference
• FutureLearn Blended Learning Essentials Getting Started and Blended Learning Essentials: Embedded Practice
• ProfHacker’s list of faculty development blogs

but this chapter quote stands out: “One might argue that faculty in meaningful dialogue with other faculty about the teaching/learning process is the most effective form of faculty development with everything else being merely layers of facilitation.” That is why peer-to-peer review, training, attending conferences, and informal discussions are so invaluable to developing and improving blended/online courses. As with blended courses, faculty initially meeting with other faculty in person is optimal with the option to follow up face-to-face or online. The chapter suggests developing a journal with personal teaching goals, benchmarks, and collect formative feedback such as peer review and self-evaluation, online suggestion box, one-minute threads, polling, and focus groups. Note taking tools such as Evernote or OneNote fit well into developing an ongoing journal and collection of ideas. 

MOST IMPORTANT TAKE-AWAYS

• High quality faculty development is crucial to effective blended programs
• Develop a journal with personal teaching goals, benchmarks, and formative feedback from a variety of tools and methods
• Assess different course design rubrics to determine which criteria meets your institutional and teaching needs but with a critical eye on what appears to be commonly accepted.
• Balance rubrics with other evaluation methods that assess teaching effectiveness

MY FAVORITE QUOTES

• “These limitations have to do with the prescriptiveness, credibility, scope, and atomism of such standards groupings.” 
• “Nearly all sets of blended/online course standards bear the imprint of an overt instructional design emphasis (e.g., instructional objectives, constructivist influence, technology-dominated, etc.). ”
• “One might argue that faculty in meaningful dialogue with other faculty about the teaching/learning process is the most effective form of faculty development with everything else being merely layers of facilitation.”

HELPFUL LINKS

• UCF Blended Course Peer Review Form (PDF)
• Open SUNY Course Quality Review Rubric and Process
• California State University Quality Online Learning and Teaching
• Monterey’s course evaluation: balance between checklists and critique (PDF)
• Chapter 6: Presenting The Online Course Criticism Model (PDF)

Blended Content and Assignments

ONE SENTENCE SUMMARY

Designing an integrated (F2F and online) blended course with a focus on a modular structure of diverse content and learning activities requires careful planning, experimentation, and ongoing feedback. 

REACTION    

Opportunities (and Challenges)

The list of Technology tools for teaching and learning is seemingly endless, continuously refreshed with updated and newer tools, gradually leaving others less tended to behind. There is the consideration of ease-of-use cost, obsolescence (e.g. Google Reader, Dropio, Zaption), and most significantly its potential for learning and assessment. Faculty typically adapt their school's learning management system and after an initial comfort level explore technologies that complement what the LMS lacks or insufficiently provides. 

Help for Faculty

There are number of teaching focused Twitter feeds and chats, blogs, conferences, and courses (in addition to BlendKit of course) that can assist faculty with course design, teaching strategies, and choosing technology materials and tools that have been tested and evaluated by others.  A partial list:

• @facultyfocus
• @profhacker
• @MERLOTorg
• #CanvasChat (for instructors using Canvas)
• Canvas.net (free online courses)
• The Teaching Professor Conference
• FutureLearn.com
• ProfHacker’s list of faculty development blogs including Of Courses Online

Technology Tools and Outside Course Resources

There are blogs, Tweets, free courses, and these teaching with technology lists:

• Technology Tools for Student Engagement for student engagement could use an update
• Berkeley commits to accelerating universal open access
• Teaching and Learning with digital behavioral and social science data

but there is no substitution for face-to-face interactions (meetings, conferences) with faculty, instructional technologists and designers, and students. 

Course Design (including integration into LMS)

The chapter points out that uniformity guides students through the content and helps reinforce learning. To add, a diversity of content provides students with different experiences and perspectives. Instructors can align their structured content and activities into learning management system modules, which are included in most new systems such as Canvas, which will be used in the examples in this post. HTML pages, links, documents, lecture recordings, and videos can be added as course materials to these modules. For activities instructors can include quizzes, discussions, conferences, and collaborations.  

The Canvas.net course United States History is module based as shown in the diagram below.  Regardless of LMS modules and content/activity tools, course organization, learning resources, student engagement, and assessment depend on teaching excellence.

