Online Teaching & Blogging

TWEN Course Site

Best Practices Blog

In addition to teaching Albany Law School’s first online course, Patty Salkin will be blogging about her experience.

lst Post: Getting Ready for On-Line Teaching

2nd Post: Organizing Technology to Teach On-Line

3rd Post:  Setting Goals and Evaluation for an On-Line Course

4th Post:   Course Design – Technology Meets Substance in On-Line Curriculum Development

5th Post:  On-Line Discussion Boards Create a New Arena for Engaged Learning Environments

6th Post:  Integrating Internet-Based and Teleconferencing Resources into On-Line Teaching

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Click HERE to read an article by Prof. Salkin about this course from the Spring 2010 Professional Responsibility Newsletter.

Mobile Apps for Law School

Welcome back students and faculty!

Thanks to UCLA School of Law for this great site: Guide Overview – Mobile Applications for Law Students and Lawyers – LibGuides at UCLA School of Law. 

It provides information about current mobile applications that might be of interest to law students and lawyers. You can download links for apps are provided for Android, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Blackberry, Palm, and other devices. (I did!!)

 

 Check back often as new apps will be posted regularly!

Albany Law’s Instructional Technology Blog – 2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 19,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

LawTeaching.Org’s Idea of the Month

Each month, the Intstitute for Law Teaching & Learning posts an “Idea of the Month.” For December 2011, the idea related to the use of technology in legal education.

• Using PowerPoint
• Recording video lectures
• Editing these videos (and creating short clips)
• Posting these video clips & ppt slides for students to view outside of class
• Using “clickers” to assess understanding in class

Last month, in article from Inside Higher Ed, Marketing Professor Mike Garver from Central Michigan University was featured.  To read the entire article, click here. He was also featured on the Turning Technologies website, here.

In order to integrate higher order thinking skills into his teaching methods, Dr. Garver turned to technology.  He records his lectures on his webcam at home. He then splits them up into small chunks, posts them to iTunesU along with accompanying PowerPoint slides and assigns them to his students to view before they come to class.

In class, he  assesses the students’ understanding of these important concepts with questions that students respond to with a “clicker.” The rest of class is devoted to group work and hands-on activities.

 

The Institute’s 2011 summer conference materials also include some useful information on video recording –  YouTube Pedagogy: A Practical Guide.

Do You Use YouTube in Law Classes?

Here are some FREE tools* to improve your use of YouTube in the classroom:

Tools for removing the clutter & distractions (comments, ads, related videos, etc) from the screen:

• A Cleaner YouTube 
• View Pure 
• SafeShare.tv
• Quiettube

Tools for downloading YouTube videos to use offine:

• Zamzar (file is emailed)
• YouTubeSnips
• Vixy
• MediaConverter
• Miro

Tools for editing the videos (in addition to those built into YouTube.com):

• Tubechop - clip a section & share the clip
• Splicd -  share only part of a video
• DragOnTape – string together a series of videos
• SnipSnip.it – clip a section & share
• Embed Plus – start a video at any point, skips scenes & annotate
• Watch2gether – watch a video & chat about it at the same time
• Veengle - create compilation videos

*Please read YouTube’s terms of service before using these tools.

Are IPads Coming to a Law School Near You?

It seems the iPads especially the iPad2 are popping up everywhere.  Even in law schools.

Here is a comment I found on a blog:

I am a law student and absolutely adore my iPad. It allows me to remain incredibly organized in class, as I no longer have to print 30 page opinions and fumble through them, looking for my notes. I also love having F.R.E., etc. readily available at the touch of a button. I couldn’t imagine law school without it!

So there you have it from one law student’s perspective.

Obviously, the are many Apps that are useful to law students such as:

• Black’s Law Dictionary
• HeinOnline
• LawStack
• NY Penal Code
• iLawLibrary
• FastCase
• USCode
• LexisNexis
• Others listed HERE

In addition to above Legal Apps, a good annotation tool would also make the iPad a useful device for a law student, especially with a stylus for writing on the screen. There are many apps that now exist to meet this need. The hard part is trying to figure out which is best suited to law school.

Prof. Hacker from the Chronicle of Higher Education offered his recommendation for Annotation Apps. See chart below:

 

He seems to recommend GoodReader and UPAD. The New York Law blog recommends SignMyPad, iAnnotate PDF, Readdle PDF Expert, or Noterize or marking up PDFs.

Lawyers using iPads appear to be a popular topic.  The Legal iPad even compiled a list of law-related iPad resources and posted them HERE .

 

Some day law school classes could look like this:

Professor Angst’s “iPad Class” at Notre Dame University

Free Federal Rules eBooks

CALI has partnered with Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School to publish three widely-used Federal Rules collections as eLangdell ebooks.

• Civil Procedure,
• Criminal Procedure, and
• Evidence

They are available to CALI member law schools for FREE.

These eLangdell Federal Rules Series ebooks are currently compatible with iPads and any device or software that accepts .epub (a  Kindle version is currently unavailable ).

These federal rules ebooks include:

• The complete rules as of December 1, 2010.
• All notes of the Advisory Committee immediately following each rule.
• A full-functioning Table of Contents for easy navigation.
• Internal links to rules referenced within the rules.
• External links to the LII website’s version of the US Code.

 

Go to:
http://elangdell.cali.org/content/federal-rules-ebooks-legal-information-institute  for more details and to download the books.

 

What’s New for 2011-12?

