It’s the first day of my e-Learning course and a student from another school board sent me an apologetic email.
The student was sorry to inform me that their board has blocked student access to all of the web services we use to communicate.
This isn’t just inconvenient; it’s preventing the student from joining the community of learners that we’re developing.
When will the fear of failing their students outweigh their fear of the Internet?
My son is 8, and he wants to be a famous YouTuber like DanTDM. Although I realize this aspiration may be short-lived, I’m open to the possibility. I also know that he probably won’t find this learning in the Ontario Curriculum.
So I decided I’d better figure out how this stuff works so that I can help him understand (and possibly realize) his dream.
I have a YouTube channel already. I post math and computer science videos, mostly, and a few more personal things. I don’t monetize the teaching videos since I direct my students to view them and that would be inappropriate. It was time to start a new channel.
I wanted a channel with a focus, but that was broad enough to allow for lots of content. The kids and I enjoy watching videos of booster box openings (Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon), and I watch more MTG videos. This is something I know a fair bit about, and I can produce content easily (if not always cheaply).
So Grasley Games was born. These aren’t games I’ve designed (that’s coming, though). Instead, “games” is a verb here.
I started by opening a box of Aether Revolt, the newest set of Magic: The Gathering available at the time. I practised for a while first, figuring out camera setup, microphone, lighting, and how to hold the cards effectively. I’ve done some video production work before, but I was still surprised at how challenging this initial planning was.
I also wanted to try some “actual plays”, recordings of playing games. I’ve recorded about 10 games, but only a few have been worth posting. Lots of camera problems with this stuff.
The channel is monetized, which means that some ad revenue accumulates over time. So far there’s $1.86 waiting for me. Another couple of lifetimes and I’ll pay for that box…
This wasn’t just for me, remember? Both my kids want to participate too. Now that I’ve learned the basics of setting everything up, they’re starting to make videos for me to post. There are three so far on the channel:
They keep asking to make more videos (I got enough stuff for them to make 6 videos each on these topics without any additional investment), so that’s pretty cool. I do want them to see how difficult it is to get eyes on your content when you’re in a fairly niche area, and that consistency is really important (they’re counting on me for this).
I’ve also made other spaces on the web for Grasley Games – we’ll see how these platforms pan out:
Like many courses, the beginning of my current computer science e-Learning class looked like this:
This separation of learning from graded performance is intended to give students time to practise before we assign a numerical grade. This sounds like a good move on the surface. It’s certainly well-intentioned.
But this process is broken. It limits learning significantly.
If the performance task is complex enough to be meaningful, it requires a synthesis of skills and understandings that the students haven’t had time to practise. In this case I’m evaluating each student’s ability to accomplish something truly useful when they’ve only had the opportunity to practise small skills.
If instead the performance task has many small components which aren’t interdependent, students never develop the deeper understanding or the relationships between concepts. In this case I’m evaluating each student’s small skills without evaluating their ability to accomplish something truly useful, which isn’t acceptable either.
And there isn’t time to do both. I can’t offer them the time to complete a large, meaningful practise task and then evaluate another large, meaningful performance task.
The barrier here is the evaluation of performance. It requires a high level of independence on the part of the student so that I can accurately assign a numerical grade.
So I’m trying something different.
Instead of these tiny, “real-world” examples (that I make up) to develop tiny, discrete skills, I started teaching through large, student-driven projects. I got rid of the little lessons building up to the performance task, and I stopped worrying about whether they had practised everything in advance.
The process looks more like this:
I couldn’t design a sequence of learning tasks that would be as effective as my students’ current projects are. They’re working hard to accomplish goals they chose, and they’re solving hundreds of small and large problems along the way.
They couldn’t appreciate the small, discrete lessons I was teaching with the small, artificial stories. They didn’t have the context to fit the ideas into. It was only when the project was large and meaningful that my students truly began to grasp the big concepts which the small skills support.
And now I don’t have a practise/perform cycle. It’s all practice, and it’s all performance. It’s more like real life, less like school, and it’s dramatically more effective. It’s much richer, much faster learning than the old “complete activity 2.4” approach.
Evaluation is very difficult, though.
I teach high school math. Students bring scientific calculators to class, or they sometimes have to borrow one from me. I have two types available: immediate execution calculators and formula calculators. I’ve been wondering lately whether one type of calculator is better for learning algebra than the other.
Here’s how they work (see Wikipedia for a longer explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculator_input_methods).