Content creation Tools

The chapter referred to content creation/screencasting tools such as Jing, Camtasia, and Audacity (audio). Snag-it, Screenflow, and Microsoft Office Mix are newer tools that allow instructors to add embedded video, audio, call-outs, and annotations to PowerPoints. Although screen recording software has evolved with more features and improvement, the time to create and produce lecture videos can be considerable. Some instructors prefer the simplicity of PowerPoint’s build-in recording tools to add audio annotations for each slide. However, this process requires students to download the final PowerPoint lecture to their desktop and having the software available to open and play. 

Ideally, enhancements to online presentations tools such as Google Slides will evolve to include live recording and embedding multimedia onto slides such as audio, video, and annotations so that live lectures can be viewed and played online.  

MOST IMPORTANT TAKE-AWAYS

• Designing courses by modules facilitates integration of F2F and online environments
• Uniformity guides students through the content and helps reinforce learning.
• technologies are adopted more readily when cast in the “context of existing teaching and learning activities
• freely available online learning resources provides an opportunity for educators to either link to or create derivative works based upon many educational resources
• Implementing different and new technologies for the first time in a course can be challenging. Start simple to help ensure success for students and faculty and then explore other tools. 

MY FAVORITE QUOTES

“I'd devote more attention to integrating what was going on in the classroom with the online work. This was true even though the project's faculty development sessions repeatedly emphasized the importance of connecting in-class material with out-of-class assignments.”

"When applied to learning, certain activities can be utilized to greater effect when appropriate matching occurs between: the technology used, the learning desired, the context of use, the learner experience, the instructor experience, and the nature of content."

HELPFUL LINKS

• Technology Tools for Student Engagement (needs to be updated)
• MIT Open Courseware
• OpenStax: access to free education materials 
• UCF Educational Repositories
• Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT)
• Merlot’s JOLT magazine and the Online Learning Consortium (OLC) have merged their journals into the OLC Online Learning Journal 
• Past issues of JOLT
• ProfHacker’s list of faculty development blogs
• Tweeting in Higher Education: Best Practices
• Opening Up Education
• Berkeley commits to accelerating universal open access
• Flipped Classrooms vs. Blended Courses vs. Hybrid Courses

Blended Assessments of Learning

ONE SENTENCE SUMMARY

Different modes of assessments based on course objectives provide faculty with comprehensive learning portfolios of their students and promote academic integrity through prevention. 

REACTION    

My experience teaching (face-to-face in the classroom or computer lab) took place before learning managements systems were available. Assessments included exercise and project assignments, in-class exams, and the use of Minitab. As an instructional technologist I have had the opportunity to work individually with faculty to assist in the effective use Canvas (learning management system) and other cloud based resources to assess student learning. Some of my thoughts are below:

Informal Assessments

Providing multiple opportunities to participate in informal assessments lessens the stress for students but these assessments should be purposeful and include faculty feedback. Some tools to consider:

1. Most learning management system include practice quizzes, which provides preliminary feedback to faculty and help students prepare for actual graded exams. 

2. I look forward to sharing the One sentence summary with faculty who have not used this assessment.  A step-by-step procedure :

Description. This simple technique challenges students to answer the questions "Who does what to whom, when, where, how, and why?" (represented by the letters WDWWWWHW) about a given topic, and then to synthesize those answers into a simple informative, grammatical, and long summary sentence.

1. Select an important topic or work that your students have recently studied in your course and that you expect them to learn to summarize.
2. Working as quickly as you can, answer the questions "Who did/Does What to Whom, When, Where, How and Why?" in relation to that topic. Note how long this first step takes you.
3. Next, turn your answers into a grammatical sentence that follows WDWWWWHS pattern. Not how long this second step takes.
4. Allow your students up to twice as much time as it took you to carry out the task and give them clear direction on the One-Sentence Summary technique before you announce the topic to be summarized

3. The Muddiest Point is a simple but effective way to determine what point was least clear to students. However, if implemented regularly (e.g. once weekly or after each class) summarizing and acting on student feedback is essential for making the assessment meaningful. 

