Author Archives: Anastasia Salter

May 20, 2013, 11:00 am

Make Presentations and Publish on the Web with Flowboard

Now that I do all my conference travel with only an iPad, I’ve been looking for better solutions to creating presentations and content while on the road. One of the most interesting of these is the recently released free app Flowboard. The free storage includes 250 MB, which seems like enough for most projects, but there is a premium for more storage. Unfortunately Flowboard requires iOS 6 and an iPad, but it creates presentations that are published through its platform and easily viewed on the web, rather like Prezi.

Essentially, Flowboard is a streamlined tool for creating linear presentations, galleries, or magazine-like content with internal and external links, text, images and video. It’s similar to PowerPoint but with fewer options, and it eliminates some of my least favorite things that show up in PowerPoints: bullet points, tables, and random flashy animation. The Flowboard…

May 13, 2013, 11:00 am

Researching in Public on Tumblr

By Anastasia Salter

Even though Tumblr has been around for several years, I’d never taken a serious look at it until recently. I’ve mostly used Tumblr as a perfect procrastination tool, especially at the end of the semester. There are lots of academia-themed humor tumblrs such as When in Academia, Acadecomic, Academic Tim Gunn, Academic Tyra and All My Friends Are Academics. Other sites provide anonymous spaces for sharing experiences in academia, such as the often depressing Academic Men Explain Things to Me. But Tumblr can also be used in the classroom, as Carol Holstead and Doug Ward pointed out in their recent guest post. Lynda Barry’s posts on her Unthinkable Mind class are a great example of that type of engagement–I’ve been following the class from afar all semester.

I haven’t tried Tumblr yet with my students, but I am playing with it into my own work. As a platform, Tumblr advertises itself a…

April 29, 2013, 8:00 am

Making Board Games in the Classroom

By Anastasia Salter

I just got home from THATCamp Games II at Case Western Reserve University, where we played and made a lot of games. In the past I’ve talked about making games for the classroom using lots of technologies (Inform 7, inklewriter, Twine, Scratch), but games don’t require any computing power to be great. Physical board and card games can be powerful systems of representation and more immediately accessible for exploring something in a classroom. This might bring back made memories for some of us of classroom jeopardy–but when the mechanics of the game fit the content, it can be much more powerful than that.

During THATCamp Games II I taught a crash course workshop in making educational board games. Here’s the full Prezi from the workshop. The same basic process can be used for designing a game for a lesson or in asking students to make a game, which itself can provoke a different way of …

April 24, 2013, 11:00 am

Open Thread Wednesday: Handling Breakdowns in Teamwork

By Anastasia Salter

Many of us at ProfHacker have written about digital projects for classes that demand collaboration. I teach game design, so my students are often involved in projects that demand a range of skillsets and are modeled after an industry that is largely team-based. It is essential that my students develop their skills at collaboration and playing different roles on teams in demanding projects. However, as the end of the semester looms, a few teams always fall apart. A student drops out of the class or disappears; a student is ill and misses several supervised team development days; a student proves unable or unwilling to do the work or team dynamics go awry.

Here are a few of the policies I’ve been trying for handing these breakdowns in collaborative work:

Invisible teammates are ex-teammates. After a certain number of absences from essential days, or one unexcused absence from a…

April 18, 2013, 11:00 am

Revisiting Your Learning Management System

By Anastasia Salter

This month I conducted a workshop on “Thinking Outside the Course Management System” as part of a series on “Networked Learning” we’re running at the University of Baltimore. Many of us at ProfHacker are big believers in using open tools and alternative platforms for our courses instead of our university systems: David Parry, a fellow WordPress advocate, offered several thoughts on what makes WordPress a great course platform and Trent Kays rebelled against Blackboard with Posterous and TinyChat. Ryan Cordell offered several thought-provoking questions about our reasons for these “rebellions” against our university tech systems, and noted that for some of us who are digitally-inclined (myself included) subversive choices in technology become a default behavior.

Talking about technology choices with a broader audience reminded me how important it is to regularly question all our own a…

March 14, 2013, 11:00 am

Handling Snow Days

By Anastasia Salter

Depending on where you live, last week’s blizzard might have brought you major snow, a lot of rain and hype, or nothing at all. My town fell somewhere in-between snowstorm and non-event but it was still enough to close my university for a day and in doing so interrupt class (and life!) schedules.

How can we handle the complications caused by snow days? Natalie recommends including a catch-up day as the ultimate syllabus hack. Of course, that requires advance planning–and can still go awry if a major blizzard or other unexpected event cancels multiple days of class. I’m a big fan of catch-up days (which usually sit near the end of my syllabus schedule with readings to-be-announced, and can be easily turned into opportunities for discussion of topics that arise throughout the course if they aren’t needed for make-up classes.)

However, catch-up days alone might not cover everything,�…

March 7, 2013, 8:00 am

Making Games in the Classroom with Scratch

By Anastasia Salter

I’ve discussed the potential value of learning some scripting for any major in the past, and President Obama recently called for more of a focus on making sure students know “how to actually produce stuff” with computers, citing game design as a potential motivation. I’ve been participating in the Learning Creative Learning MOOC from MIT Media Lab, and this week we’ve been working with Scratch. Scratch is certainly a powerful entry point for the type of learning Obama called for. Playing with Scratch reminded me how powerful it is for a language that uses building block code, and made me reconsider it for introducing fundamental programming to some of my non-coders in the classroom. Scratch is a powerful way to support goals like Brian’s of teaching kids to make–but it’s for more than just kids. I grew up with Logo, a highly visual tool where writing simple code “commanded” a turtle to …

March 1, 2013, 3:00 pm

Weekend Reading: Creative Learning Edition

By Anastasia Salter

For the past few weeks, I’ve been participating in the MIT Media Lab Learning Creative Learning “MOOC.” All the session videos are available online, including a great discussion of Making & Constructionism. I’ve enjoyed the course’s fairly active Google + community most of all, as participants share their own experiments with learning creativity (and creatively) across a broad range of backgrounds and environments. This week’s readings are inspired by some of the conversations happening throughout that course.

LCL participant Rosa Aleman wrote a reflection on “Scratch & New Ways of Seeing“: ”Personally, I’m still learning fluency in the medium of coding– but what Scratch has done for me is given me a powerful concept to explore in the real world. I try to set up my collaborative projects and activities much like the interface of Scratch— offering with each project or them…

February 21, 2013, 11:00 am

Creating Interactive Texts with Twine

By Anastasia Salter

While assigning digital alternatives to the traditional essay can be very rewarding, many tools are too complicated to introduce to students for just one assignment. If you’re looking for something simple that offers ways to break out of the linear text form, you might want to check out Twine, a free open platform (created by Chris Klimas) for building simple linked nonlinear texts. Twine has been around for several years, but it’s recently experienced a resurgence in use for experimental works and in classrooms. Ambitious projects like the just-released Depression Quest (by Zoe Quinn, Patrick Lindsey, and Isaac Schankler) show how powerful Twine can be for storytelling and persuasive games. I’m using it as a first tool in an upcoming course on interactive narrative alongside examination of the hypertextual electronic literature it resembles at a structural level.