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Video that might appeal to K-12 teachers. Teachers talk about how it gives the students control over what they are doing. With access from any computer, students are able to work on their assignments virtually anywhere. Whether they are out from school, on vacation or working from home, they can stay up-to-date with assignments and group projects.

Requires wireless mouse(s) Microsoft Mouse Mischief is a free software download for PCs that integrates into Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 and 2010 to allow educators to insert questions, polls, and drawing activity slides into lessons for participation for up to 25 students. Each student or pairs of students uses their own wireless mouse to do this. Additionally, the teacher gets statistics of who answered first and correctly in order. I priced some wireless mouses for the classroom and found used ones for $6 so this can be a relatively cheap

Showing students how to read critically and formulate research queries is part of the teaching function of college libraries. But how do you teach students to read critically that which has no text? She divided the students into groups and instructed them to write "problem statements" relating to important information that was not provided by the video. Then, with May's guidance, they translated those questions into keyword searches that might help them locate where in the library they might find answers.

There are several widely-accepted rubrics (Quality Matters, the ION one in Illinois, etc.), but in my opinion, they focus on course design, not on teaching the course. When I was at Black Hawk College, we created a Best Practices for Exemplary Online Teaching set of standards based on the Chickering and Gamson's "7 Principles of Good Practice for Undergraduate Education" meta-analysis. Individual best practices for online teaching were pulled from the literature and listed as possibilities under each of the 7 principles, and an 8th was added with some of the course design elements not already mentioned in the first 7. In other words, we created a local document that could assist faculty in doing self-assessment, peer evaluations of each other's courses, and potentially institutional review of online courses. However, our instrument was not used for institutional assessment because it was not approved as part of the faculty [union] contract. It is important for a document like this to be shared with the faculty ahead of time so that they know how their courses are going to be evaluated. I also think it is helpful to have several people evaluate various aspects of online courses, such as someone who is an expert in online education who can evaluate the learning experiences and course design elements of the course, someone from the faculty member's department who can evaluate the quality and accuracy of the course content, as well as the administrator whose job it is to evaluate teaching. If the institution uses a type of rubric or assessment document when evaluating face-to-face teaching, it needs to be vetted by online experts to determine if it emphasizes appropriate, comparable variables in the online environment. For example, if activities to promote student engagement is on that form...what does that look like online? Not all administrators or faculty who have not taught online would know what to look for as indicators of student engagement.

Book review I know that our faculty friends in the humanities have a lot of advice to offer for facilitating student writing, but often it doesn't seem to fit the context of quantitative work (or at least, the benefits are lost in the translation of the process). Enter Student Writing in the Quantitative Disciplines: A Guide for College Faculty by Patrick Bahls, 

It started with an announcement in February that a University of Georgia instructor would start a crowdsourcing project to find out more about working conditions and salaries of adjuncts. Last month, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro announced that she was attempting something similar for graduate student employees. Both projects are attempts at gathering information -- on the salaries of adjuncts and graduate students -- where rigorously researched data is difficult to come by. Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/02/crowdsourcing-contingent-salary-data#ixzz1quha2YCW  Inside Higher Ed 

lThe course introduces pre-service teachers to the applications of different instructional technologies in mathematics classrooms (K - 12).  Students will examine and interpret the meanings of effective and appropriate use of technology through readings and activities.  Using technology along with existing school curriculum, either as an aid or as a supplement, students will learn to create, adapt, and find technological resources.  Students will be exposed to and use Web-applets and other resources on the Internet, computer-based learning software, multimedia presentations, mathematics forums, interactive whiteboards, spreadsheets, dynamic geometry software, calculators, and calculator based laboratories (CBL).  

An online service opening today offers a new approach to connecting students with potential employers. The service is called Seelio (a portmanteau of "see" and "portfolio"), and it aims to simplify the postgraduate job hunt by creating a place where online student portfolios are seen by a network of companies.

Dual enrollment is widely seen as a strategy to help advanced high school students begin college early. More recently, interest is growing in using dual enrollment as a way to smooth the transition to college for students traditionally underrepresented in higher education.1 Many scholars and practitioners are coming to believe that high school students who have the opportunity to participate in college courses are more likely to enroll in college and succeed once there.

This fall, I am requiring the students in my seminar to have a Twitter account. Students will post items on a regular basis, using the hashtag #BIO361. We also will devote some time on a regular basis to discussing items or responses from Twitter. Our first post probably will be on the first day of classes - Tuesday, August 24, 2010. For this project to work most effectively, we need a critical mass of people outside of our class to participate. If you, your students, friends, or colleagues would like to join us, please do. We will appreciate any new comments, retweets, or responses. I'm looking forward to an engaging discussion throughout the semester.

The Social Web is transforming the way students interact with others, and is challenging traditional pedagogies, values and practices. An analysis of students' uses of social networking tools (e.g. Facebook, Myspace) and video/photo sharing sites (e.g. YouTube, Flickr) reveals the emergence of collective digital literacies. These include filtering content, new textual and visual literacies, managing multiple digital identities, representing self in cyberspace and engaging in new modes of interaction.

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."  

This blog is a student project. Students taking Civics at Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School are writing blog posts as part of a requirement for the course.

It is often difficult to explain what Creative Commons licensing is to students and teachers - this short film does a pretty good job of presenting the facts. I do think there is a need for more high quality resources to help teach licensing of digital content and especially resources to communicate what it all means to young student. What do you think?

A new research project by the Open University explores the much-debated concept of "the digital native". The university does this by making full use of the rich resource which is its own highly diverse student body. It concludes that while there are clear differences between older people and younger in their use of technology, there's no evidence of a clear break between two separate populations.

For students new to medical school, parsing out the most relevant and helpful information from a seemingly limitless supply of materials can be daunting. The University of Virginia's School of Medicine has created a set of relevant websites that can be useful for medical students and others with an interest in related fields such as anatomy, physiology, and neurology. The links are divided into two dozen topical areas, such as "Gross Anatomy", "Nephrology", and "Surgery". Each section contains links from reliable sources, including the University of Toronto, Oxford University, and the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. The "Gross Anatomy" area is very thorough, as it contains over twenty resources that provide an overview of anatomy, anatomical slide shows, and so on

Feature of the software include: The ability to import PowerPoint slide shows; Interactive questions, which lets students answer inquiries by the teacher via laptop or mobile device; A variety of question types; Teacher previews of interactive activity results in real time; Bookmarking of slides to be reviewed later; Recording and archiving of student activity during class;

The following are what I believe are the rights of all student to have with regards to using technology as an educational tool, written as a student to their teacher:   1) I have the right to use my own technology at school. I should not be forced to leave my new technology at home to use (in most cases) out-of-date school technology. If I can afford it, let me use it -- you don't need to buy me one. If I cannot afford it, please help me get one -- I don't mind working for it.

A student guide to studying online - What you need to know before you enroll for an online course 

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