4. Student generated questions: Online discussions provide a forum for students to share questions, provide feedback, and collect their questions into shared documents such as a Google doc, spreadsheet, or presentation. Using the groups tool available in many learning management systems students could write questions for their own group and then quiz other groups who have not seen the questions. In turn faculty can assess these questions and determine which are suitable for practice quizzes or graded assessments. 

Formal Assessments

Developing different types of online assessments: summative, formative, multiple choice, short essay, practice, graded exams, assignments, discussions, and group presentations to measure student learning offers several advantages:

• Help maintain academic integrity by not focuses on one type of assessment such as multiple-choice quizzes.
• Provides an in-depth assessment of students and determines their strengths and weakness based on the type of assessment.
• Allows faculty to collect feedback on what works best for their students in achieving course objectives.

Exams and quizzes

Multiple choice exams with an emphasis on application and higher-level thinking are difficult to write effectively and can take significant time. Taking advantage of resources such as 10 examples of question improvement and Examples of Multiple Choice Items at the Levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy help faculty with this difficult, time-consuming process.

Publisher test banks provide faculty a reasonable efficient way to create quizzes that can be used for practice and low-stakes assessment (e.g. ensure that students are completing assignments such as readings). In addition faculty can curate the best questions and write those of their own to build their own improved question banks. 

Essays/Academic Prompts

In a small college where class sizes are typically less than 30 students, the focus is less on multiple-choice exams and more on essays, projects, and presentations. 

Learning management systems such as Canvas provide faculty different tools to assess student contributions in writing: such as essay or paper assignment submissions, links to an online blog, or interactions with other students (wiki, discussions, document collaboration in real-time). One of Canvas strengths is the ease in assessing documents with SpeedGrader, which provides inline annotation, text and multimedia commenting), and grading. Students can comment on their assessed papers providing a trail of student-faculty interaction.   

Projects/Authentic Tasks

Audio and video recordings provide opportunities for different modalities of student expression, which can be submitted as assignments and included in discussions. Most learning management systems support these features. In Canvas students can record media with the browser, upload video or audio recordings as files, or use their smartphones to create multimedia recording and submit them. In addition their is the fluency of commenting and feedback that is an essential part of evaluating student recordings. 

ePortfolios such as those for teacher education are a promising but often underutilized assessment that can be summative, formative, and authentic. To see testimonies read The Benefits of E-portfolios for Students and Faculty in Their Own Words. Although there are significant benefits to students in completing ePortfolios, it is essential that student work be consistently assessed by faculty, mentors, peers, and advisors with feedback. Such consistent feedback can take considerable time and must be planned in advance by reviewers. 

Promoting Academic Integrity

Respondus LockDownBrowser, which integrates with most learning management systems, is advertised as a tool to prevent student cheating. It was added to Canvas at Elmira College in response to faculty concerns about academic integrity in high-stakes exams taken in large classrooms. However, online proctoring tools such as LDB can also be framed in a more directed, student-centered approach: a tool for reducing outside distractions and focusing student interaction with the assessment. Proctored exams using tools such as LDB work best in a F2F environment. 

Promoting Academic Integrity in Online Education is a special PDF report from Faculty Focus that provides a variety of helpful articles such as the catchy “91 Ways to Maintain Academic Integrity in Online Courses"

MOST IMPORTANT TAKE-AWAYS

• Based on previous faculty experiences students taken a blend of online and face-to-face assessments have better outcomes.
• Writing multiple-choice questions that effectively measure student knowledge (especially) higher-level thinking is difficult and requires time, experience, and re-writing (based on student responses). 
• Examples of assessment strategies provides faculty a framework to choose which assessments meet the needs of their students
• “Authentic assessment—assessing student abilities to apply knowledge, skills, and attitudes to real world problems—is not only possible in an online environment; it is getting more popular.”
• Define course objectives so they are clear to students, determine how they will meet these objectives (e.g. essays, presentations, audio recordings) and choose the appropriate assessments (e.g. online exam, blog, media assignment) to evaluate their learning.

