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St. Thomas E-Learning And Research

Student Systems of Support, Uncategorized

Tommie Tech Student Resource: Tips for Faculty and Staff

This article describes the University of St. Thomas student technology resource called “Tommie Tech“ Canvas site, and how faculty and staff can use this resource to support student success.   

What is Tommie Tech?                                                          

All current St. Thomas students have access to a Canvas site called Tommie Tech, an orientation to St. Thomas technologies and online learning resources. There is both an undergraduate and a graduate student version. The current COVID pandemic has further reinforced how students need equitable digital access to resources to enhance participation in virtual spaces.  

Tommie Tech invites students to: 

  • learn about key tech systems such as Canvas, Zoom, Murphy, Office 365, and OneStThomas; 
  • set up their devices including free apps to download; 
  • practice with technology tools; and 
  • locate additional resources while learning online. 

Tommie Tech includes videos, tutorials, and optional activities so that students start their classes knowing how to upload assignments, set their notifications, find 24/7 help, and more. Tommie Tech Site Facilitators keep the site current, post occasional resource updates, and help students find the technology resources such as the UST remote tech desk help.  Tommie Tech complements (does not replace) the more specific college/department level orientation provided to students, and enhances the course-specific student prep module that instructors may include in their courses. 

What do students say about Tommie Tech?  

Many students report finding value in having access to the Tommie Tech site, especially early on in this program.  Here are a few examples of impact from this resource:   

  • “I loved having the screenshots that walked me through how to access the platforms step-by-step!” 
  • “I think the best thing is the canvas app because you are able to see and get notifications on your phone.” 
  • “I thought it was cool that we get 1 terabyte of free cloud file storage in OneDrive.” 
  • “That’s awesome there is 24 hour help available for students, it makes me more confident that if any tech problems arise, I’ll have help to solve them.” 
  • “The in-depth tour of Canvas helped me get the hang of how classes will be organized. The “preparing your devices” section helped me catch and address a few potentially-frustrating tech shortcomings.” 
  • “I have a strong background in technology and have taken many online classes. Combine that with this very thorough orientation and I feel ready.” 

How do students access Tommie Tech? 

Students find Tommie Tech on their St. Thomas Canvas dashboard. If they have trouble finding this site, please contact services.stthomas.edu or the techdesk@stthomas.edu. 

Tommie Tech is especially pertinent for newer students, students who have had less access to or comfort with technology or academics, and/or students unfamiliar with St. Thomas technologies. However, some more experienced students also use the site. Students get to decide when and if the site is helpful for them.  

How can faculty and staff access Tommie Tech? 

St. Thomas instructors and staff are invited to self-enroll into the Tommie Tech Sample Sites: 

Try out the activities and share your feedback on ways to further improve the resource. 

How might instructors, advisors, and program leaders use Tommie Tech with students? 

Professors, advisors, program leaders, student service team members hold a special role to help students to find and use this resource. A few ideas to consider: 

  • Instructors could point out this resource to students on your course site home page or in course announcements. Prior to a new semester or course start, include a message in your pre-class or week 1 note such as “All students are enrolled in a Canvas site called Tommie Tech. Please explore the resources in this site and try the suggested activities by or before the first week of class” OR you could point out certain activities that you’d like them to try. 
  • You are welcome to include the student course URL in your current course or student communications. 
  • There is an option in both sites for students to receive a St. Thomas Tommie Tech certificate if you would like students to document a certain level of engagement with the content. (Note: Starting fall 2020, all first-year freshmen undergraduate students were required to complete Tommie Tech before their first semester and receive a certificate of completion.) 
  • Advisors, Counselors, or Disability Services team members – If you see a student having technology challenges or needs, ask them if they know about the Tommie Tech site. If not, help them find this course on their Canvas dashboard. 
  • In your advising notes, say “For additional technology support, explore the Tommie Tech Canvas site-there for you, 24/7. If new to St. Thomas, we suggest completing practice activities in the site too.” 
  • If a student has unresolved tech needs, point them to the services.stthomas.edu or  techdesk@stthomas.edu for one-on-one support.  

Where did Tommie Tech come from (in case you are wondering…)?  

These sites combine ideas from both the Orientation to Online Learning site (launched in Summer 2018) and the fall 2019 Tommie Tech sites. The earlier versions of both sites had a lot of student, faculty, and staff input that guided us on what to include in this current site. At the start of the COVID 19 pandemic (spring 2020), all students became automatically enrolled in the respective site to ensure equitable access to technology support for all students.  

