This Week In OpenLab! February 26th Edition

Announcing our Upcoming Workshops!

All through the rest of the term the OpenLab team will be offering workshops for faculty, staff and students.  Whether you’re thinking of ways to improve your course management, just getting started, or would like to explore a topic of your own choosing, we’ll be here to meet your needs.  More information will follow, but the first of these workshops will be:

Working with Courses on the OpenLab (FOR FACULTY)  Tuesday, March 6. 11:30am – 12:45pm. A540 (in the library)

Thinking about teaching a course on the OpenLab? Already using the OpenLab for your courses? Bring your questions to these mixed-level sessions. You will need an account on the OpenLab, and your syllabus. Workshops are open to all City Tech faculty and staff. Part-time faculty are eligible to receive a small stipend.

What is the OpenLab?  (FOR STUDENTS):  Thursday, March 8th, 1:00pm – 2:15pm, A540 (in the library)

Please RSVP to OpenLab@citytech.cuny.edu. Please specify workshop date(s), and we’ll see you then!

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Featured Course:  ENG 2003: Introduction to Poetry

In most of our recent entries we’ve focused on the course site–today we’d like to highlight those project management tools you can find on your Course/Club/Project Profile page.  This can be a valuable place for students and/or members to work collaboratively on a particular document, or have a discussion that you might want to distinguish in some way from what is going on on the course/group/project site:  a project or club might use the Site for more public-facing announcements, etc, and use these discussion boards on the Profile page for in-group discussion.  Privacy settings are all customizable, so it’s easy to do.

And just as an example, one of our favorites, Professor Jody Rosen’s on-going glossary project, which one suspects gives students a great sense of accomplishment by the term’s end, and which you can see here.

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(image by Andrew Mertz, licensed via creative commons)

Weekly Tutorial:  WP-Latex

We mentioned last week that Jonas Reitz, a professor of Math here at CityTech, was helping us out with a tutorial for the WP-Latex plug-in, which allows teachers and students to write mathematical formulas directly into OpenLab comments, posts or pages.  You can find that tutorial here.

The plug-in presumes you know LaTeX, and as such is most useful to the mathematically inclined among us, but in the interest of intellectual curiosity, there is a useful tutorial/summary here.  In addition, Jonas has kindly allowed us to link to an assignment in his Calc II class which includes some basics, like fractions, radicals, and integrals.  You can find that here.  And if you’re trying to write LaTeX code, you’ll find that a tester is an invaluable too.  You can find a good one here.   Thanks to Jonas for all these resources!