Teaching Using SharePoint
Many faculty are discovering that a SharePoint site can make it easy to share class and program related information with their students. This guide is designed to introduce faculty to the concept of using SharePoint in the classroom at Red River College.
Benefits of Teaching with SharePoint
Benefits for Teachers
-
facilitate knowledge exchange - organize material in a way that’s easy to maintain
- strengthen academic relationships with students
- bridge technology gap between teachers + students
- communicate important info with parents
- easy to use with other e-learning tools (e.g. podcasts)
Benefits for Students
-
quick and easy centralized access to info - revisions/changes/updates can be quickly made
- easy to collaborate on group projects
- keep focused, on task, and organized
- transfer skills to a number of careers
- practice activities, interactivity, peer review
Credit: This information is taken from the Red River College TLTC Workshop titled "Teaching Using SharePoint"
Tips for Teachers
The following tips have been compiled by asking teachers teachers for suggestions about teaching with SharePoint, and combined this with other teachers’ suggestions found online.
-
Share
important course materials such as lecture notes, assignments and
related materials. - Create separate document libraries for each type of document so it’s easy for the students (and teacher) to locate things.
- List assignments on the main page in specially-designed section that contains info on the assignment, a link to supporting documentation, and the due date.
- Use 'Events' to highlight the mid-term and final exams.
- Use ‘Announcements’ – you can subscribe to announcements on behalf of the students to be sure that when you post an announcement, they’ll receive notification.
- Take it slow: use the basic functionality at first and learn how to customize it later on.
- Use what helps, ignore the rest.
- Identify someone who understands the advanced administrative features who can assist with things such as the security features and ensuring that certain documents can’t be changed.
- Annotate links to online resources.
Credit: This information is taken from the Red River College TLTC Workshop titled "Teaching Using SharePoint"
How to get a SharePoint Site for your Course
If you have not already done so you may familiarize yourself with SharePoint Services at RRC. There are two SharePoint Options for faculty who wish to use a SharePoint class site in support of their classroom activities..
Option 1: Go Portal at https://go.rrc.ca
The new Go Portal, located at https://go.rrc.ca is able to host class sites for most college programs and courses. The Go Portal has been available to all RRC Programs since January 2010 and is now the preferred place to host SharePoint based course sites at Red River College.
Option 2: Connect.rrc.ca
Connect.rrc.ca is a SharePoint server designed
for communicating and collaborating with
Students. Instructors may use a Course
Site on the
Red River College Connect server.
There is a special Administration site on Connect that provides information on how to get a site on Connect. In fact, some departments have local administrators that may create course sites for you.
Instructor Sites
There is an area on Connect.rrc.ca for instructor sites. An instructor site may be used by an instructor that teaches in several different programs and courses and they wish to post office hours and generic course/program information of their particular concern.
To create a new Instructor site in this area please contact Mark Nelson - mnelson@rrc.mb.ca.
This page content is contributed by Mark Nelson. If you have any questions regarding this content please contact Mark Nelson.
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