Starting May 4, 2020, all current and upcoming students are automatically enrolled into the respective site (graduate or undergraduate). There is a daily enrollment feed to ensure that students are not missed. After students are given access to the site, if they do not want to be in the site, they can request being removed at any point (see the home page for unenroll option).  

This post was written by Jo Montie, Online Learning Student Success Facilitator (jkmontie@stthomas.edu) with the St. Thomas E-Learning and Research (STELAR) Center at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn. To learn more about this topic, please visit our website at www.stthomas.edu/stelar or email Jo at jkmontie@stthomas.edu. 

December 17, 2020 by
Best Practices, Tips, and Tricks

Designing and Teaching Short Courses

This post originated as a presentation given to faculty on November 13, 2020.  You can view the recording of that session here. 

In this post, we will present some considerations and strategies to help you design and implement an effective short online or hybrid course. For the purposes of this post, a “short course” is one that is equivalent to a semester-long course in terms of credit hours but is condensed into a shorter amount of time (for instance, a course that would normally be 15-weeks long is instead 5-weeks long).  Sometimes called “compressed”, “intensive”, or “accelerated” courses, they present unique challenges to both students and teachers, especially when all or part of the course takes place in an online environment.

Don’t Merely Condense

For instructors accustomed to teaching semester-length courses, particularly those converting a course they have taught during a whole semester into the short-course format, the first temptation to guard against is expecting to be able to just condense the longer course into the smaller one.  This is often inadvisable for several reasons, and it’s important to reflect on these reasons so you can make wise choices about what to include or leave out. 

Stamina

First, for many students, some activities cannot be sustained for the long periods of time that would be required to complete them in the shorter time frame required in a short course. Examples may include reading a challenging text, doing complex mathematical exercises, or listening to a lecture. Suppose, for instance, you assign students a challenging article or book chapter.  The average student may be able to spend a half hour or an hour at a time on the reading before their concentration drifts and they start to lose the focus required for deep comprehension.  With several days to complete the reading, this may not be much of a problem, but what if they only had a day to do it, or had to complete several such readings over a few days?  Students with less capacity for long periods of sustained concentration may not be able to complete the readings, or may only be able to do so with diminished benefit. 

RunnerWe can liken this to endurance athletics training.  If a running coach has her athletes run 5 miles a day over 6 days, can she just have them instead run 15 miles a day over 2 days and expect the same kind of performance and benefits?  Obviously not.  Something similar holds for many academic activities, which likewise require a kind of endurance and stamina. 

Processing and Internalizing

Secondly, and relatedly, it’s important to consider the time needed to not merely “get through” material, but to process and internalize it. A rapid-fire encounter with a bevy of topics, ideas, information, arguments, and the like, may allow a student to check off a requirement if she’s clever enough to perform well on exams, but she will be likely to forget them as quickly as she learned them.  And courses that involve critical thinking need to give students the chance to think critically, which requires time to ruminate and digest material. 

Instructor Overload

Third, consider yourself, the instructor, here.  Short courses are not just time-intensive for students but for the instructors as well. As a general rule, to ensure that students complete the activities assigned to them there needs to be an associated assessment (a quiz, grade, etc.), and as we will discuss later in the post, a crucial component of short courses is timely feedback. Are you prepared to provide a meaningful assessment – and feedback – for (nearly) everything you assign?  Are you going to be engaged in all of the online discussions you assign?  Teaching short courses online is frequently much more work than instructors realize, and so you want to avoid overloading yourself. This isn’t about laziness or making things as easy on yourself as possible; it’s being realistic about the fact that good teaching takes time, and you want to be thinking carefully about where you want to be putting in your time so that it’s being used most effectively. 

Clarify Course Goals

Having discussed why you usually shouldn’t just condense semester-length courses into short courses without encountering significant problems, the question now is how to make decisions about the material, activities, and organization of a short course. 

The first task is to think carefully and be explicit about the course goals. Those of you who’ve participated in our course design workshops or who’ve worked with instructional designers in building out a course will know all about the importance of setting out the course goals or outcomes right at the beginning, or at least as early as possible in the process.  As important as that is in designing a normal course, it’s especially important for a short course given that a lot of decisions will have to be made about what material and activities are essential and what are not. 