Albany Law School will offer several technological improvements for the staff, faculty and students this year:

 

• CALI – Starting this school year, CALI Lessons are going to look a lot different. Content of the lessons will remain the same, but the new-look lessons will work on mobile devices like iPads and iPhones, lesson runs and scores will be saved automatically and stored in students’ “My Lesson Runs”,  copy and paste from the lesson will be much easier and more…

 

 

• OWA 2010 – IT Services has upgraded the e-mail system from Microsoft Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010.  Improvements include: multi-browser support, conversation view, singl page of messages, nickname cache, forward as attachment, more powerful searching. Click here for a guide to using some of the new features in Outlook Web App (OWA) 2010.

• TWEN – Students can keep up with TWEN anytime, anywhere.  Go to m.lawschool.westlaw.com on your mobile device and log in.

 

 

Faculty have increased ability to track student usage of their TWEN site.

 

 

 By clicking on User Trail, faculty will be able to see what a specific student has done in their such as what a student has viewed, posted, added, or deleted.

 

 

By clicking on Course Activity, faculty can run a specific report by feature (forum, wiki, etc.) to see what kind of activity their course has had.

 

The 2011 TWEN Administrator Guide is available here.

 

 

• LSE – Faculty will be able to load materials (such as audio and video files) into Law School Exchange (LSE) and incorporate them into their TWEN course site. This will also allow faculty to make copyrighted items available to students by restricting their ability to download through LSE.

 

 

• LexisNexis – Lexis®Advance for Law Schools will be offered sometime this fall. Their new online legal research system will include an easy-to-use search template with pre- and post-search filtering, allowing efficient narrowing of results,  foldering to organize and store research and other new features.

 

 

• New Phone System – Avaya Digital Phone/Voicemail System has been installed for all staff and faculty. This new system will also include voicemail to e-mail is a feature where e-mails are sent to your e-mail address when your voicemail mailbox receives a new voicemail message.

 

• Lync – Staff now have Lync 2010 installed on their desktops.  This communications software creates a virtual connection between staff members who work at the law school.  It will enable them to chat, share  their desktop and programs, and work together in real time, all from their computer.  

 

 

• Examsoft – This fall, SoftTestMac will function on all Apple laptops. Students will be able to download a version that is compatible with their OS X.  There will be  two installers, one compatible with Leopard and Snow Leopard, and one compatible with Lion. Students only will see the version of SofTest Mac for their OS X.

 

• Portal – myALBANYLAW is a portal where staff, faculty and students will log on with their email/network username and password and have access to ALL their favorite places: email, calendar, WebAdvisor, files, Colleague, announcements, news, discussions, etc.

This portal will rolled out to the users in stages and training offered to each group. Launch date is TBA.

The Oyez Project

What is the Oyez Project?

The Oyez Project is a multimedia archive devoted to the Supreme Court of the United States and its work. It aims to be a complete and authoritative source for all audio recorded in the Court since the installation of a recording system in October 1955. The Project also provides authoritative information on all justices and offers a virtual reality ‘tour’ of portions of the Supreme Court building, including the chambers of some of the justices.

To take advantage of Oyez media,  one needs two plug-ins for your browser: Flash and QuickTime. The Oyez Project contains more than 3000 hours of audio materials delivered as streamed and downloadable mp3s. The streamed audio version uses a player built on Adobe Flash, a free plug-in. The Project also contains dozens of panoramic images of the Supreme Court Building. To view these images in the Tour section, you will need to download and install QuickTime.

For more information on the resources contained the Oyez Project, click HERE and for the FAQs, HERE.

The Oyez Project now offers two *FREE* apps for iOS and Android OS devices:

• OyezToday tracks the current business of the U.S. Supreme Court in the form of abstracts in all cases granted review.  OyezToday shares SCOTUS audio in a searchable format linked to transcripts. With a simple flip and tap, it is possible to identify and create clips of segments or turns to share and repurpose. OyezToday also makes written opinions available shortly after release.

 You needn’t be tethered to a computer to read the latest decisions. OyezToday will transcribe and add opinion announcements from the 2010 Term shortly after the Court releases them to the National Archives in October. The iPad version of this app offers additional features for note-taking and highlighting.

•  PocketJustice focuses on the Supreme Court’s constitutional jurisprudence regardless of Term. The free version provides abstracts, voting data, searchable arguments+transcripts, and opinions in the top 100 most frequently employed cases found in con law casebooks. The FULL version of the app (which is not free) covers the entire corpus of 600+ cases we identified through a survey of major con law casebooks.  All income supports the Oyez Project.

To download these apps, simply search by name in the App Store (iPhone/iPad) or Android Market.

New CALI Lesson Interface

Starting in the 2011-2012 school year, CALI Lessons will look a lot different.

• CALI Lessons will finally run on mobile devices like iPads and iPhones,
• Student lesson runs and scores will be saved automatically in the students’ “My Lesson Runs” account profile section,
• Copy and paste will be easier,
• Faculty features* (see below) will be built-in to the lesson.

Watch the video below which covers what’s changing and the expected timeline for implementation.

 

* Faculty Features:

• There is a direct link to faculty view: a view of a CALI Lesson in its entirety on a single webpage. It makes a complete review, and even printing of the lesson, much easier. (see image above) A faculty options link (also in the above-linked image) opens a special faculty toolbar on the left with advanced tools and navigation options.
• A mapper tool in that menu helps you visualize the flow and branching of the questions.
• A direct link to LessonLink lets faculty create a unique URL that tracks your students’ usage of assigned lessons.

Please note:

Creating a LessonLink to track student usage now leads users to the new viewer. However, any LessonLink created before 8/10/2011 still leads to the outdated version of lessons, without auto-save. Faculty who created their LessonLinks before 8/10/2011 should create new LessonLinks and assign them instead.

 

CALI Conferences on YouTube

If you missed a CALI Conference, visit http://www.youtube.com/user/caliorg?feature=mhee#g/p and pick your favorite year.