Another PDF Annotation Tool Available for Full and Part-Time Students

Last Spring, JHSPH Information Systems announced that they had acquired a site license for PDF Annotator, a tool that lets you annotate (write, draw, highlight, and otherwise mark up) PDF files. This is a really useful tool if you're trying to take class notes digitally or otherwise doing collaborative work using PDF files. Unfortunately, PDF Annotator is only available for the Windows operating system. Those of us using a Mac could use Preview, an application built in to the Mac OS, to do basic PDF annotation, but Preview lacks many of the features of PDF Annotator.

Recently, JHSPH Information Systems announced that they have acquired a site license for PDF Pen Pro, an equivalent to PDF Annotator for the Mac. This makes this tool available for free to all full- and part-time students, faculty, and staff here at the School. If you aren't enrolled in a degree program at the School, or aren't School faculty or staff, you can't take advantage of this site license.

For more information on acquiring either PDF Pen Pro or PDF Annotator, please see this page in the my.jhsph.edu portal. Remember: you have to log in to to the my.jhsph.edu portal using your JHSPH email account credentials to view this information.

Posted by Brian Klaas at 4:17 PM - Categories: General | Online Courses | Course Tools | CoursePlus

"Practice Leaders in Medical Homes" Training Course Launched

At the end of July, the Roger C. Lipitz Center for Integrated Health Care, in conjunction with the Center for Teaching and Learning with Technology, launched the "Practice Leaders in Medical Homes" online training course. The course provides practicing physicians and other practice leaders with an awareness of the competencies needed to facilitate a medical home. It is an on-demand course composed of nine one-hour modules. Each module includes self-assessment questions, a short reading, a narrated presentation, a case study, a video vignette, final assessment questions, and a list of additional resources.  The Lipitz Center recruited national content experts to help develop the nine course modules.

The list of modules in the training course is as follows:

• Module 1: Assessing Readiness to Change into a Medical Home, by Mindi McKenna, PhD, MBA
• Module 2: Leading Change in Medical Homes, by Alan Lazaroff, MD
• Module 3: Health Information Technology in Medical Homes, by Chad Boult, MD, MPH, MBA
• Module 4: Interdisciplinary Teams in Medical Homes, by Ron Stock, MD, MA
• Module 5: Communicating with Patients of Medical Homes, by Danelle Cayea, MD, MS
• Module 6: Supporting Patient Self-Management within Medical Homes, by Margaret Gadon, MD, MPH
• Module 7: Care Management in Medical Homes, by Bruce Leff, MD
• Module 8: Continuity of Care for Patients of Medical Homes, by Cynthia Boyd, MD, MPH
• Module 9: Managing the Medical Home, by David Dorr, MD, MS

Tuition for is $15 per module.  At the end of each module, successful learners will receive a certificate of completion. CME credit is also available.

For more information about this training course, please see the Web site for the "Practice Leaders in Medical Homes" online training course. 

2 comments - Posted by Brian Klaas at 7:57 AM - Categories: General

Special School Events and Seminars Now Online

Have you missed special live School seminars or events due to locality or scheduling conflicts? This past academic year, our center began recording selected live events and publishing them on the CTLT Web event page. Now, all students at JHSPH, online or onsite, have an opportunity to hear speakers relevant to their studies and careers at JHSPH.

There are currently 16 events posted on the site and more are being added every month.

Recently, we added the following special events:

• Peter Agre, MD: Aquaporin Water Channels: From Atomic Structure to Malaria
  
• Anne Riley, PhD: The Public Health Consequences of Depression in Families
  
• Rafael Irizarry, PhD: The Role of Statistics in the Genomic Revolution: Rescuing Signal from a Sea of Noise

In most cases, you can choose to watch either a video of the event or to listen to the recorded audio. There is no special log-in required to view the presentations.

5 comments - Posted by Kathy Gresh at 4:33 PM - Categories: General

New eLearning Account Management Tool

Currently, access to both CoursePlus and online course Web sites requires everyone to have a JHSPH eLearning account. The scope of individuals who need access to CoursePlus and online course Web sites is bigger than those who need access to the JHSPH portal or email, or even JHED. As a result, a separate username and password is required to access to both CoursePlus and online course Web sites.