Similarly, if you have tended to focus on content delivery, you want to think about how to translate that into outcomes.  Why is it important for students to read a particular text?  Can the outcome of that be achieved by substituting a different, shorter text, a combo of text and lectures, etc.?  If you’re working from an existing course but haven’t spent the time to carefully articulate the outcomes or goals, this would be a good time to do that, and the instructional designers at STELAR would be more than happy to help as it can often be challenging to pin that down. 

Next, you want to think about how you would prioritize those goals or objectives, because that’s going to help when it comes time to deciding what content and activities may need to be cut or pared down.  This can be quite challenging in cases where an instructor may have a range of goals or content that she would like to include yet would be too much to fit into the course.  But bear in mind that what seems indispensable to a content expert with command of the subject, years of experience and study, etc., may not, in fact, be as necessary for the student to know.  There’s a temptation among academics to design courses as if they’re training up other academics.  It’s how they were trained up, at least those who went through graduate school, earned advanced degrees, and so forth. So they’re accustomed to teach as if they were training up people like them, thinking about the major theories, arguments, etc., that one needs to know to be an expert in the field. 

Short courses force one out of that mentality, and in doing so it’s helpful to think less in terms of comprehensiveness or breadth and more in terms of depth or “meatiness”.  A soup metaphor may be apt (Kops, 2009).  If you’re transferring soup from a larger container to a smaller one, some will inevitably spill over, but you will want to ensure that it’s only the broth that spills rather than the heartier bits.  One commentator has suggested, as an exercise to help make those distinctions, to consider what you would do if you had to teach a course in only 3 hours versus several weeks (Lee, 2002).

Along those same lines, you may consider refocusing your course a bit more radically, making a more minor or secondary goal into one of the primary ones.  For example, if a semester course aims to provide a wide survey of a particular topic, such that a subtopic is comparatively minor, you may decide to focus the short course on that subtopic; in other words, to make the course much narrower. Students may not get the survey you would normally provide, and there may be many gaps in their understanding of the subject, but they may come away having given quite a bit of thought, attention, and discussion to a few subtopics in a way that has shaped their capacity for skillful and critical reasoning far better than a cursory examination of a wide range of issues would. 

Course Design

When you’ve done the work of articulating the course goals and prioritizing the aims and content, it’s time to think about how to design the course.  Again, there are reasons to avoid automatically designing it as a shortened version of an existing course, and material may need to be rearranged.  In the next section, we will present some common challenges students face with short courses, which will then inform a series of design considerations in the section following. 

Holding the Wheel

Consider that in a high-intensity course, late-course fatigue may be more of a factor than in normal courses; even the most dedicated and determined students may find it harder to sustain their concentration or think creatively.  Moreover, students may have a more difficult time catching up if they fall behind, and because of that there’s a greater danger that they will fall behind more precipitously than in a longer course, or give up altogether. 

Sophie P., CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The endurance athletics analogy is apt again here. As to the first point, a major endurance or skills test – like a hill or a technical part of a course – is far more difficult later in a stage than earlier.  But the more interesting analogy pertains to the second point.  A phenomenon commonly-known among participants and observers of endurance events, such as marathon running or cycling, is that when an athlete in front gains a gap – even a small one – on the athlete behind, the psychological effects can be profound.  So long as the trailing athlete “holds the wheel” or “the heel” of the athlete in front, she can produce the energy required to keep up, even if it’s far more than what her body would normally produce.  But once the leading opponent opens a gap, her motivation is quickly sapped, and not only can she not sustain the pace of the person in front, the pace drops considerably more, even less than she might produce on her own due to the impact of discouragement.

Similarly, in a high-intensity environment, falling behind even by a small amount can quickly give way to complete abandonment. As the student struggles to catch up, she is aware that more and more is piling up, like game of Tetris gone bad, and this feeds a sense that no matter how much effort she puts in she’ll never be able to get back on track, so it’s better to just abandon and eat the costs. 

One more consideration needs to be kept in mind.  Students have different learning styles (viz., visual, aural, verbal, logical, social, and solitary).  While it’s important to acknowledge this in the design of any course, the fast-paced and intensive nature of a short course make it much more difficult for a student who favors one learning style to adjust or accommodate herself to a course that emphasizes a different style.  For instance, an aural learner may be able to adapt to a course with a heavy reading load if she’s given plenty of time, but that’s precisely what she’s not given in the short course. 