The TI-36X Solar 2004 version immediate execution calculator.
These calculators work by performing calculations along the way as you type in values and operations. For example, you can evaluate the expression
by typing 3, multiply, 45, then the sine key. As you press operations and operands the calculator will evaluate what it can according to the rules of order of operations, or BEDMAS. For binary operands (those taking two values to produce a result, like multiplication), you put the values in order. For unary operations (those taking just one value, like squaring or taking a sine), the value must be present on the calculator screen when you press the operator key. These calculators usually have a bracketing feature to allow the user to work through complex expressions without using memory storage.
The Sharp EL-510R formula calculator.
These calculators work by waiting until the user has typed in a complete expression to evaluate, then evaluating the entire expression. The order of button-pushing is pretty much as the symbols are written in the expression, making them easier to use for a lot of folks. Once a value is calculated, it’s stored in an “answer” variable in case it’s needed for the next evaluation.
When we write out algebraic expressions, we have a number of conventions to follow. The most important convention is order of operations, which people usually learn to remember with the mnemonic BEDMAS or PEDMAS:
When evaluating (simplifying) an expression, you first simplify the smaller expressions inside brackets. Then you evaluate exponents, then division and multiplication in the order they appear, and finally addition and subtraction in the order they appear. It’s useful to think of brackets as isolating sub-expressions, which then follow the same rules. It’s also useful to think of this order as the “strength” of the operation: multiplication is a stronger operation than addition, so it holds its operands more tightly together, and it gets evaluated first.
When a student is learning order of operations, it often feels like a set of arcane rules. There is no reason, from the student perspective, that it has to be this way. In fact, it didn’t really need to be this way, but the convention was established and now it’s important to abide by it (if you want to be understood, that is).
People often lament that today’s youth can’t perform basic arithmetic in their head. It’s unfortunately true; I often see students reach for their calculator to evaluate 
(Aside for parents: If you have kids, please do make them practise their age-appropriate facts. It’ll help them in the same way practising reading makes things easier)
This will draw a lot of heat, I’m sure, but I think calculators do have a strong place in even K-6 learning. They let students explore quickly without the burden of computation getting in the way of non-computational learning. It’s the same effect that web-based, dynamic geometry software can have on learning relationships between figures, lines, etc. (if you’re looking for awesome dynamic geometry software, try GeoGebra – free and wonderful).
But calculators are a hindrance when students are learning to compute fluently. They allow a student to bypass some of the thinking part of the exercise. Don’t let students (or your kids) use a calculator when they don’t have to. Only use them when students need the speed for the task they’re completing.
Here’s the part I don’t know about, but I’m speculating about.
I think immediate execution calculators require students to understand the algebraic expressions we write, where formula calculators bypass the thinking part of evaluating expressions.
As with arithmetic, if practising evaluating expressions is not part of the learning, and might be getting in the way of the goals for learning, then either type of calculator is fine.
But as students are developing their understanding of algebra and the order of operations, the immediate execution calculator displays the results of operations as they are evaluated, while the formula calculator obscures the evaluations in favour of a single result.
When a student types 5, add, 6, square, equals into an immediate execution calculator, they see the value 36 as soon as they press the square button. There is a reminder that the square operation is immediate. Similarly when a student wants to evaluate 
*A student can use brackets, which is equivalent to pressing equals before sine. Also, I hope anyone using the sine function knows that 30+45 is 75 and doesn’t need a calculator’s help for the addition.
I perused the InterTubes to find research into this question, but either it’s not out there or I’m not skilled enough to find it.
I want to know whether one calculator is better than the other for a student who is learning to evaluate expressions.
Has no one looked into this? Help?
by Noël Zia Lee at flickr.com, CC-BY 2.0 licence.
I hosted a session at On The Rise this year. I’ve posted my slides as a PDF, but I knew from the start that a 60-minute session would be too short for the topic. Here is the previously-mentioned, obscenely long, supplementary blog post.
Being a leader in educational technology does not mean becoming technically skilled. It doesn’t mean you can write code, recover crashed hard drives, or configure a router. You don’t even have to know what those phrases mean.
Being an EdTech leader means that you have relationships with others, and that you share with them using technology.
In order to lead effectively, you need some goals. Here are a few generic examples of goal types:
For example, you might have a goal of learning how to use audio recordings for assessment as learning in a language class. You might have a goal of connecting your teachers to teachers in other school boards. You might want to develop closer professional relationships within your department. You might want to collect and curate resources to support newer teachers.
