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The free and easy way to award badges to students for all learning experiences. Sign In Teacher Registration New Students ClassBadges is now part of the EdStart.com family, makers of ExitTicket For Educators ClassBadges is a free online tool where teachers can award badges to students for accomplishments or academic mastery. Through your teacher account, you can award badges customized for your classroom or school. Badges can easily be aligned to academic goals or associated with existing school awards.

"rapport is necessary in DE because of the absence of face-to-face communication. Challenges to building rapport relate to the geographic dispersion of students, the asynchronous nature of DE, teacher workload, limits of the software, teachers and students not seeing the need for rapport, and DE traditions. We identified six categories of rapport-building in DE as follows: Recognizing the person/individual; Supporting and monitoring; Availability, accessibility, and responsiveness; Non text-based interactions; Tone of interactions; Non-academic conversation/interactions."

A lengthy but good overview of MOOCs, with a close look at xMOOCS - Coursera, Udacity, edX that have taken advantage of scalability but tend to reinforce a traditional teacher-student model, and cMOOCS - knowledge building/networking, flexible tools, self directed, chaotic learning. Siemens goes on to share lessons learned from cMOOCs he has been involved with and provides 9 Steps How to Plan/Create a MOOC [approx 58:00] Around 18:00 he makes a provocative statement that because of the expertise available in xMOOCs, he would throw out all of his content, tell his students to take one of these courses, interact with them around the content themes and then assess their work. Other interesting ideas include: the need for regional MOOCs to diversify and fully explore potential innovation [export vs import]; the concern that mid-range universities stand to loose to the 'superstar' professors in the xMOOC model; & the notion of teaching globally, accrediting locally [e.g. Udacity -Pearson testing option for credit]

"In this paper, we use Bain's (2004) book What the Best College Teachers Do to discuss some of the major ways that the practices of effective teaching in general can be applied to online teaching in particular. "

Reeves et al. Authentic activities in online There has been a renewed interest in the role of student activities within course units as constructivist philosophy and advances in technology impact on educational design and practice. This paper proposes ten characteristics of authentic activities, based on a substantial body of educational theory and research, which can assist teachers to design more authentic activities for online learning environments. The paper includes a short review of the literature, together with the list of characteristics attributed to appropriate authors and theorists. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the affordances of Internet technologies can facilitate the operationalisation of authentic activities in online courses of study.

"Much of the theory of design might be conveyed via MOOCs, and then reinforced in practice. MOOCs might free up teachers for crits, tutorials, studios and the other high value physical exchanges that cannot be distributed so easily."

Increasingly, universities are using technology to provide students with more flexible modes of participation. This article presents a cross-case analysis of blended synchronous learning environments-contexts where remote students participated in face-to-face classes through the use of rich-media synchronous technologies such as video conferencing, web conferencing, and virtual worlds. The study examined how design and implementation factors influenced student learning activity and perceived learning outcomes, drawing on a synthesis of student, teacher, and researcher observations collected before, during, and after blended synchronous learning lessons. Key findings include the importance of designing for active learning, the need to select and utilise technologies appropriately to meet communicative requirements, varying degrees of co-presence depending on technological and human factors, and heightened cognitive load. Pedagogical, technological, and logistical implications are presented in the form of a Blended Synchronous Learning Design Framework that is grounded in the results of the study.

"Thousands of educators across the country use the Understanding by Design framework, created by the late Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, to get a handle on standards, align programs to assessments, and guide teachers in implementing a standards-based curriculum that leads to student understanding and achievement. "