Design Choices

For reasons like these, a few design choices are worth considering.  Some of these are not ideal, and some may not be possible for a particular course.  That’s why they’re considerations rather than “best practices” (and that’s why we spent time discussing their grounds above, so you can determine whether they apply to your own particular course).  

  • If possible, arrange more difficult, complex material and topics to be earlier in the course so students can tackle them when they are fresher and have a bit more time. (This may not be as easy in courses where the difficult, complex material requires a solid foundation to be built first.)
  • Include shorter, more frequent assignments in lieu of longer, less frequent ones. This keeps students active and engaged, and gives them more opportunity to catch up if they miss something.  For instance, divide up an essay assignment into shorter parts that scaffold onto one another, which can help them avoid the blunder of starting too late on the assignment.  Include several quizzes comprised of questions that you would normally include together on a larger exam.  And so on.
  • Schedule the first assignments as early as you can, even if it’s just a quiz on syllabus, a survey, an initial outline or abstract for their assignment or something like that. With such a short time frame students will need to jump right in, and scheduling assignments early can help with that.
  • Vary the activities they will be engaging in throughout the day, as well as the modes of presentation and engagement: readings, video, audio; academic as well as popular pieces; individual writing assignments, group discussions, collaborative assignments, media production; quizzes and journals, etc.
    This can be important for three reasons:
    • Varying the activities and modes is a way to keep things fresh, which is important to avoid burnout.
    • It’s a way of responding to the differences in learning styles mentioned earlier, which, again, becomes much more important in this intensive format. If everything is designed for one type of learner, a student who is a different kind of learner is much more likely to fall behind or be unable to cope.
    • It can give students an “out” if they fall behind, especially when it involves alternative modes of presenting or engaging with similar kinds of themes, such as an article or book chapter as well as a short video presenting similar ideas. This doesn’t necessarily mean giving students different options for achieving the same goal (although you could do that), but it can mean the difference between a rudimentary engagement versus no engagement at all.   
  • Finally, look through your material and consider whether there is something, especially something that involves listening, that they could do while working out or jogging, doing laundry, eating lunch, etc. If they don’t need to have a text in front of them or necessarily be taking notes, but just need to listen and absorb, you build that into the course and designate it as a “listen” video or something like that.

Course Delivery

In this final section, we will consider some strategies to optimize the delivery of your course. As before, many of these are ones that are important to consider for semester-length as well as in-person short courses but become especially important when a course is delivered in a condensed online format. 

Leverage groups

Dividing students into smaller groups for discussions, activities, and assignments can have numerous benefits in the short-course format. 

  • You can have students conduct peer reviews of assignments, or early drafts of assignments, as a way to facilitate critical thinking and take some of the burden off you, the instructor, to be the sole source of feedback.
  • In the short-course format, in which students may be less inclined to read through many of their classmates’ posts and will instead choose to respond to the first post, the shortest post, the post of their friends, etc., smaller group discussions can help ensure that they’re engaging with a wider variety of perspectives (you could even require them to respond to everyone in the group).
  • Create collaborative assignments, such as group presentations, that allow them to divide up time and responsibilities.
  • Students have often reported that relationships develop better in these environments – just as they tend to do when people share intensive experiences – so you can think of groups as providing opportunities for that kind of bonding.

Communication

  • For most students, the short course will require significant adjustments to their study habits, and communicating time expectations can help quite a bit, especially in the early days. *resource.  Indicating how much time should they plan to devote to various aspects of the course can help them plan their days as well as prepare them mentally for the effort involved. 
  • You should also provide resources for time management if those are available. At St. Thomas, all students are enrolled in Tommie Tech, which includes a page on Success Routines and Time Management.  If a student contacts you because he or she is having a hard time keeping up, you can point him or her to this resource, or better yet, include a link to this page in your Canvas site. 
  • It also may be worth checking in with students a week or so into the course to ask about the pace. Are they finding it too fast, or even too slow?  This can be a way for you to adjust if necessary, and at the very least it reinforces to the students that you are concerned about pace and workload rather than just wantonly piling things on. 

Be a Resource

  • Since students are often having to traverse a large territory in a short amount of time, reading and study guides are especially important to help them know what is essential for them to know and remember. 
  • When providing instructions for assignments, discussions, and the like, be as clear and explicit as possible.  Remember that in the intensive environment, students won’t have as much time to ask you questions, get clarifications, etc., nor will they have as much time to work out details on their own. 
  • Providing regular, timely feedback helps them stay focused, motivated, reminds them that you’re present and that they’re not just taking a correspondence course or the like.

