Vancouver, Washington / Portland, Oregon
This conversation took place late last night on Slack:
Student: Bruce I see you the Sublime Text editor.
Bruce: I have tried many of them out and prefer Sublime.
Student: I want to be a professional web developer one day. I also have some questions about the assignment that’s due tomorrow.
Bruce: A professional web developer wouldn’t start a project the day before it was due.
Student: Only the good pros do.
Bruce: It better be perfect then.
When an assignment has been available for 2 weeks and you ask for an extension on the day it is due isn’t cool.
Read through the assignment in its entirety. Read through it again and maybe a third time. If you only use the grading rubric to go by, you will possibly miss key elements of the assignment.
Continuing on from my list of “College Student Worst Practices” post:
Worst Practice No. 4:
Waiting until the day an assignment is due to ask the instructor for assistance. As soon as an assignment is announced or made available, read through it in its entirety at least once and maybe twice. Don’t simply do the assignment to hit the rubric marks as quite often there is more to the assignment than what appears in the rubric.
Worst Practice No. 5:
Expecting to learn everything you need to learn during class. Also, expecting to finish your work in class.
Worst Practice No. 6:
Not reading the syllabus. A course syllabus is a contract between the instructor and each and every student. It contains all of the things that a student will need to know about assignments, exams, late work policies, how a student’s grade will be determined, a statement about procedures and school policies for students with disabilities and much more. Neglecting to read it at the beginning of the class and every now and then is also not a good thing to do.
What does the syllabus really say? All of the things that you are going to ask tomorrow.
Worst Practice No. 1:
From an email sent to students: “If you have read this far and want 3 extra credit points, send a message to me by Tuesday at noon.” 5 days later and only 2 people replied.
If your teacher/instructor ever offers you extra credit points for reading a weekly announcement email, respond to them as soon as you read the words “extra credit”.
Worst Practice No. 2:
Don’t wait until the assignment or exam due date to ask for an extension. It’s ok to ask for an extension (in my classes). Communicate early and often. It’s ok. I’m human and sometimes life happens and I get that.
Worst Practice No. 3:
If you are the smartest person in the classroom, and you know more than most people, don’t use that as the platform to challenge or prove that the instructor is dumber than you or that you are smarter than everyone else, use it as an opportunity to help others in the class that may be struggling.
Registration for Clark College summer and fall quarters is now open! I’m teaching HTML Fundamentals (CTEC 122) this summer, and in the fall, Intro to Programming and Problem Solving (CTEC 121), PHP/MySQL (CTEC 127) and Business Web Practices (CTEC 165). If you are interested in taking any of these classes, please let me know.
Please share this with your friends who might be interested in taking any of these classes.
Did I mention that I’m approaching 3.5 years of teaching at Clark? Man, how the time goes by…
I’m not sure if this feature is new or not, but it certainly makes validating all of the links in a Canvas course easy to check.
Start by logging into Canvas and going into the course you want to validate. In the left navigator, click on the “Settings” link:
On the Settings page, look in the right navigator for the “Validate Links in Content” link and click on it.
From the Course Link Validator page you can click on the button to start validating all of the links in all of your content in your course. It may take a few minutes for it to complete, so be patient.
Once completed, you will see a list of all of the content with the associated links that are broken. You can then restart the link validation after you fix and links that the validator finds are broken.
I hope this helps you in developing quality Canvas course shells.
One thing that presenters are always wanting to find out after their presentaiton, is how well they did and did the audience walk away with what you expected them to. Well, please head on over to https://getkahoot.com, sign up and give it a try.
Here are some things I would like to see presenters try:
Let me know what you think of Kahoot, as I would be interested to hear what you think about it, and it’s use in a professional presentation.
It’s now been a little over a week since the Fall Quarter ended at Clark College and it’s time to review anonymous feedback students left on the popular RateMyProfessors.com site.
Now, this post may see a bit “ASW-ish”, but when you truly enjoy what you are doing and you are making an impact on peoples lives, why not share it?
Here are some the reviews left in the past 30 days:
CTEC 121 – Intro to Programming and Problem Solving
Awesome teacher and a great class, I really learned a lot. I never felt like I couldn’t ask questions, and he joked with the class a lot to make it a really comfortable environment to learn in. There is a lot of homework, but it was fun to do, and he was always available to answer questions. An all around fantastic class.
CTEC 165 – Business Web Practices
Each week Bruce Elgort brought in speakers to conduct presentations. He went all out to find interesting people that could speak on a variety of subjects related to “Business Web Practices”. I am usually fighting off sleep when forced to endure presentations, but these were often fun and always very interesting to listen to.
CTEC 228 – API and Advanced Integration
Bruce Elgort is very organized, easy to understand, available for help,& definitely cares about his students. He goes the extra mile to provide guidance and help when you need it.
CTEC 121 – Intro to Programming and Problem Solving
Bruce Elgort is very organized, easy to understand, available for help,& definitely cares about his students. He goes the extra mile to provide guidance and help when you need it.
CTEC 228 – API and Advanced Integration
Bruce is an amazing instructor, He makes himself available 27/7 for help, His classes are hard, but its programming, and programming is hard. Bruce make class fun and he teaches useful techniques that can be applied to many programming languages.
CTEC 121 – Intro to Programming and Problem Solving
Bruce is probably one of the best professors I’ve ever had. He’s extremely knowledgeable in his field and he is always excited to teach you more, if you just ask about it. He has a great talent for teaching to the average student, but also giving unique challenges to the student who is ready for something a bit more complicated.
CTEC 121 – Intro to Programming and Problem Solving
A very enjoyable professor. I had him and he made everything interesting in his own way. Quizzes and homework almost every week, but if you go to class and do some reading it will be a breeze. If you need help is almost always online and ready to help you with whatever roadblocks you run into. I’m definitely looking forward to taking him again.
CTEC 121 – Intro to Programming and Problem Solving
Bruce extremely helpful! He is very smart and knows the subject in and out! He’s always available for help! He is very funny and makes class very enjoyable!
Here are all of the reviews left on RateMyProfessors.com.
