I've been playing around with SitePal for a year and a half now. I love the idea of having an avatar for students to interact with, but it has proven to be a bit time consuming and expensive. My initial investment was a cool $99 to get five avatars and scenes with 1 minute of audio each (Bronze). One minute is not a lot of time and during the first year I had a hard time keeping to the limit, so I ended up neglecting my avatar, dubbed Associate Professor Sam. But instead of giving up completely on the idea, I decided to invest a bit more money into it and see if I could make it work. Initially the lowest SitePal plan costs $99 but didn't include Text to Speech (TTS). That is how I make Sam talk to my ...

Finals start tomorrow, and I've spent most of the last week grading and tying up loose ends in my hybrid and online courses. I finally feel as if I have my hybrid and online ENG102 course right where I want it to be in terms of design. It only took 7 years. I started designing the course in 2001 when I started grad school. Back then it was just a face to face course with lots of different technologies added in here and there. It grew to a hybrid that I studied and wrote my dissertation on. Now it's a fully online Quality Matters certified course, one of the first QM certified courses in the district. I'm proud of this course, but as I wrap up this semester and reflect on what I think went well and what I think didn't, ...

No, don't get me wrong. Educause is a great conference and definitely worth while to fly across the country to sit in on some amazing conference sessions. But when I start thinking about going back to my campus and never having the possibility to experience any of the great tech tools I learned about, I get depressed. We don't even have any IT leaders from our campus that even come to Educause, so I ended up hanging out with all the other IT, VP's, faculty and instructional designers from our sister colleges. What a treat that was as well. I get so jazzed hearing about all the cool things they are doing on their campuses. I saw an amazing presentation this morning from some guys at Drexel University talking about a lecture capture solution they implemented on their campus: Increasingly, colleges and ...

Multimedia Infused Freshman Comp From: soul4real Multimedia Infused Freshman Comp View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: multimedia tyca-west) Presentation for the TYCA-West conference in Clarkdale, AZ. Using podcasting in freshman composition courses. SlideShare Link

Okay, first notice that I didn't say Smartboards. I said white boards. I would love to be posting about the use of Smartboards in my developmental writing class at GCC, but that is not the case today. I'm posting about the technology of white boards and markers and technology use in developmental classes. I often struggle with the protestation of using technology in developmental writing courses. Some say that developmental writers are not ready to use technology and that many will struggle with the technology and miss out on learning the necessary writing skills. Others, including myself, feel that the use of technology only enhances the writing and learning experience. The debate is on going. From the Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Basic Writing: According to a survey of basic writing teachers across the country, a disparity ...