Be available

  • Hold office hours regularly. 
  • Provide a Zoom link that serves as a “office door” – if you’re available (at your computer working, for instance), you can open Zoom like you might open an office door, even outside of regular office hours, in case students may want to pop in. 
  • Check email on a regular schedule, and communicate that with students.
    • For instance, you can communicate to students something like, “I’ll check my email every day at 8am, noon, and 4pm M-F.  So if you send me an email, you can expect a reply within 30 minutes of those times.”
      This is a great way to ease their anxiety and help them budget their time. If a student only has a small amount of time to complete an assignment but needs a question answered, knowing when to expect that answer greatly reduces stress and gives the student the freedom to wait on the answer before trying to proceed. 

Be flexible, supportive, and understanding

  • As we mentioned before, we have to be attentive to different learning styles and how it’s harder to adapt to a mode of delivery that favors a different learning style in such a short time frame.
  • Be ready to accommodate contingencies and off days. Everybody has the experience in which something unexpected comes up that draws you away from your work, or you’re simply having an off day in which you can’t focus or your body woke up but your brain slept in.  In a normal course a student can usually afford that, but an intensive environment, this can be disastrous. Once they fall behind a little bit, it’s not only hard to catch up, it saps your motivation and energy as we discussed earlier.  The question we instructors have to ask ourselves is, what do we want to have happen to a student who experiences that?  Do we want them to be left in the lurch or do we want to make sure they are able to be reintegrated with the class?  Assuming everyone prefers the latter option, as we design and deliver our courses we have to keep in front of us that student who will get sick, have to contend with a family crisis, have an off day, etc., and how we will help ensure that student will be able to finish the course successfully despite that. 
  • There’s also the anxiety and pressure, some of it due to the intensity of the course but much of which is due to the students being aware of everything we’ve been discussing – the fact that she has a different learning style, that he’s at home with his family, that if she has an off day or an unexpected demand she’ll fall behind and be unable to keep up. So being aware of and sympathetic to that in the way you design and execute your course can be very consequential. 
December 14, 2020 by
Best Practices, Tips, and Tricks, Student Systems of Support

Tommie Tech for All: Student Success Resource

As faculty prepare and launch courses for upcoming semesters, here are reminders about the Tommie Tech technology resource for students...

All St. Thomas students are enrolled in either the undergraduate or graduate student version of the Tommie Tech technology resource introducing St. Thomas technology. Whether in an online or blended course, Tommie Tech guides students to:

  • find technology help available to St. Thomas students
  • set up your own device(s) such as testing your browser
  • use Canvas basic features
  • locate St. Thomas apps and digital tools
  • be aware of online etiquette, and
  • learn about digital security practices

All first-year undergraduate students are required to earn the Tommie Tech Certificate and upload into their First Year Experience course; other professors or programs may invite students to review or refresh themselves on St. Thomas technology.

Tommie Tech reinforces what you put into your courses, and is there for students throughout their time at St. Thomas for those who want to come back to this.

Security note: All course URLs in this article are password protected and only accessible to St. Thomas students using their username and password.

Suggestions to help students get the most out of Tommie Tech:

  • Mention the Tommie Tech Undergraduate or Tommie Tech Graduate site in an early course announcement or letter before or during the first week of class.
  • Encourage students to visit the Tommie Tech site by the end of the first week of class and spend time on what is unfamiliar. There are Tommie Tech Site Facilitators available in the discussion spaces and resources on doing a browser check, internet speed tester, tips on Canvas, free apps in the Microsoft word suite, and much more!
    • Sample Message: If you are new to St. Thomas or wanting to review some of the technology and technology support available for students, please explore the Tommie Tech site and suggested activities. <Faculty, insert in either the Undergraduate Student Tommie Tech or the Graduate Student Tommie Tech link into your communication>. New St. Thomas students find it especially helpful to complete the entire site but it is a resource for all students to keep current with St. Thomas technologies; if you have been at St. Thomas for awhile you may simply want to skim the resource. There is also an option to request a Certificate of Completion.
  • Include the student Tommie Tech course link in your course to make it easy for students to access Tommie Tech. Select the correct link here:
  • Use one of our university Canvas Course Templates (upload from the Canvas Commons) which includes a Tommie Tech site url.