All of these are great goals, but make sure you follow one simple rule:
One or the other type isn’t enough if you’re trying to consciously lead. If you only have goals for yourself, you have no reason to share and support others. If you only have goals for others, you’re just trying to “improve” them without being honest about your own needs. Have both.
There are a lot of ways to categorize communities, but the “publicness” of a community is fundamental.
This is really a continuum.
At one extreme end of the continuum we have completely public communities, which anyone can observe and in which anyone can participate. For example, Twitter is generally* publicly and globally available. What you say there is readable by anyone, even those who don’t have user accounts with the service.
(*I’m not going to put asterisks all through this post, but be aware most of these statements can be modified by user settings. For example, on Twitter you can protect your tweets so that only approved users can read them.)
At the other extremity we have completely private communities, which are only visible to the “invited” few. For example, you may have a Facebook group that only approved participants can join. The rest of the world isn’t allowed inside.
What’s best depends on who wants to participate, what their level of comfort is, and what everyone’s talking about.
You might have a private community when you need to talk about something sensitive or confidential, or when the participants are worried about making very public mistakes (particularly if this sort of community is new to them). You might protect the conversation when you need to prevent self-censorship in order to have honest dialogue.
You might have a public community when your local community (e.g. the people you work with) is a small one, and you want outside voices. It’s good to be public with universal issues, like assessment or writing.
You might partially protect the conversation by making it “read-only” to the uninvited. For example, perhaps you share the work you’re doing with your department members on a departmental blog/wiki/etc. The rest of the world can view your resources, but only your department members can update the work or comment on it.
Some communities are organized and constructed. For example, you might set up a discussion group about instructional strategies, or you might create a sharing folder for rubrics. The purposes of those communities or activities are clear, and so they’re constructed.
Instead you might just set up a space for conversation to happen. Twitter is my favourite place for this. The topic isn’t defined in advance, so we can talk about anything we want to. The connectedness of the participants is what matters, not the quality of the prompt. Organic communities tend to be participant-directed and very welcoming of tangential thinking.
Halfway between these is the ConstrOrganic community (yes, I just made that up. I’m sure it’ll catch on). This is a community of people which doesn’t have a tight restriction on the conversation, but does sometimes provide prompts. For example, you might ask an open-ended or reflective question on Twitter: “How does your experience with technology in your personal life affect your use of technology in the classroom?” The question itself is posed in an otherwise organic community, but you can try to mould the conversation for a while. In my experience we don’t stay “on-topic” for very long, but that’s fine: the talk goes where it needs to, not where I aim it.
This is one of the hardest to deal with, and it very much depends on (a) who you are, (b) what your role is in your organization, (c) who you are leading or hoping to lead, and (d) what your goals are for the people you lead.
If you’re a principal of a school and you want all the teachers you work with to reflect on their assessment practices in an online space, you might be considering requiring a writing activity in a private, online space. When you imagine how that will play out, you might be concerned that some folks might not participate, or that the participation might not be as deep and reflective as you want.
Rule of thumb: don’t require participation (at least at the beginning) if it’s not anonymous (and therefore safe). People need to trust you in order to follow you. If you don’t already have the level of trust that makes an optional task work well, then you don’t have the level of trust that makes a required task work well with names attached. By removing the names, you’ll remove a good portion of the (legitimate) fear associated with putting thoughts out there.
For example, you can create a shared online document (like a Google Doc) and make it editable to anyone who has the link. Participants can modify the document without identifying themselves, which makes it a lot more likely to be honest and complete.
Your interactions within your community can be synchronous (instant), like a tweet, or asynchronous, like a blog post and a comment. This is often a tradeoff between speed (synchronous) and depth (asynchronous).
Online conversations are usually persistent (they stay there forever), but they may not be easy to return to or make quick sense of later. Sometimes conversations are temporary, like a back-and-forth on TodaysMeet.com or a Google Hangout.
I wonder if having persistent, asynchronous conversations creates a thoughtful-but-cautious environment, possibly erecting a barrier or self-censorship. Is it true that instant, casual, organic conversations are more honest and allow for experimental thinking?
It could be, I suppose, but don’t just do this. Mass email isn’t personal, interactive, or persistent (for most people), which can be good things to have. It’s typically one-way communication, and you can’t really opt-in or opt out. Other types of services will work better for you.
