Monthly Archives: December 2016

Collaborate and Get Work Done with Office 365 Groups

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Do you have a team project or group assignment? Need to coordinate information and documents with other people? Not always in the same place at the same time?

Office 365 Groups was designed for collaboration. It’s available within Office 365 right alongside your Lesley email, your calendar and OneDrive. Create an Office 365 group and provide your team with a shared email inbox, calendar, space to share documents and a OneNote notebook. It’s a great place to work out project plans, collaborate on documents and make sure everyone is in the loop.

Get started using Office 365 groups by logging into Office 365 at http://lesley.edu/email and watch these Atomic Learning video tutorials for quick how to information.

 

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.

Learn Anything in 20 Hours

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Atomic Learning has created the 12 Days of Learning, a series of articles designed to kick off resolutions to keep learning in the new year. We thought this was a great idea and have decided borrow (shamelessly steal) it and do our own. Over the next 12 days we will have links to a series of tutorials aimed at increasing your elearning skills.

It can be hard to learn a new skill and research suggesting that it takes 10,000 hours to develop a new skill to mastery can be offputting. You already have too much to do. However Josh Kaufman suggests that you can become reasonably competent at something in just 20 hours.

What? 20 hours? No way!

Yes, way! It requires a little thought and pre-planning, but you can do it. Watch the video below and Josh will tell you how.

 

Online Tutoring Expands at Lesley

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This Fall, Lesley’s Center for Academic Achievement (CAA) launched a pilot of Brainfuse’s Help Now Online Tutoring platform to support online students, off-campus cohorts and other Lesley students whose busy lives prohibit them from accessing tutoring in the CAA. Brainfuse’s Help Now tutoring program includes individualized tutoring and study tools to help Lesley students be successful in their classes. This initiative is one of the Retention Center’s priorities as a result of last years’ exploration of qualitative and quantitative data on student persistence.

HelpNow consists of three components: live tutoring, asynchronous and synchronous writing labs and a learning skills center.

  • Live tutoring: Live tutoring is provided in a variety of college disciplines including business, math, social sciences and hard sciences. Tutors and students communicate in real time through the Brainfuse online classroom. All sessions are recorded for later review.
  • Asynchronous Writing Lab: Students submit their writing online through a secure service. Within 24 hours, a writing specialist will return the paper along with a detailed analysis focusing on organization, voice, and coherence. In addition to Brainfuse tutors asynchronous online writing support continues to be available directly from CAA tutors.
  • Live Writing Lab: Students who are in the preliminary stages of the writing process have the option to receive live, one-to-one writing assistance from a writing specialist.
  • Learning Skills Center: Students address academic needs such as reading comprehension, developmental math and science or time management to build essential skills for college success. Students are offered a variety of learning options based on the way they learn best.

Brainfuse is integrated into myLesley so all students have easy access to connect with a live tutor. Tutors are experienced classroom teachers with graduate training in their discipline.

Usage so far this semester has been highly successful especially in the Business and Math programs where it was piloted and strongly promoted. Students can easily access Brainfuse Online Tutoring from their myLesley home page. Subjects include Accounting, Statistics, Economics, Calculus, Geometry, Biology, Chemistry, Writing, Psychology and many others.
brainfuse access