MY FAVORITE QUOTE

“The most crucial step needed in each unit of instruction is the preparation for students’ transfer of learning to new contexts. If learning is not transferred from the place of learning to practical application, there can be no positive return on investment of the time needed to create, implement, and evaluate instruction”

HELPFUL LINKS

• UCF Effective Online Assessment (many resources on this page!)
• Assessing Online Learning: Strategies, Challenges and Opportunities (PDF)
• Merlot JOLT/OLC Online Learning Journal
• Promoting Academic Integrity in Online Education (PDF)
• The Benefits of E-portfolios for Students and Faculty in Their Own Words
• Classroom Assessment: Step-by-Step procedures
• Student-generated test questions broken down into goals, purpose, activity, and possible uses.
• Use of Student-Generated Questions in the Classroom

Understanding Blended Learning

One sentence summary

An effectively designed blended course combines the strengths of face-to-face and online learning and offers new learning opportunities for students and development opportunities for faculty. 

(Kudos to the UCF team for a great chapter! I used the eBook version for note taking and highlighting on my iPad.)

Reaction

Many years ago I taught face-to-face when online was only by dialup (LOL) but have not taught blended or fully online courses. As an instructional technologist I have worked extensively with faculty who are new to Canvas and teaching blended or online for the first time. As a starting point for my reaction I thought it helpful to think of blended/online courses that reflect lack of experience and expertise in teaching online.

Blended courses that tack on F2F courses typically offer in-class sessions first and last weeks of the course. The last week often is used for in-class presentations, proctored exams, or other methods of final assessment. The remaining traditional part of the course is converted to learning management objects: PowerPoint slides, readings (PDF’s or links), online assignments (drop boxes), and discussion forums to replace in class conversations.  Such courses often lack objectives, integration with the F2F and online components, student outcomes, and an environment that promotes active online engagement and assessment. The focus is often on mastery with the LMS and not how  

Re-designing a (blended) course from scratch, not knowing where to start, and how to define course components is challenging. In Educause’s Report on Blended Learning lists competencies (with example behaviors) and guiding principles that help guide faculty through the development of a blended course. For example, the active learning competency involves planning and implementing tasks that engage the student in an active role (e.g. the instructor encourages students to interact with each other by assigning team tasks and projects where appropriate) and the emulate the student experience principle: use the blended learning model to teach instructors how to teach blended learning courses. 

The Quality Matters Rubric is a useful tool for assessing course design through 8general standards organized into 43 review standards. But this article: What Faculty Need to Know About ‘Learner Experience Design’ puts into perspective such checklists (with points) as the QM rubric by focusing on three big ideas: relationships matter, tech should increase - not replace - social interaction, and walk in students’ shoes. 

Web sites such as UCF Examples of Approaches and U Waterloo examples of blended courses provide concrete examples that instructors can refer to as they design their course.

Most important takeaways

“There is clear consensus that the best strategies for design begins [sic] by clearly defining course objectives before coming up with course activities, assignments and assessments”

"A superficial understanding of blended learning is that it simply adds non-F2F elements into the traditional course structure. But this most often results in a dysfunctional phenomenon known as the“course-and-a-half.”

Meeting with students (in-person, by phone, by conference) before the course starts can help instructors assess student competencies and needs in advance, especially important if F2F are few. 

My favorite quote

In 2002 Troha asked “why do so many blended initiatives turn into frustrating boondoggles, consuming far more time... than anyone anticipated?” 

Helpful links

• Educause report on blended learning (PDF)
• What Faculty Need to Know About ‘Learner Experience Design’
• Some examples of blended courses
• Welcome to the Morning Blend

Not so helpful

• NCAT - project descriptions sorted by degree of success - The focus of these somewhat dated projects is on computerized-instruction replacing F2F classes as a “blended” solution.   

Assessing Student Audio Journals

Introduction

Blogs, wikis, and e-portfolios provide students tools to write in a public venue with opportunities for peer and instructor feedback. For assessment of student journals instructors can use a course management system’s (e.g. Blackboard) private journaling tool to engage in one-on-one conversation with their students. However, most web based systems including Blackboard are cumbersome in enabling two-way audio journals that include content such as diction, reflection, or presentation and instructor feedback. The process to record, save to .mp3, and upload the file to the web for each audio event is tedious, time-consuming, and can be frustrating over time. 