Where did Tommie Tech come from?   

The Tommie Tech sites combine ideas from several previous student tech sites. The earlier sites had a lot of student, faculty, and staff input that guided us on what to include in this current site. We continue to learn from students (and you!) and make edits to further guide all of our students.

Faculty are welcome to enroll in the faculty version of the site. 

There is also a faculty version of this site so you can see what students are experiencing.

One St. Thomas, nobody left behind…Advancing the Common Good is about All of Us!  

If there are additional resources or activities you would like to see for your students especially accessing learning in the online or digital space (whether in a fully online class or other classes that access technology), please reach out to Jo Montie jkmontie@stthomas.edu to explore some ways to creatively work together on this!

This post was written by Jo Montie, Online Learning Student Success Facilitator (jkmontie@stthomas.edu) with the St. Thomas E-Learning and Research (STELAR) Center at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn. To learn more about this topic, please visit our website at www.stthomas.edu/stelar or email us at stelar@stthomas.edu. 

November 16, 2020 by
Technology Tools, Uncategorized

Place Based Digital Storytelling, Citizen Science and Place Making

Think of a few places you have never been to, but feel connected to.

How did that connection develop?  What stories were involved?

Our earliest evidence of stories are etched or painted on stone, inseparable from the places they inhabit. Through digital storytelling we can better understand people whom we may have never met and places we may have never been. In ” Voices of the Grand Canyon” we are shown places “firsthand from people whose cultures, world views, and livelihoods are inextricably tied to the Grand Canyon region.” In the video below, Jim Enote shares the meaning of petroglyphs in Chimik’yana’kya dey’a.

Video from the “Voices of the Grand Canyon” Story Map

ESRI story maps have specialized tools for creating narratives involving spaces and places. They make meaningful and authentic whole class, group, or individual projects when some aspect of place is a part of the study. Story Maps are not new, but recent improvements have made them easy to use to create modern-looking and immersive web experiences. Their use is growing in the private and public sectors, including k-12 and Higher Education. This post provides an overview and examples of Story Maps with resources to get you started using them.

Guide your audience through immersive and interactive scenes with maps, images, video, and sound.

If you were telling a story in person you would probably use gestures and movement. Story Maps have features that help draw your audience in. For the best experience let’s look at some stories that highlight some of these features.

  • Side Cars allow you to create smooth flowing scenes with rich media content and maps. As the user scrolls down the page, the side cars float up triggering new views or scenes. There are a few well designed options for layout that are simple one-click options in the builder. The Story Maps below show some ways sidecars can be used with different media types.
    • Braided by Greta McLain, A Midway Murals Project by the College of Arts and Sciences SOLV Initiative tells the story behind the St. Paul Mural “Braided” by Greta McLain. The central pane features different views of the art while the sidecar uses video interviews with the artist to tell the story behind the mural and its connection to the community.
    • Saving the Shawangunks uses video and text adjacent to maps in the side car.
    • Sounds of the Wild West immerses you in the sounds of the ecosystems of greater Yellowstone National Park. One unique feature of the sidecar is its ability to add sound that will play in the background as the user scrolls down the page.
  • Slide Shows allow your audience to navigate horizontally for a section of your story. This can be used when you want to provide more detail about a topic in your story without taking away from the main narrative. Hannah Wilber’s Slideshow: A new immersive block in ArcGIS Story Maps provides an in depth look at this feature and when you might choose it over side cars.
  • Guided Map Tours takes your audience on a journey through points on a map. Each stop contains a block that you can configure with multimedia and text. By setting the initial zoom of each point, you can draw your audience’s focus to the action. In guided maps you can choose to have your map, or your media focused in the main view.
    • Mapping street art inspired by George Floyd keeps the art positioned in the center while the map and narrative float to the left.
    • Reveal takes you on a short journey of exposed features in the Mississippi River Gorge near St. Thomas. This tour keeps the map as the central focus.
    • TIP If you take pictures using a phone with “location services on.” Location data is encoded in the picture. If you upload those pictures in .jpeg format to a map tour it will automatically create a pin on a map where you took the picture. For a fun activity ask students take 5 random pictures and then ask them to create a story out of them. As a get to know each other activity you can ask students to create a story about 5 places that are important to them and describe why?
  • Swipes let the user compare two maps or pictures. These are great for highlighting change in a place at two different times.
    • Reveal uses a swipe to compare two photos of the falls of St. Anthony at different times. You can also compare maps.

