Clickers are wireless personal response systems that can be used in a classroom to anonymously and rapidly collect an answer to a question from every student; an answer for which they are individually accountable. This allows rapid reliable feedback to both the instructor and the students, even in large classrooms. Clickers are not a magic bullet – they are not necessarily useful as an end in themselves. They become useful when the instructor has a clear idea as to what they want to achieve with them, and the questions are designed to improve student engagement, studentstudent interaction (on-topic), and instructor-student interaction. (CWSEI Website)
Blogs and Wiki’s Blogs and Wikis let you and your student easily build and maintain private or community websites. Blogs and wikis have been applied in hundreds of instances for a wide array of teaching and learning applications. Professors use blogs to make big classes feel smaller by sharing resources and news, and allow students a quick means of offering feedback or questions. Course blogs give students a unique, personalized platform for finding their own voice and sharing it. (blogs.ubc.ca website)
Turn-It-In Anti-plagiarism software TurnItIn is a web site that checks for the originality of material. Students upload the text of their assignment to TurnItIn or can submit assignments via Vista if instructors have added and configured the Turnitin Vista PowerLink. The software scans the assignment and reports on originality (on a scale from 1 to 5). Using a variety of algorithms, the program compares the assignment to material on the web and in its database of student reports. (It will detect copying even if a student replaces up to 50% of the words in a paragraph). Instances of copying are flagged in a report. More extensive reports for assignments with low originality scores can then be studied in more detail, including the sources of any text that is matched in the student’s assignment. Faculty members decide, with help from the report, whether this is or is not a case of plagiarism. Privacy and security are high at this password-protected site. UBC has subscribed to Turnitin’s service (http://www.turnitin.com) since 2001. For more information, see Turnitin at UBC http://www.vpacademic.ubc.ca/ integrity/turnitin/ If your Faculty has an Instructional Support Unit, it should be your first stop for finding out more about the technologies available at UBC and how to incorporate them in your teaching.
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