I've been having fun over this last summer and the beginning of this semester. I participated in a course redesign project at my university. As part of that project, we were exposed to various tools that might be of use to us in redesigning our courses. I had seen SoftChalk before but I was not convinced that I would be able to make much use of it.
Boy was I wrong. I have thus far created four lessons using SoftChalk (still working on the last one). Initially, the plan was to develop my own weekly content for my target course, an online graduate networking class. But, as I moved through this process, I began to receive feedback from some of my peers. They already had some content. I was able to take that content and adapt it to my expectations for my courses. This shifted my effort from developing direct content creation for my course to indirect content creation. In other words, developing support material to help students such as APA formatting guidelines, the registration and use if testout.com, and the download and use of microsoft software through DreamSpark.
My hope is that I will be able to use this same content in multiple classes and be able to preemptively address student questions. Hopefully, I will even be able to reach a few students who otherwise would not have know about these resources. My goal is to add a few more indirect modules and then more on to direct content. I think showing students some of the basics of the use of Visio to create logical and physical designs for networking, developing MS Project files to develop their semester as well as real life projects, and the installation of MS Virtual PC and various OSs to familiarize them with their opportunities to try out this software would all be great lessons to create.
This is an exciting process to me. I have trouble trying to decide which lesson I want to work on next. For now, it is just trying to clean them up, post them to my website, and integrate them into my Blackboard shell(s).
