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Spring 2023 Canvas Pilot – Feedback from Pomona Faculty and Students

About the Spring 2023 Pilot  During the Spring 2023 semester, Canvas was utilized by a growing number of students, instructors and courses, building on the success of the Fall 2022 pilot. Specifically, over 500 students and 21 instructors across 35 courses used Canvas. Seven new instructors joined the pilot, while fourteen existing users continued to…

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News RITG Blog Tool Exploration

Fall 2022 Canvas Pilot – Feedback from Pomona Faculty and Students

Pilot Background  In the early 2000s, The Claremont Colleges deployed a variety of Learning Management Systems (LMS) solutions – Moodle at Pomona College, WebCT at Claremont McKenna College, and Sakai at Harvey Mudd College. Sometime around 2005 or 2006, the Consortium standardized on one LMS, Sakai, and it has been in use continually by most…

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RITG Blog Tool Exploration

Teaching with Sakai’s Rubrics Tool

Have you been overwhelmed with endless piles of papers or other assignments to grade? Are you looking for a useful and reliable assessment tool? Do you have a list of the pain points that your students repeatedly stumble over? If this sounds familiar to you, consider using the Sakai Rubrics tool. Rubrics can facilitate your…

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RITG Blog Tool Exploration

Haaaaave You Met Ed?

Haaaaave you met Ed? No, not Ted, Ed. C’mon, I’ll introduce you. Meet My Friend, Ed Ed, like me, is new to Pomona College. We both started in January 2022. Ed’s favorite color is purple. They wear it all the time. An introverted extravert, Ed adores conversation but tends to let others do the talking…

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News RITG Blog Tool Exploration

Sakai Top Skills and Information

After a recent examination of the most frequently asked Sakai questions, we (RITG) developed a top skills list to help serve the Pomona community. This list pulls together some of the most common questions and requests that ITS has received through our ticketing system in the past year. While Sakai questions often change with the…

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News RITG Blog Tool Exploration

No-Code Augmented Reality

Earlier in the term, I wrote about BioChemAR: Macromolecular 3D visualizations in the classroom, a case study with examples of using Augmented Reality (AR) in the classroom. In the third part of our AR blog post series, we will discuss a no-code solution for building AR experiences. We introduced a web AR example using DNA in…

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News RITG Blog Tool Exploration

BioChemAR: Macromolecular 3D visualizations in the classroom

Last term, I wrote about Classroom Augmented Reality in an Online World. In this post, I will give a real-world example of using Augmented Reality for teaching undergraduate students the three-dimensional structure of proteins. Traditional methods of teaching macromolecular structures have focused on using two-dimensional images to illustrate the three-dimensional structures of molecules. Two-dimensional visualizations, however,…

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News RITG Blog Tool Exploration

Inside Story: Sakai Annual Upgrade and Quality Assurance

We are excited to introduce a new version of Sakai each summer. The annual update brings a variety of new features alongside hundreds of bug fixes, all in the hopes of making Sakai more accessible, useful, and easy to understand. While users explore the new features and familiarize themselves with this summer’s update, we’d like…

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RITG Blog Tool Exploration

The robots are not quite ready to take our jobs: Automatic Blog Post Generation

My original idea for this blog post came in spring when I was at a loss of inspiration for writing a blog post. I came up with the idea of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to write my post for me. I wanted to see if it was possible to automatically produce a blog post with…

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Faculty Story RITG Blog Tool Exploration

Electronic Lab Notebooks

Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs) are, at their simplest, a digital version of the traditional bound paper notebook. While I’m unaware if any Pomona faculty have adopted ELNs for their courses, ELNs can be useful for STEM and non-STEM fields alike, and ITS would love to partner with interested faculty members.  Nature published an article a few…