Tag Archives: communication

Email Your Students Without Knowing Their Email Addresses

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myLesley has a couple of helpful tools that allow you to easily communicate with your students without having to first look up their email addresses or create an email list.

Announcements

Announcements allow you to post timely information and reminders to your students in your myLesley course. You can also send the announcement as an email to all of your students, allowing them to receive the information even if they are not logged into the course. Want to remind them that you are meeting in the lab tomorrow? Learn how in the video below.

Send Email

The Send Email tool allows you to easily send email to a single student in your class, a small group or all students without ever leaving myLesley. You can also email TA’s or another instructor co-teaching with you. Your students can use this tool as well. So much for the excuse that they lost your email address.

Faculty Spotlight: Martha McKenna

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Martha McKenna is a professor at Lesley University and the Director of the Creativity Commons. As part of her work to support creative exploration in teaching and learning across the university, McKenna is currently heading up a two-year grant-funded project called the Visual Literacy InFUSION Project. This cross-division collaboration aims to support faculty across the university in recognizing, promoting and evaluating non-traditional visual and media literacies in their classroom practice. As the project heads into its second year, we caught up with McKenna to see what role academic technology has played in the Visual Literacy project so far, and how it might intersect with the project’s goals going forward.

[eLIS]: The faculty involved in the Visual Literacies project are a diverse group from across the university, all with busy schedules and other priorities. How have Lesley’s academic technology resources helped to facilitate the project despite these challenges and lay the foundation for an authentic group collaboration?

[McKenna]: Academic technology played a critical role in connecting faculty across the university in the Visual Literacy InFUSION Project.  Through myLesley, we were able to create a learning community where communication was centralized, and where all resources were made available and easily accessible. We have also been able to capture all of our faculty’s activity in the community’s Blogs. The eLIS staff helped us think through how best to utilize myLesley, and helped us to adapt the tools to suit our unique purposes.

[eLIS]: What do you see as the biggest challenges that lay ahead as the Visual Literacies project moves into its second year and scales up to reach more instructors and classrooms across the University? 

[McKenna]: We are excited to move forward with the Visual Literacy InFUSION Project across the undergraduate schools. Since the Project encourages faculty to integrate text and image more creatively in their teaching and learning environments, faculty will naturally be expanding their use of digital resources in the classroom, and many could require exposure and training to support this evolution in their practice. We will also be counting on myLesley to help us reach and coordinate the efforts of greater numbers of faculty across the undergraduate schools.

[eLIS]: With the success of the project so far in a select sample of face-to-face classrooms, do you see potential for this work to impact distance education and online instructional practices at Lesley University? 

[McKenna]: The Visual Literacy InFUSION Project provides an opportunity for all faculty to think about how digital resources can expand the engagement of students in learning and expressing what they know through text and images using new media. This transformation away from text-centered instruction can only expand the way we look at online learning resources and delivery of instruction. And since our approach has students become active agents in their own learning through project-based assignments, it is perfectly suited to create new possibilities in Lesley’s online learning environments.

Emails Blocked from myLesley

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Gremlins in the System (GITS) is at it again. This time they are blocking communications sent from myLesley in hopes of disrupting eLearning. Will Agent L be able to outsmart them? Read on and find out.

ALvsGITS

Agent L: Hi Ben. Do you have time for a cup of coffee?

Ben Friday: Not today, Agent L. GITS are at it again. They are blocking emails sent from myLesley. No one is getting their messages. It’s a disaster!

Agent L: Calm down, Ben. Tell me what’s happening.

Ben: GITS has changed the email address that all the myLesley course emails are sent from. They are now coming from do-not-reply@blackboard.com except not everyone is getting them.

Agent L: Let’s take a look at your email. It must be there somewhere. Here they are. All the emails are in your Junk Email folder. Basically your email application thinks the emails are spam.
junk email folder

Ben: So what do I do?

Agent L: Simple. We tell Office 365 that they emails are ok.
(Agent tip: Go to lesley.edu/email to access Office 365 with your Lesley email address and password.)

