Group items tagged

Blackboard is the new Learning Management System (LMS), or online classroom, being rolled out for MBT classes.  Please see the Online Classes page to check whether your course is being delivered in Blackboard or WebTeach.   Below is the Student User Manual for Blackboard, if you would like to request a hardcopy please contact Student Support. Blackboard

View the links to the Voice Threads that were made between fourth graders and expert collaborators during our animal inquiry project this year.

patricia pedroza likes this. Actually wants to create something like it of her own. Lenguajero is a language learning community where people meet to practice conversational Spanish and English. Practice and share your knowledge of these two languages with other learners around the world.

both faculty and student videos for 9.1 good place to start for us to learn, if nothing else

According to the United Nations, the elderly population of the world is growing at its fastest rate ever. By 2050, there will be more than 2 billion people aged 60 or over. The age of a country's population can reveal insights about that country's history, and can provide a glimpse towards the economic and healthcare trends that will challenge their societies in the future. Explore the visualization below to learn more about how the populations of eight countries will grow and change over time.

Social gaming to learn about issues. Many are based on phone apps and traveling around NYC to find things. One is a basketball game that teaches about the deficit. recommended at edcamp

"In this course we'll learn common techniques for visualizing data, as well as some strategies for managing information digitally. But first, a brief history."

There is something in the air, and it is nothing less than the digital artifacts of over one billion people and computers networked together collectively producing over 2,000 gigabytes of new information per second. While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption that information is scarce and hard to find, nearly the entire body of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one form or another, ready to be accessed by laptops, cellphones, and iPods. Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation.

Students still want face-to-face contact with staff, but more use of the kind of technologies they have grown up with, though they need to be persuaded to use them to study. They also need to learn how to critically evaluate online sources, while academics need more help in using the technologies.

"Lecture capture systems offer three important benefits: an alternative when students miss class; an opportunity for content review; and content for online course development. Lecture capture enhances and extends existing instructional activities, whether in face-to-face, fully online, or blended learning environments."

Rich library of project based learning

I've been making podcasts for many years and, at one point, was one of about 200 podcasters on the planet (back in the day).  Making a podcast using, say, Audacity, never seemed very difficult, but as my carpenter is fond of saying: "It's easy...if you know how to do it."  But since I went MAC this summer, GarageBand has been my great discovery and 14 and 15 year olders have become my new consultants (seriously).  With GB you can not only make podcasts easily, but you can make real, real cool podcasts which sound as good as (sometimes even better) than on-air radio programs.  I just posted my first podcast using GB about a week ago and already I'm chopping at the bit to re-do the production now that I have another week of GB experience under my belt.

Listen, create and share FREE geolocalized audioguides.

Via Judy "I just ran across a website that is a really exciting tool for anyone reflecting on their foreign travel or interested in practicing their foreign language.Woices  www.woices.com is a website that gives you the ability to create free geolocalized audioguides. Sample guides are:* a walk in Valencia http://woices.com/walk/33 in Spanish * a walk in London London http://woices.com/walk/13 in English. Students could create their own tours of places they have been. Woices walks you through the process and provides the map, a place to upload your own photos and the ability to record 10 minutes of audio at each stop. When you're done you can embed the production in any web page and download the audio file.It creates a very nice product and one that others would want to listen to and learn from.If you know someone not listed here who you think might enjoy this, please pass it on."

Everyone learns differently. Social media marketing has a lot of moving parts and processes which make it hard to get up to speed. This challenge is only compounded by the ever-changing nature of the market, in which new applications and opportunities arise daily. 

From an LMS provider's standpoint, the more open and flexible the LMS, the more it can be integrated with other programs for robust analysis of student activity and interaction.  According to Lou Pugliese, president of online learning solutions provider  Moodlerooms, that kind of integration is needed. Technologies exist to measure student data and interactions on a large scale, Pugliese says: The focus now is how to effectively collect data and conduct reporting on-demand within the LMS. "Over the past ten years, the LMS has managed to record the most basic of student interactions and activity, but we've barely scratched the surface in enabling universities to analyze data on an institutional level," says Pugliese. "However, new developments in analytical technologies will provide educators with the ability to measure interactions within the ever-popular collaborative tools present in today's LMS environments. Moving beyond simple traffic reporting to more comprehensive online behaviour analysis will be critical to make more effective intervention decisions."  

For a low cost solution, you can look at things like magpie ( http://ncam.wgbh.org/invent_build/web_multimedia/tools-guidelines) where you can generate the caption files yourself (slight learning curve involved).

education built on the industrical model and based on elightenment view of people and learning that no longer applies.

Wiki: Participatory media lesson plans These are a series of small lesson plans (I call them "labs") I've used as assignments for my students. These pages serve as more permanent reminders of what I show them during the face to face class meeting, as assignments, and as resource pages for further learning. Please feel free to add your own.

The longtime Fb fans used their visits for 'social and educational purposes'. 'Facebook is both entertaining and a useful learning tool'. Three acknowledged experiencing distractions on their academic visits: 'Friends finding you online want to interact, whereas you are there for academic reasons.' Others who joined to become part of the Group were distracted by 'family and friends who want to be your friend!'. Two decided to use Fb for academic purposes only......

Create Your own interactive learning acitivity. Each activity-creation tool helps students develop historical thinking skills and gets them thinking like historians. Choose one of the tools below to begin. Then find and insert primary sources and customize the activity to fit your unique students.