Month: November 2015

Invitation to “Accessibility as Good Pedagogy: Universal Design for Inclusive Learning”

Come out and join the Office of Faculty Development and Instructional Technology in celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). We honor this milestone with a webinar on how to make teaching and learning accessible to students with diverse educational needs.wordcloud accessibility

Accessibility as Good Pedagogy: Universal Design for Inclusive Learning
Wednesday, 12/2/2015 from 12:30 – 1:30 PM ET

Please register here even if you cannot attend the live webinar. A recording will be available to all registrants.

I am happy to co-facilitate the webinar with Christopher Leydon from the Office of Student Services. In this presentation and Q&A session we will introduce the principles of universal design for learning (UDL) and how their use not only accommodate students with disabilities but also benefit other diverse populations within the SPS faculty and student body. The importance of these practices lies not only in the requirement to make our educational environments inclusive, but in their ability to help us as effective educators.

Please register here. We look forward to you joining us next week!

Teaching Tip: VoiceThread introduces threaded comments

If you have used VoiceThread in your course then you already know that it is a great tool for creating a discussion around a multimedia presentation, a PowerPoint slide show, a song, or even just a page of text. Recently VoiceThread introduced a few new ways for participants to interact with VoiceThread slides: direct replies, threaded replies, and private replies.
comments in VT

  • Direct replies allow you to click on a comment and have your reply appear directly below that comment, instead of putting your response at the very bottom of the comments bar.
  • Threaded replies are like direct replies, but they start a thread from the original comment and they are visually distinct so you can see who is participating in a particular thread of comments.
  • Private replies are recommended for individual feedback or for private “sidebar” conversations between VoiceThread participants.

See this VoiceThread video for a short overview of these new reply options.

Here’s what a thread of replies looks like:

VoiceThread threaded repliesAllowing threaded replies is not a default setting in VoiceThread. Here’s how to enable them:

  • On your VoiceThread Home screen, hover over the VoiceThread in which you want to enable threaded commenting, and select Edit in the lower left corner.
  • On the next screen, click on the blue pencil on top to edit the VoiceThread settings. In the window that opens, select the Playback Options tab and tick “Enable threaded commenting.”

The threaded reply icon will now be available when participants click on a comment.VoiceThread add threaded replyIf you have any questions about replies (or any other feature) in VoiceThread, please feel free to contact Sarah Kresh or Antonia Levy.