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13 Comments
Can someone offer me advice on how to survive my first semester of ph.d. school?
What’s your field, and what is particularly difficult for you right now?
I’ve been thinking about a post along these lines, Jenna, but I too would like to know your field since my advice will be limited perforce by my own experiences.
Anybody have issues with IT. We are supposed to be migrating from WebCT to Blackboard 9 and since IT is opposed to Blackboard, they have stalled it for another year. Quite frustrating.
We, on the other hand, are using Blackboard–I don’t like it at all, but it’s what students are used to and what we are pressured to use ourselves. So, given that I’m trying to make it work for me, can anyone give me tips on whether there’s a better way to handle student papers from within Blackboard? My students submit them as attached files, which I then dowload to my own computer, comment on, and upload again–one at a time, which is very tedious! It seems as if there should be a way within the system to open the file up, work with it, and close it again, in such a way that it is now (or still) in the student’s assignment box. Am I missing something? (I can download them in bulk, though they arrive on my desktop in individual folders which I then have to open up to find the document.)
Accept current students’ friend requests on Facebook? Why/why not?
I don’t initiate friend requests with current students, but I respond if they initiate the request. Mostly that’s because, within reason, I’m prepared to communicate with them in whatever way they prefer to communicate with me, and their initiating a FB friend request is one way they can indicate a preference.
I do exactly the same thing, for the same reasons.
I also do the same thing, for mostly the same reasons, as well.
I don’t friend current students. Not that I get many requests, since my privacy settings are fairly high. But I do tell them this rule of mine as an aside somewhere in the first week of school. My reasons are to keep particular boundaries in place with my students. But I see why Amy and Julie do what they do.
@Rohan, in the couple of different versions of Blackboard that I’ve used, it’s at least possible to zip up a set of files, upload them, and then unzip them from within Blackboard. Then you would still have to redistribute them to the students individually within Bb, but at least it would save one step of the annoying process.
I’ve been using Google Docs on a trial basis in a couple of classes. It worked pretty well in a 4th-year lab class where we had a common data-tracking spreadsheet, but students in the 3rd-year lecture class are still struggling with sharing documents with each other for peer checking. I hate having to provide tech support so I try to make my instructions really clear, but I can never anticipate the things they can’t figure out for themselves. Anyone got any ideas for helping students become a little more tech-adventurous?
I’m actually working on a post for next week, on not assuming students’ technical skills. I don’t know that it gets around the issue of having to provide tech support, though–if anything, I find I have to plan it in (and so far, I consistently fail to plan enough!).
I’m looking forward to that post, Amy! With all the mobile technology I see my students using, it’s been particularly surprising to me that so many of them are confounded when faced with a real live computer. I often find myself doing basic tech tutorials on top of teaching the actual course material, and any new ways to approach this would be welcome.