JHSPH eLearning accounts are created either when first accessing CoursePlus, or when registering for Introduction to Online Learning. One of the problems with having two places in which accounts can be created is that people sometimes think that they need one username and password for CoursePlus and one for online courses, and that is simply not true. Additionally, if you create your account using CoursePlus and you need to update your eLearning account information, you're taken to the online courses Web site, which may be confusing. Finally, if you only use CoursePlus, you may not know that your eLearning account has a personal profile section, in which you can upload photos and provide more information about yourself to your fellow students and faculty.

To remedy these issues, and others, a new eLearning Account Management site has been created. This site provides a unified interface for creating and updating eLearning accounts, regardless if you're coming from CoursePlus, Introduction to Online Learning, or other online courses at JHSPH. On this site, you can:

 

• Create a JHSPH eLearning account.
• Retrieve your JHSPH eLearning account information should you forget it.
• Update your JHSPH eLearning account information, including the email address (or addresses) to which CoursePlus and online course emails are sent.
• Update your JHSPH eLearning profile, including your profile photo, list of public health interests, Facebook link, and more.
• Update proctor information for online courses which require proctors for exams.

 

0 comments - Posted by Brian Klaas at 11:50 AM - Categories: General

Possible New Online Courses

Aren't blogs for reporting the news before the mainstream media picks up the story off the wire? I'll preview five possible new online courses for academic year 2009-10. Each of the courses below should be highlighted with an asterisk, as they are unofficial until submitted and approved by the Catalog Subcommittee. Courses are official when they appear in the  Course Search listings at http://commprojects.jhsph.edu/courses/

Because the Bloomberg School of Public Health offers over 60 online courses every year, this is hardly considered breaking news, but in 1999 the first 35 Internet-based MPH students were dying to know what the new courses would be each year. Without further delay, here are five courses proposed for online development for 2009-10.

 

Course #	Course Title	Faculty
380.603.81	Demographic Methods for Public Health (4)	Agree
380.xxx.81	Indirect Estimation	Hill
330.612.81	Introduction to Behavioral and Psychiatric Genetics (3)	Zandi
340.701.81	Epidemiologic Applications of GIS (2)	Castillo-Salgado
380.762.81	HIV Infection in Women, Children, and Adolescents (4)	Brahmbhatt

 

0 comments - Posted by Andy Lentz at 12:00 AM - Categories: General

PDF Annotator Now Available from Information Systems

Ross McKenzie, the Director of Information Systems, sent out an exciting email message today:

PDF annotation is a great way to reduce the amount of paper generated by online courses and online supplements to face-to-face courses. Additionally, if lecture notes are stored digitally, they become searchable, which is a big boon when reviewing for exams. If you have your notes in digital format, you can store them "in the cloud" via a service like GMail, or DropBox, or even in your JHSPH email account. If you do that, those digital notes can go with you wherever you have a connection to the Internet, so the notes you need don't get left at home when it's time to go to work or school.

For more information about PDF Annotator, see the link above. Mac users already have PDF annotation software installed on your computer. It's done with an application called Preview, and there is built-in help to demonstrate PDF annotation.

1 comments - Posted by Brian Klaas at 11:54 AM - Categories: General

Welcome to the CTLT Blog!

The Center for Teaching and Learning with Technology here at the School of Public Health is involved in many educational and educational technology activities. A lot of the faculty, staff and students at the School don't really know all that we do and how we go about doing what we do. This blog is an effort to keep everyone in the JHSPH community aware of what we in the Center are working on, why we're doing what we are doing, and what we're looking forward to.

Although my focus is on the development of new educational technology and tools in online courses, CoursePlus, and online training, the blog will feature many of the voices from the Center on a range of topics. Instructional Designers might post about trends in educational technology and best practices for teaching — with or without technology. Our OpenCourseWare coordinator might post about recent developments in the open learning content community and how it impacts us here at JHSPH. The Center's director might stop by from time to time and talk about the direction in which the Center is headed.

Through all of this, we want to hear from you. We want to hear your ideas and your feedback on our ideas. The Center is here to work with everyone in the JHSPH community to make teaching and learning with technology at JHSPH as good as it can be.

To stay up-to-date, be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed by clicking the "RSS Feeds" link at the top of the page. You can also get email announcements of new posts to the blog by using the box on the right side of the page.

0 comments - Posted by Brian Klaas at 4:20 PM - Categories: General