In your participation in any community in which work is being done, you usually take on one of four roles. You’ll move between them freely and frequently once you’re a solid member of a functional community.
I have a question or problem, and I’m looking for an answer or solution.
For example, I post to Twitter, “Anyone have a good summative task for the quadratics section in MCF3M?” That’s a specific quest, and I’m the Quester. Anyone else in the community can answer, and anyone else can benefit from the answer.
I am trying something new, and I’m going to share my journey.
For example, I decided to try some physical demonstrations in my classroom for quadratic motion. I wrote a blog post explaining what I had come up with, shared some video from class, and reflected on how effective it was. I wasn’t an expert, but I shared what I found out (even if it turned out to be wrong).
I am learning something new from you, and I may ask questions.
This is great when there is a source of wisdom you can tap into. For example, I can read all about how to use Screencast-o-matic to improve an e-Learning course by watching someone’s videos or reading their tutorials. If there is something I don’t understand, I can ask questions. The answers help me, and both the answers and the questions help others (including that expert).
I have some special skills or knowledge, and I’ll demonstrate or share.
For example, I post instructional videos about how to program a computer using the Java programming language. I’m sharing some niche knowledge that I have, and I invite conversation and questions about it. I’m not looking for anything specific, but that knowledge does very little good bottled up in my own skull.
There are three major considerations:
Lots of platforms serve multiple purposes. YouTube is for video, but it includes commenting. WordPress is for blogging, but it can serve as a fully functional website. Facebook is a social network, but it has private community pages. Here are a few loose categories and some popular services:
Here are some other considerations when you’re adventuring online.
Think about maintaining loyalty to your employer, respecting copyright and other licences, and protecting student identity and information. There are some things that you simply can’t say in public.
You might draw unwanted attention, even if what you say is “allowed” and isn’t “wrong”. For example, what will you do if a parent has a concern about the conversation between two teachers revealing a lack of professional understanding? Also consider students, other schools, and community members.
When you post something in a private or protected space, you’re trusting the other people in that space to maintain the privacy of your thoughts. Before you post something, consider what might happen if it were “leaked”.
Each has advantages and disadvantages. Your decision will depend on your goals. Here are some of my thoughts on the matter from a while ago:
What if your team doesn’t follow you? What if they want to do something else? What if your team is already doing something different? What if your team is afraid?
You’ll have to work through the reasons for your particular situation, and talk with your team. There might be nothing you can do, except for continuing to share and model good practice.
Is there a good reason for the filtering? Are the people who make those decisions aware of what you’re trying to accomplish? Are they supportive? Have you talked with them about it (really talked, not just made a request by email)?
Sometimes the decision makers have parameters that you’re unaware of, and sometimes you have insight they are unaware of. Talk to each other. In the best situations, neither party thinks they have all the answers.
At On The Rise: K-12 in 2014 Catherine Montreuil (then of Bruce-Grey Catholic DSB) said, “Private practice is inconsistent with professional practice.”
Being connected makes someone a leader, and being open and transparent are the best ways to get connected. You don’t need to be expert, articulate, or tech-savvy.
You just need to be willing to share.
Here are some tweets that I wrote, retweeted, or favourited during OTRK12. I still have to write my OTRK12 reflections in a post, and a summary of the session I hosted. Hopefully I’ll get those done this week. In the meantime, here’s OTRK12 in bite-sized chunks:
(Note: “the” = “they” in above tweet. You knew what I meant, right?)
Two and a half years ago I wrote How I Use Twitter Professionally, then revised it with How I Use Twitter Professionally – Updated! and How I Use Twitter Professionally – Updated Again!
I guess we’ll make it an annual thing:
I’m trying to encourage conversation and collaboration, so my tweets are globally accessible. This also means I don’t make statements I wouldn’t be comfortable with anyone reading – my family, my students, my employer….
I currently follow 370 people, of whom about 250 are actively tweeting (let’s say at least weekly). Some of these aren’t related to education; for example, I follow The LEGO Group (@LEGO_Group) and authors John Scalzi (@scalzi) and Marko Kloos (@markokloos – he has a new book out today!).
I can’t read all of the stuff they tweet. I’m relying on my tweeps to retweet the really good stuff so I have a better chance of seeing it, or to mention me if it’s something they think I ought to notice.
Except for a few obvious accounts, I let anyone follow me. Since my tweets are public, anyone can read them (even without a Twitter account), so letting people follow me doesn’t reveal anything extra. Plus, it’s easier when you don’t have to approve people.