Maps help tell your story.

Creating maps

Why you should use Express Maps provides useful examples of the types of maps you can create in new Story Map builder.  Use express maps to tell your story provides a comprehensive and efficient animated tutorial to create maps. There are Nineteen Steps, but you really only need to do steps 1-3 to create a simple map with location points. For all maps, steps 17-19 are critical to helping your map stand out, look good, and be accessible. It’s easy for maps to get complicated fast. If you are new to this keep your maps simple to start.

Using existing maps

A library of over eight thousand maps are available through Esri’s Living Atlas of the World.  Maps built from public data sources such as US Census, academic, non-profit, private industry, and a growing open and citizen sources provide a diverse array of maps to enhance or be the centerpiece of your story.

Citizen Science, Research and Placemaking

A compelling story can motivate people to engage with your cause, research, or contribute to your crowdsourcing call. Story maps offer several affordances to promote engagement. Buttons with links provide “calls to action.” <i frame> support for embedded content help you integrate with other data collection forms and widgets. For citizen science work where you want to crowdsource information with a spatial component (like bird sightings), or for collective placemaking, ESRI’s Survey123 application helps you collect information from your audience and map it. In the story map Reveal there are two surveys to collect data and buttons with calls to action or to view the crowd-sourced data. The map River Stories displays the incoming entries in real-time. Survey 123 makes a fun and engaging class activities and a powerful tool for research.

Resources and guides for creating Story Maps

Planning Guides and Resources ESRI Education team

Get Started with Story Maps ESRI Education team

Teach with Story Maps  University of Minnesota

Making Story Maps Citable for Research ESRI Education Team

Have an idea of how you could use Story Maps but need some assistance?

Let us know!

This post was written by Matthew Vernon, Instructional Designer (vern0007@stthomas.edu) with the St. Thomas E-Learning and Research (STELAR) Center at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn. To learn more about STELAR, please visit our website at www.stthomas.edu/stelar or email us at stelar@stthomas.edu. 

November 16, 2020 by
Badging and Microcredentials, Student Systems of Support, Technology Tools, Uncategorized

Zoom Assistants: Available to Team with Faculty

Our St. Thomas Innovation and Technology Services (ITS) team now has Zoom Assistants, trained student employees who have earned Zoom Host and Zoom Assistant badges.

This fall 2020 several Zoom Assistants started teaming with faculty to help get the most out of Zoom in both fully online classes (where everyone is in Zoom) and also flex/blended classes where some may be online in Zoom and others are in person at the same time.

Typically,  a student Zoom Assistant would join you for 1-4 sessions (although on occasion, longer), or if you simply want a Zoom Assistant to practice certain Zoom tools with you, that is also an option.

These student employees are committed to you and your class’s success, and work in partnership with you to help you to further incorporate Zoom features and engagement tools into your teaching.

How to Request a Zoom Assistant

If you would like a Zoom Assistant to either join you for practice, or to attend one or more class times, please complete this short Zoom Assistant Request form. These details will help us to match the right support for your needs.

Situations Where a Zoom Assistant may Help 

  • If you wish to try breakout rooms and have help the first time doing that, a Zoom Assistant could join you to first practice and then join your class.
  • Perhaps you feel that your Zoom students and face to face students do not hear one another well; the Zoom Assistant can join your Zoom students for a session or more and help to improve the experience for virtual students.
  • If you have an extra-large class, you might like a Zoom Assistant to help monitor chat, monitor the participant box, and help with audio or cameras if someone has trouble.
  • Perhaps you have a guest speaker with a large class, and would like a second pair of hands to help you with the Zoom logistics for that session.
  • Maybe things are overall going “ok” and yet teaching can be lonely (especially during COVID) and you would like some validation in how you are using Zoom and also get a few other good tips or ideas.

If you or someone you work with may appreciate a Zoom Assistant,  please encourage them to fill out the Zoom Assistance Request form or talk to Sam Baldwin or Jo Montie to learn more.

Thanks for helping us to launch this new effort, and please help spread the word! 

This post was written by Jo Montie, Online Learning Student Success Facilitator jkmontie@stthomas.edu with the St. Thomas E-Learning and Research (STELAR) Center at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn. 

October 25, 2020 by