Special Characters in MyMitty Quizzes

As teachers, we have had no problem including special characters in our MyMitty quiz questions.  The issue has been students answering with special characters.  Their end of the quiz doesn't have a text bar with special character support.  So how do we circumvent this issue?  Create a bank of all possible special characters they may need for their answers and include them in every question. 

Create your question:

Add special characters (and instruct students to copy and paste appropriately):

Create your answer with the special character included:

Here is what the students will see:

Students can now respond to short answer questions with special characters.

Course Assessments

Student Course Assessments are Monday, December 2nd and Tuesday, December 3rd. Your spectrum member will show you how to proctor these during your department meetings this week. Click here for the Google Presentation.

Stickies on your desktop

Stickies is a simple note taking application that has been included on every Mac for almost 20 years now. However it has gained a huge amount of new functionality over the past few years.

If you aren't familiar with Stickies, you'll find it in the Applications folder. You can create as many sticky notes as you'd like, and they remain on your desktop until you close the application. The next time you open it, they will all still be there!

If you have already been using Stickies, did you know that:
- you can color code your notes?
- you can make notes translucent?
- you can add pictures or embed videos into your notes?
- you can search for text in your notes?
- you can format with different fonts and add bullets and lists?
- you can zoom a sticky so that it takes up your entire screen with one click?

Here's a link to an article that explains how you can do all these things: http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/how-to-exploit-the-stickies-app-in-os-x

Share with us in the comments section how you have been using Stickies on your desktop to help you organize!

Giving Students More Options

Are you tired of having students make Keynotes for presentations?  Looking for a more interesting way to get the information out?  The sophomore religion team created a new project this year in which students had options as to how they wanted to present information on an assigned topic.  They created "museum exhibits" that digitally and effectively conveyed important information within three minutes.  We allowed students to choose whatever app best suited their needs--we offered Thinglink, Doodlecast Pro, Prezi, and iMovie as options (click the links for example projects created by the sophomores).  Some projects were (as always) better than others, and we had a few technology glitches along the way, but it was refreshing to give students the freedom to be creative with technology and to watch them troubleshoot when they had problems.