Before I decide to follow someone, I take a look at their tweet history. Is their stream of tweets going to enhance my experience? Will I learn from them? Or will I only learn what they had for breakfast?
I’m a fan of some personal stuff on Twitter, but if you post 300 times a day just to talk without conversing, I don’t need to see it. It’s not about you, it’s just that your use of Twitter doesn’t fit with mine. I think your lifestyle on Twitter should be like the Law of Two Feet: if it’s not working for you, move on.
This cuts down on the spam. Now it’s just mentions, and there aren’t too many of those. This is a good idea for anyone, so I thought I’d list it here.
I also don’t follow people who I don’t want to DM me. That especially includes students. I have my school email for that kind of communication.
I follow #OTRK12 (our annual conference in Mississauga – this week!) and #elADSB (for my Board’s e-Learning teachers). I don’t follow the very busy tags, although I sometimes apply them to my posts (#D2L, #onted, #blendedlearning, #edtech).
I try to follow the people in Northern Ontario. We face many of the same issues, and perhaps we have solutions to help each other. I like that idea.
I tweet too much. No one on Facebook wants to read all of that stuff. The handful of FB friends who do are also Twitter users and teachers, so they just go to Twitter to find me. When I write blog posts WordPress will publicize them on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, and I’m certain that’s plenty for the FB crowd.
Chrome has TweetDeck as an app; I like that I can have columns for a variety of things I want to look at. Currently I have my Twitter timeline, my Twitter Interactions, my Twitter Messages (DMs), and columns for a bunch of hashtags and lists I follow.
I tweet things that I want to remember or revisit (great for “note-taking” at a session/workshop/conference). I also tweet things to inform others or start conversations. My tweets (of links and such) aren’t endorsements, but since people sometimes view them that way I try not to share stuff that I’m not at least familiar with.
I try to ask questions and help out when others ask questions. I’m proud to say I am included as an honourary member of the SGDSB educators list because I help out the teachers up there, so I think my contributions are valued.
More importantly, I’m developing relationships with these distant folks, and the growth of my PLN has helped me out in my work as well. It was very exciting last year at OTRK12 to meet people whom I knew only through Twitter, and it was surprising how natural the face-to-face interactions felt. We were already friends. So thanks, tweeps.
I’m @bgrasley. No pressure, of course. Use Twitter however it works best for you, and don’t be upset if other people use it differently!
Yup, On The Rise is this week. It’s hard to believe we’re that far into the school year already, and it’s harder to believe that it’s been over year since OTRK12 2014.
This year I’m very happy to be presenting on Friday morning. The session title is “How To Become An EdTech Leader” and it’s for school and system leaders. Here’s the official description:
What does it take to be a leader in educational technology (EdTech) today? You don’t need to be a technical wizard. You do need to be willing to connect to a community, listen to others, and share what you’re doing.
We’ll talk about how to create or join different kinds of communities online. We’ll explain some different roles you can have. We’ll have hands-on time for you to get started using a platform of your choice based on your personal goals. And we’ll look at the challenges you can experience trying to lead at different levels of your organization (and propose some solutions!).
You’re coming to this session because you want to be a better leader with EdTech. If you’re a highly connected, social media guru, you probably want to go to a different session.
Did I mention it’s only an hour long? Yup, it’s a big topic. I’m paring down the stuff I’m going to talk about, and I think I’ll have to write an obscenely long blog post to get the rest of it out there.
My basic outline for myself is the following:
I’m definitely feeling the time crunch. Sadly, I’m more verbose in person than I am in writing (shocking, I know), so I’ll need to strictly monitor myself. Of course, the actual path I take during the hour will depend on the other learners in the room with me.
Suggestions are very welcome, as always.
I’m teaching ICS3C/3U (Computer Programming/Computer Science) online this semester. I was the e-Learning Contact for my board for several years, but this is my first time teaching online in “real life” (i.e. not a professional learning session).
Overall I’m fairly happy with how I approached the design of my course, and I’ve also learned a few things that I’ll improve upon.
I work in Ontario using the Desire2Learn/Brightspace platform. The Ministry of Education here has provided a “starter course” for each of my classes. I’ve discussed the problems with the format of that course before (see here), and thoughts I had about improving on it. I mostly followed my own advice.
In the end, there were significant differences between the provided course materials and the approach I wanted to take with the course, so I ventured out on my own.
