Category: Teaching with Technology

Digication (http://elon.digication.com) is an e-portfolio system. All Elon students have a Digication account tied to their Elon email/Gmail account. Faculty must create an account by contacting the Technology Helpdesk (278-5200; helpdesk@elon.edu) and asking to have an account created.

Uses of Digication include

• Helping students understand how to create and disseminate texts in an electronic form
• Creating and sharing portfolios of student work. For example, PWR seniors create a digital portfolio to share their work with PWR faculty and, if they wish, future employers.
• Creating projects for showcases, such as the College Writing showcase
• A vehicle for sharing faculty scholarship

“I rely on rubrics to help me more efficiently provide feedback on informal writing assignments. Being more efficient allows me to respond to students’ writing quickly. A carefully worded rubric can provide students with essential information about the expectations for and their performance on these informal assignments. Being able to provide general feedback by checking a box on the rubric not only saves me time, but allows me to focus my written comments on aspects of students’ writing that are unique to the individual. In other words, the rubric allows me to save time, but also allows me to provide better feedback. The Rubrics Tool in Blackboard Learn helps me create and distribute rubrics to the students.”

“A ‘bloody’ essay is one that has been graded, and as a result, may have quite a bit of red ink on it.  Red ink can be inserted electronically in several ways, which will be demonstrated in this document, but you must remember that lots of red ink doesn’t necessarily mean that you got a bad grade.  What it does mean is that I have lots to say to the writer (read: constructive comments). …These red comments include praise as well as ideas about improving problem areas, and sometimes even hyperlinks to helpful online resources.”

“Last semester I began using a screen-capturing software called JING, which allows you to make a short videos (5 minutes) of whatever is on your screen. After having students submit papers electronically, I was then able to create a personalized video that both provided visual representations of areas that needed work (highlighting passages for example, moving paragraphs, etc. ) and my comments in the form of audio track that followed the action of the screen. The students really loved this approach and I was not only able to provide a lot more feedback (I found 5 minutes of speaking to be much more than I could ever write) but it made grading much quicker.”