From within Office 365, click on the gear icon in the top right corner. Settingsicon

Choose Options from the menu. Then click Block or allow in the left-hand menu.
blockAllow

Click on do-not-reply@blackboard.com to select it and click the trash can icon to remove it from the list.
Blockedsenders

Click Save at the top to save your options and you’re all set. Emails from myLesley will now go to your Inbox instead of your Junk Email folder.

BenBen: Wow, Agent L! Way to outsmart GITS!

agent LAgent L: Outsmarting GITS isn’t just my mission, Ben. It’s my passion.

 

Learn more about using myLesley and Office 365 at the Agent Support Site.

Instructional Continuity: Communicating with Your Students

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The early months of 2015 saw record-breaking snowfall in the Boston area, causing wide-spread school closings. What do you do when you need to cancel class or the university is closed for inclement weather or a flu outbreak? How do you ensure that your students don’t fall behind?

In this first post in our Instructional Continuity series, we’ll explore some ideas and strategies faculty have used for communicating with students and replicating classroom discussions during school closures.

Synchronous Communication
Class has been cancelled but you and your students are still available to meet, albeit remotely. The solution? How about a conference call? You can use a free conference call number (such as freeconferencecall.com) to connect with all of your students at once.

I scheduled a conference call during which we talked in real-time about some of the course content; I explained several concepts, and gave the students opportunities to discuss them.  It wasn’t perfect, of course, but students later told me they were glad there were ways for us to keep in touch during all those snow cancellations.

Donna Halper
Business Management and Communication

Looking to step up the technology a bit? Try scheduling an online meeting via Skype for Business (Lync). Skype for Business allows you to create an online meeting where you may communicate with your students, present information, or share your screen.

Please note that in the case of widespread power outages students may have limited internet and/or phone access. If this is the case you may want to try some asynchronous options.

Asynchronous Communication
Instead of meeting in real time, you may choose to hold your conversations asynchronously. Unlike a synchronous tool, asynchronous activities take place when it is convenient for each person. Some ideas for asynchronous communication include email and online discussions.

Email is a great way to keep in touch with your students. You may send emails to all of your students, groups of students, or individual students.

Some students could not come in [because of the weather], but class was never cancelled. For students who could not make the commute I gave alternate assignments via email.
Lynette Cassel
Expressive Therapies GSAS

Use the Send Email tool in myLesley to send messages to your students without ever leaving the course.

Looking to have a more in-depth conversation? The myLesley Discussion Board allows you to replace or enhance classroom discussions in a digital format. Discussions can serve as an online meeting place, a place for collaboration, or a way to demonstrate the understanding or application of course material.

I assigned students a reading response in the course discussion board.  They were responsible for exploring a movement therapy concept in the theme of movement observation.  After completing the readings I had them move through these themes on their own, look for visual images that reflected their experience and post these images into the discussion board.  They had to post these images with a description of their body experience and how that shaped their understanding of the concept.  They then had to respond to at least 2 other peer comments.
Valerie Blanc
Expressive Therapies GSAS

Looking for more ideas? Visit Planning for Instructional Continuity for guidelines on creating an emergency plan for your course. And stay tuned for next week’s Instructional Continuity blog post.

Faculty Development Community at Lesley

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A new faculty community has been created in myLesley as a central place to share information and events from the Dean of Faculty Office and eLearning and Instructional Support. The community is still a work in progress so if there’s content you want to see and would find helpful please let us know.

A key element of the Faculty Development community will be events calendar. The calendar will list events sponsored by the Center for Teaching, Learning and Scholarship, eLearning and Instructional Support, Faculty Development and the Provost Office. We will also post relevant events by other Lesley offices.

To access the Faculty Development at Lesley community, log into myLesley. Click on the “my community” tab at the top. Look for Faculty Development at Lesley in the list and click on the title.my organizations To access the events calendar, click on Faculty Calendar in the left-hand menu.faculty calendar link

Want to add the Faculty Development calendar to your own calendar such as Outlook, Office 365, Google, or your iOS or Android phone? Simply scroll to the bottom of the myLeslsy calendar and click Get External Calendar Link. get external link

Copy the link for the myLesley calendar and add it to your personal calendar. See the instructions on our support site to learn how to add the calendar link to many of the most popular calendar tools.