Instructors need easy-to-use and affordable technology that engages students in an efficient back-and-forth exchange of their audio recordings (including text, images, attachments, and hyperlinks) — something like leaving messages on an answering machine with the flexibility of using digital media. In addition instructors need to efficiently manage the student journals and organize them into course units. After thinking through the process I developed an instructional model for faculty using the free version of Evernote, which more than meets the essential requirements and includes these advantages:

• Students can register for a free Evernote account using their e-mail address and a unique password. If a student forgets their Evernote password, they can reset it in their e-mail. The process is even easier for students with Google Apps accounts.
• Students can use Evernote desktop (Mac or Windows) or their smartphone (Android, iPhone, or Windows Phone) to record audio notes. They also had the option of adding photos or text to their notes. 
• A free Evernote account provides 60MB of storage per month, which is more than sufficient for several short audio recordings. Assuming 500KB per minute of high quality recording, students and faculty should be able to record up to two hours of audio per month. 
• With the free version of Evernote students can chose one notebook with Modify rights to allow instructors to respond within a student note or create a separate note within the shared notebook. 
• Students and faculty could engage in their conversation by inserting mixed media (text, images, embedded audio) in single or separate Evernote notes.
• Instructors can easily manage their student shared notebooks using Evernote Desktop or Evernote Web by placing them into course Stacks. 
• Instructor audio comments count as part of student storage so there is no quota issue for instructors.

Observations

Based on an instructor's successful experience with a class of more than 20 students who used Evernote exclusively for recording their course journals, the following observations were noted.  

• Evernote is a huge timesaver for instructors because they can easily organize, play, read, and respond to student journal entries without technology getting in the way. They can play recordings with their smartphones, tablets, Evernote Desktop, or Evernote Web.
• More than 90% of students have a smartphone, iPhone (2/3) or Android, and used them almost exclusively for their recordings. Those who did not have a smartphone used an iPod touch or laptop. 
• The voice recording quality of smartphones is noticeably superior to that of a laptop's webcam, which was sometimes affected by ambient sound. 
• The embedded media player in Evernote Desktop for Windows does not always display properly and when it does may not play. It was sometimes necessary for the instructor to use Evernote Web for audio playback.

Quickstart for Students

Getting started

As part of your course you will be able to record, annotate, and organize a personal digital audio journal that will allow your instructor to listen and provide feedback on your progress. Follow these steps to create your free Evernote account and set up a shared notebook (your journal).

Steps to Creating Your Evernote Account

Follow these steps to install Evernote on your personal computer's desktop, and on your Android, iPhone/iPad/iPod touch or Windows phone and sign up for a free account using your e-mail address.

• Go to https://evernote.com/getting_started and click to play the Introduction.
• Choose Installing Evernote to install the application on your Windows or Macintosh laptop.
• Choose Create your account and follow the steps to create your account. 
• Use a password that is easy to remember but hard to figure out. However, it should not be the same as your e-mail password.
• Click the Register button.
• Log on to Evernote for your Mac or PC and explore the interface, creating a note or two for practice (Choose step 4).
• Choose steps 5 and 6 (Adding an image and How Sync works) so you know how to add an image and sync.
• Before you sign off sure to click the Sync button to sync any notes to the Web.
• Evernote will sync automatically every several minutes or so but you should always sync before switching devices or logging off.

Creating a New Notebook and setting it as default

• In the left sidebar hover your mouse over Notebooks and to the right choose New Notebook from the drop arrow.
• Type your full name followed by Audio Journal. In the example below Mark Twain is used.

• Click the Save button.
• In the left sidebar hover over Mark Twain Audio Journal and choose Properties from the Drop arrow.
• Check the box Make this my default notebook and click the Save button.
• By making your Audio Journal as the default notebook all audio journals that you record will be automatically saved in this notebook.

Sharing your Notebook

• In the left sidebar hover over Mark Twain Audio Journal and to the right choose Share this notebook from the drop arrow.

• Click Share with Individuals.
• Verify that you are sharing your Audio Journal notebook.
• Enter the e-mail address of your instructor.
• Choose Modify notes under individuals who can join. This will allow your instructor to add audio and/or text feedback to you’re the notes in your journal.
• Click the green Share button.

• Note the wireless-like icon to the left of your notebook, which indicates that it is being shared.

Attention! With the free version of Evernote you can only one notebook for collaboration (modify notes.)

