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Think-Pair-Share is a strategy designed to provide students with "food for thought" on a given topics enabling them to formulate individual ideas and share these ideas with another student. It is a learning strategy developed by Lyman and associates to encourage student classroom participation. What is Think, Pair, Share? Think-Pair-Share is a strategy designed to provide students with "food for thought" on a given topics enabling them to formulate individual ideas and share these ideas with another student. It is a learning strategy developed by Lyman and associates to encourage student classroom participation. Rather than using a basic recitation method in which a teacher poses a question and one student offers a response, Think-Pair-Share encourages a high degree of pupil response and can help keep students on task. What is its purpose? * Providing "think time" increases quality of student responses. * Students become actively involved in thinking about the concepts presented in the lesson. * Research tells us that we need time to mentally "chew over" new ideas in order to store them in memory. When teachers present too much information all at once, much of that information is lost. If we give students time to "think-pair-share" throughout the lesson, more of the critical information is retained. * When students talk over new ideas, they are forced to make sense of those new ideas in terms of their prior knowledge. Their misunderstandings about the topic are often revealed (and resolved) during this discussion stage. * Students are more willing to participate since they don't feel the peer pressure involved in responding in front of the whole class. * Think-Pair-Share is easy to use on the spur of the moment. * Easy to use in large classes. How can I do it? * With students seated in teams of 4, have them number them from 1 to 4. * Announce a discussion topic or problem to solve. (Example: Which room in our school is larg

Designing a Blended course: Here is a three-step process: Establish clear learning goals for the topic. Design activities to help students meet the learning goals. Sort the activities into two categories: online and face-to-face. Very short article that might be useful in CELT's blended classes.

Introverts. Who are they and how do we ensure they thrive in active learning classrooms? If you have ever come to the midterm point of the semester and graded a stellar paper of a student whose name you don't recognize and who has never raised her hand in class, you may have just identified an introvert in your classroom. In every classroom there are a significant proportion of students who would identify themselves as introverts, if they understood what that term meant. Originally conceived by Carl Jung, the concepts of introversion and extroversion have been helpful ways of understanding basic differences in human temperament (Jung, 1970). Often confused with shyness, introversion is an aspect of personality which affects how we engage in social activity and our preferences for learning. Unlike extroverts, who typically are energized by social interaction, introverts can find connecting with large groups of unfamiliar people exhausting. They may have excellent social skills and enjoy meaningful friendships, but are quite happy in their own company.

# Develops higher level thinking skills # Promotes student-faculty interaction and familiarity # Increases student retention # Builds self esteem in students # Enhances student satisfaction with the learning experience # Promotes a positive attitude toward the subject matter # Develops oral communication skills # Develops social interaction skills # Promotes positive race relations # Creates an environment of active, involved, exploratory learning # Uses a team approach to problem solving while maintaining individual accountability # Encourages diversity understanding

a collection of instructional strategies that illustrate how the principles of positive psychology might be applied in the classroom. ( - See more at: http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-professor-blog/two-activities-that-influence-the-climate-for-learning/#sthash.ABCJKqB0.dpuf

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.

Now comes the important part. Once we have an ordered list of learning objectives, we instructors have to choose a "cognitive cutoff point" at which student responsibility for mastery prior to class ends. "Below" this point, we expect students to master the learning objectives before class through guided practice. "Above" this point, some fluency would be nice, but these are long-term learning objectives and will serve as the focus for class activities.

Power to the People! Jennifer Ditkoff, Keene State College Give students the power to guide their own education. Using Wallwisher an instructor gains insight on student needs and opens up a classroom discussion. After library instruction short tutorials are posted on Voicethread. Students experiment with the concepts, actively participating in assessing their own research efforts, as well as their classmates. Students have control over their own learning experience and can revisit the course materials throughout the semester to add content, ask questions, and receive feedback. Diigo is used rather than a static handout. Students provide links to helpful materials for their peers, highlighting the community aspect of ongoing education. Jennifer Ditkoff has worked in academic, public and medical libraries, learning every type of classification system, including the elusive Cutter system. When she is not troubleshooting electronic resources, she teaches information literacy, staffs the reference desk, and shows up early to committee meetings. She enjoys learning about new technologies.

Web 2.0 has been, during the last years, one of the most fashionable words for a whole range of evolutions regarding the Internet.Although it was identified by the current analysts as the key technology for the next decade, the actors from the educational fielddo not really know what Web 2.0 means. Since the author started to explore and use Web 2.0 technologies in her owndevelopment/improvement, she has been intrigued by their potential and, especially, by the possibility of integrating them ineducation and in particular in the teaching activity.The purpose of this paper is both to promote scholarly inquiry about the need of a new type a pedagogy (Web 2.0 based) and thedevelopment / adoption of best practice in teaching and learning with web 2.0 in higher education (HE).The article main objectives are: * to introduce theoretical aspects of using Web 2.0 technologies in higher education* to present models of integrating Web 2.0 technologies in teaching, learning and assessment* to identify the potential benefits of these technologies as well as to highlight some of the problematic issues /barriers encountered, surrounding the pedagogical use of Web 2.0 in higher education* to propose an agenda for future research, and to develop pedagogy 2.0 scenarios for HE sector. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

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."  

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).  

Timelines enable chunking. Another ideal feature of timelines is that by their nature, they chunk information. Because events on a timeline occur at a point in time or during a segment of time, you're residing in a chunking environment. Chunk away!Timelines are a good source for interactions. Asking learners to build their own timeline or to drag and drop events on a timeline can make an effective online learning activity.

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.

Participants will collaboratively build a set of shared online resources as they gain knowledge and skills to help faculty integrate technology. In each activity, groups will develop materials as Google Docs that will be immediately available to all. Participants don't need to be wizards but should be familiar with digital learning tools. Each participant must bring a laptop and should be able to create and edit Google Docs. The intended audience includes instructional technologists and technology integration specialists.

CloudCourse is a course scheduling system. Built entirely on App Engine, CloudCourse allows anyone to create and track learning activities. It also offers calendaring, waitlist management and approval features. CloudCourse is fully integrated with Google Calendar and can be further customized for your organization with the following service provider interfaces (replaceable components): * Sync service - to sync CloudCourse data with your internal systems * Room info service - to schedule classes in your locations * User info service - to look up user profile (employee title, picture, etc) CloudCourse has been developed in Python, using the Django web application framework and the Closure Javascript library.

"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."

Hot spots on video allow you to go to another video.

Some good learning activities with Prezi

Here's a valuable set of resources for Health Sciences education: "60 public access virtual patient cases released under a Creative Commons licence for open use and reuse. Cases were created working with subject experts in workshops across the province. Using the open-source OpenLabyrinth platform the PINE project has a research and development theme investigating common simulation, gaming and narrative patterns in educational case design. This is facilitated by the use of the Vue topic mapping toolset that allows authors to create visual representations of activities and decision making processes."