Our guest blogger today is Rene Tanner ASU librarian, who specializes in biology, life sciences and environmental resources, and will be regularly sharing tips and tricks through our TeachTech Blog. In her post below, she shares how to set up an alert, and a great app called BrowZine that may be helpful for your classes and research. APP:  BrowZine Do you remember coming to the library and browsing the periodicals to see what was new in your research area? BrowZine is an app designed for browsing recent issues of scholarly journals on your iPad, iPhone or Android tablet. As the name implies, BrowZine is unlike many traditional research tools in that it emphasizes browsing over focused research and searching. Many journals develop issues around a research theme and having a tool that displays articles in the larger content of a journal issue can produce serendipitous discovers. In BrowZine you can create a bookshelf of favorite journals, browse a collection of jo...

Developing online courses can be an overwhelming experience, but Kathleen Pigg and Brenton Scott wrote a blog post that gives you some insight into their transition from traditional to online courses. Our adventures in the transition to digital format.  - Kathleen B. Pigg and Brenton D. Scott, SoLS Plants & Civilization (PLB 302) is a course that explores the wide range of how we grow, eat, build with, discover, exploit, modify and imitate synthetically the plants and plant products that are essential to our world and our survival. The course has always lent itself to a lot of in-class activities, e.g., "activity days" when we bring in real things (tropical fruit juices to test, herbs and spices to identify, chocolate of varying % cocoa, knitting needles, crochet hooks and yarn, drop spindles), group projects (e.g., "create a farm", "create a menu") and guest lectures (e.g., on herbal medicinal tea, xeriscaping, coffee roasting, etc.) As the...

Sometimes we get a group of students that just do a fantastic job on a project. They go above and beyond our expectations, and remind us how great it is to be a teacher. Scott Cloutier, PhD taught an online course on the Biology of Happiness this summer, and just had to share the final project from his students. His assignment was open-ended, and allowed students the freedom to create something meaningful and creative. Below is his blog post. "Have you ever wondered why we feel the way we do in the spaces we occupy? How about connections between relationships and our happiness? We live in an overwhelming world of endless choices and options, yet, we are driven by biological factors to survive and reproduce. I recently asked my online students to develop interventions to help people realize the connections between their own happiness and some of these biological factors. You can see my assignment guidelines by clicking here.  I want to share one website in particular -...

Field Trips are a great way to motivate students, get them excited about content and create memories. But often the locations are too expensive, or would be geographically impossible to get to during class times. One option is to create a virtual field trip! Our TeachT@lk Webinar on August 4, focused on how instructors can create virtual "experiences" for students that include location videos, images, interactions with experts in the field and guided discussions between students and their peers about their Dr. Jim Elser's Drone Video experiences. We shared 3 experiences by ASU Faculty: Jim Elser's Drone Tours (sample clip) Mike Angilletta's Expert Interviews with Robbie Wilson using Vidyo "Live" synchronous field trip at the ASU Natural History Collection with Liz Makings using Adobe Connect Finally, we talked about using existing resources like the wildlife webcams, and having students create their own virtual fieldtrips as a final clas...