• Click the New Note button and title it Text note from your name. Attention! It is always important to title each note with a descriptive name.
• Type your first note with a signature. You can experiment with the formatting tools if you would like. Note that the new note is automatically saved to your Audio Journal, which is your default notebook. In addition Evenote Web automatically saves and syncs your note to your cloud account.

If you save notes outside the Audio Journal, you will need to manually drag it there.

•   Sign out of the Web account.

Creating a Multimedia Note with your Smartphone App

Although you can not record audio from a microphone or take a camera snapshot using Evernote Web, these features are available on Evernote Desktop for your PC or Mac or the free app on your smartphone.

• Make sure you have downloaded the free Evernote app from your iPhone https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/evernote/id281796108?mt=8 or Android phone https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.evernote
• Sign in to the app.
• Create a New Note and make sure that it is saved to your Audio Journal notebook.
• Title the note as My First Audio Note
• Type a paragraph of text summarizing your note and then sign your name. You can use your smartphone’s built-in voice recognition (e.g. Siri) to quickly insert text :)
• Use the Camera to take a photo of yourself and add it below the text.
• Next record 30 seconds of audio or more reflecting on what you have learned so far!
• Click the Save button and then click the Sync button.

Playing Your Recording on Evernote Web

• Start Firefox, go to http://evernote.com and sign in to Evernote Web.
• Click to play your latest note in QuickTime Player.
• Note that your note will also be available on Evernote Desktop on your personal 
• Mac or PC laptop, though you will need to first sync.

Quickstart for Instructors

This section explain how to join and keep track of shared notebooks using Evernote Web and then to organize them into a stack using Evernote Desktop.

• Once a student has shared their notebook with you, then accept the invitation in your e-mail.

• Click the Open Notebook button and log into your Evernote Web account. 
• When prompted click the Join Notebook button.
• A list of shared notebooks that you have joined will show up in the sidebar. 
• Click View My Notebooks. 
• Repeat the process for each student invitation. 

Click Joined Notebooks to see a listing of notebooks that students have shared with you. Although you can not move joined notebooks to stacks with Evernote web you can file them with the Desktop version.

Using the Evernote Desktop for Windows or Macintosh contra click on a shared notebook and choose Add to stack > New Stack.

• Rename the stack (e.g. Instructor Course) and add all your students notebooks.

If you encounter difficulty in playing audio notes with Evernote for Windows, use Evernote Web, which appears to be more reliable. I have experienced no such issues with Evernote for Macintosh. Using an Android tablet or iPad is a highly effective portable solution for commenting on student journals. 

How to Import Data to a Google Sites List Page

I discovered a script written by Romain Vialard that processes exporting/importing of data from/to a Google Sites List page using a Google Docs spreadsheet. If you would like to take advantage of Sites List features and formatting and have a long table of data to import, then the script is a real time saver. You can also export data from a Sites List page into the spreadsheet that contains the script. 

• Create a new Google spreadsheet and choose Tools > Script Editor
• Choose Spreadsheet under Create a Script For
• Remove the sample script from Code.gs
• Copy the script from this forum post and paste it into Code.gs
• Name the project (e.g. Google Sites Export Import) and choose File > Save.
• Under Select Function you will see (OnOpen, create_list, push_items, and fetch_items). 
• Close the spreadsheet and re-open and there will be a new List page menu with the choices to Create a list or Fetch list items. 
• To create a List page within your site choose List page > Create list. You may need to authorize the app to run. If so, choose List page > Create list again.
• Provide the URL of the parent page (e.g. http://sites.google.com/site/joefahs/demographics) under which the list page will be created. 
• Choose a name for your list page (e.g. countries). 
• Wait patiently for the script to execute. 
• Go to your page address (e.g. http://sites.google.com/site/joefahs/demographics/countries) to see your automatically created list page. Note! If the script is not available in the List page menu choose Tools > Script Manager and run your scripts from there. 
• Push items will push data from the spreadsheet into an existing List page replacing the existing data in that list.  
• You can retrieve data from a list page and put them in the spreadsheet by choosing the script Fetch Items. It will will require the list page's URL and number of columns and will import the data but not the header. You will need to add the headers in the spreadsheet and then sort as needed.