Tag Archives: resources

Check Out Atomic Learning!

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Are you looking for help using Microsoft products such as Office 365, SharePoint, or OneDrive? Do you need help using Adobe Creative Suite? Are you interested in learning more about designing effective presentations or creating digital portfolios? Want to beef up your time management, critical thinking, or decision making skills? Check out Atomic Learning!

Atomic Learning is a free service available to all Lesley students, faculty and staff featuring hundreds of self-paced video tutorials on popular software tools, online tools, tech integration, mobile devices, college and career readiness, and more. Atomic Learning breaks down each topic into manageable tasks and explains each task through a one-to three-minute tutorial. You can view a tutorial when you have a quick question about a program you’re using or you can view a series of tutorials and master an entire application or topic.

Atomic Learning is available online, 24/7, from on campus or at home. Ready to give it a try? Log in to Atomic Learning with your myLesley username and password at http://atomiclearning.com/login/lesley

Want to learn more about navigating and using the Atomic Learning site? View the Atomic Learning Web Site tutorial.

Getting Started with Open Education Resources

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What is OER?
The Hewelett Foundation defines Open Educational Resources as: “teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits free use and repurposing by others.”

OER may include textbooks, videos, tests and assessments, software, course content and even full courses. These materials are shared under Creative Commons licensing which allows the content to be freely used, copied, and remixable. The goal is have content that is free of barriers to access and sharing for educational use.

Why do I care about OER?
Textbooks are expensive. Using OER instead of publisher content that students must purchase makes education more affordable. OER gives you freedom to decide what to teach when in your course. Simply plan your course and then look for the resources to support your content and assignments rather than following the textbook structure. OER are just as good, and sometimes better, than publisher content.

Why isn’t everyone using OER?
In a 2014 survey, most faculty were unaware of OER. Those who were aware were deterred by the lack of search tools. Locating appropriate resources took too much time and energy. Fortunately, the lack of search tools is changing. Over the last decade several OER repositories and search tools have appeared to curate all this incredibly useful content.

Where can I find OER?
These searchable sites are great places to start looking for content you can use in your classes.
MIT OpenCourseWare
Open Stax College
College Open Textbooks
MERLOT
Jorum
OER Commons

ARTstor Digital Library: A place of visual primary sources

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ARTstor is a digital library full of images for you to use for classroom instruction, especially if you want to integrate visual literacy. Its title can be a bit deceiving but ARTstor’s true focus is less about discipline and more about giving educators online access to over 1.8 million authoritative visual primary sources. You and your students will discover content from a wide range of museums, archives, libraries, and other types of cultural heritage institutions that span various time periods, movements, and cultures.

Check out what collections are available, http://www.artstor.org/collections. Some of the collections used with students doing research include:

Not only does this educational technology have visual resource collections, it allows easy integration into your online classroom environments. Some great tech features include curating groups of images sharable in Blackboard, links to share on blogs, and generate of PowerPoint presentations. Any images collected using ARTstor’s image group feature automatically live in the system so you never have to worry about losing them or your image presentation. Please be advised that ARTstor registration is required to use the tool!

If you want to learn how to use ARTstor there are a number of resources that come in various formats ranging from videos, written instructions, and in-person help. Visit the websites below or find help in at the Moriarty Library 

ARTstor Help Resources
Moriarty Library’s ARTstor Help Guide
ARTstor’s YouTube
ARTstor’s Knowledge Base

Contact a Librarian for help!
Kate Thornhill, MLIS
Research and Instruction Librarian for Digital Scholarship
Moriarty Library
617-349-8070
kthornhi@lesley.edu