I use the News area to share interesting links, reminders, and extra details. Notice I don’t post a news item every day; I’ve decided that’s too much without a real payoff.
I post a lot of “instructional videos” in the course. The videos show me coding applications live, so students can hear my thinking while I work, see the errors I make and how I correct them, and see how the development environment works visually.
Of course, playing videos successfully in the online learning environment is a bit device-dependent, so I also post every video to YouTube. I maintain them in a playlist (here) and I post a link in a widget on the course homepage. The YouTube videos also have the advantage of sometimes being faster to download, and users can change the resolution on the fly (not very helpful for code, I suppose).
And most importantly, those videos are available for anyone on the Internet to use. That makes me feel good in my heart.
In an out-of-the-way place on the course homepage I maintain a Padlet. I use this to post related-but-not-necessary links.
I don’t use the Calendar directly, but I do use due dates for Content items so they show up in the Upcoming Events list. More on that later.
I divide up a Unit into Activities, and I number everything:
Within each Activity I also “letter” my items sequentially (3.1A, 3.1B, etc.):
I used to only put due dates on the items that needed to be submitted/completed, like Dropboxes and Discussions. After helping an e-Learning student in the library here with her English class, I realized that students were using the Upcoming Events list in the Content area. I had never explored it before, but it was a sparse list in my course.
Now I add due dates to Content items which I want students to consume as well; for example, I put a due date on 3.2E, which is a video I want them to watch by the end of today. They don’t have to submit anything, but I’m hoping the due date helps to keep them on track.
(Note: This is not an “end date”, which would make the item unavailable after the date has passed.)
I have tried to use HTML, Word documents, and PDF files to post CS content, but I’m happiest posting a PDF that I generate in Word. I get excellent control over the look and feel of the text/images, but the links I put in there still work. It’s also universally-readable.
HTML takes too long to format correctly/beautifully, and Word documents are rendered as images by D2L (disabling any links).
In the end I think the videos are more valuable for the students, especially later in the course. I have several students now requesting videos explaining a certain aspect of the course, but not a lot of PDF requests.
I have a lot more to learn, but I’m pretty happy with the workflow I’ve developed now. Suggestions are very welcome!
This semester I am teaching my first e-Learning course (I’ve been supporting e-Learning for five years; time for me to walk the walk, eh?). It’s a split ICS3C/ICS3U course in Computer Science and Programming.
I’m using Java with NetBeans and we’re coding “desktop” applications (i.e. not mobile yet). We might later move to Android programming, but I think that’ll probably be enrichment for interested students. There isn’t really a requirement to write for mobile in the course, and it adds a lot of extra layers of complexity.
Complexity would be fine, except many of the students are first-time coders – zero experience with programming of any kind. That’s normal, since ICS3x doesn’t have a prerequisite, and many schools (especially in Northern Ontario, but elsewhere too I understand) can’t afford to offer ICS2O as a precursor.
Of course, many of the students do have a bunch of programming experience, some in Javascript or Visual Basic, others in HTML, and a couple in many languages.
So I have what I think is a typically wide range in starting points for learning computer science and computer programming.
Teaching online has special challenges for any course, but ICS has software requirements that are significant and unusual. You need a “computer” – no tablets, no Chromebooks*. You need an application installed and a development kit. If students are using computers owned by their school boards they may have to ask to have those items installed for them. I’m sure you can imagine how easy that is to accomplish.
Of course, many students are using their own computers. I prefer this, because they can install their own software (a useful skill in its own right) and they have a lot more coding time (evenings and weekends).
So what do you do when you get an email like this?
“Hi Mr Grasley, I can’t find Netbeans on the computer at school. I don’t know what to do.”
After several email messages, we got it all worked out. I’m sure the student was frustrated, and I felt a little helpless. The special software needs are tough up front in the course.
The e-Learning environment has a handy document renderer which nicely formats Word and other documents for me in the browser. It’s a fairly new feature, and it works really well.
It can’t handle a .zip file containing a Java project, of course.
So, I have to download the student submissions and import them into NetBeans or unzip them and open the .java files in a text editor. A little more onerous, but still manageable.
See, I’m not complaining – it’s pretty good to have only a couple of issues that are special. I like teaching online, I get to reference xkcd in my course, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the semester.
*It is possible to use a cloud-based development environment, which would allow you to code using other kinds of devices. I’m not “supporting” that just yet, but I can see it down the road. I’m hoping some of my students try it out and report back.
Brandon Grasley's Blog 