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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

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.

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.

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."  

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.

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;

Complete List of Google Earth Activities

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

ideas for digital-activities

Chart that separate assignments from activities - good for first timers

"he tips provided below are based on expert teacher experiences using the social network twitter. These activities are designed to encourage students in making connections beyond a basic understanding of concepts using this online education technology."

OmniDazzle is a set of fun and useful enhancements that help you highlight certain areas of your screen, create special effects, and track the location of your mouse pointer. Each plug-in can be configured to suit your own particular preferences: change colors, make objects bigger or smaller, or change the way you activate the OmniDazzle plug-in of your choice. By allowing you to manipulate your screen, OmniDazzle offers practical features for doing presentations, taking screen shots, focusing on specific tasks, and adding visual information to your desktop.

OmniDazzle is a set of fun and useful enhancements that help you highlight certain areas of your screen, create special effects, and track the location of your mouse pointer. Each plug-in can be configured to suit your own particular preferences: change colors, make objects bigger or smaller, or change the way you activate the OmniDazzle plug-in of your choice.

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.

What is most important about the world of American literature? It's an important question, and some would argue for the works of Twain, while others might speak eloquently about Richard Wright, and so on. This inventive 16-part series for college students deals with the foibles of American literature through a "diversity of voices" in a way that is eminently accessible and interesting. This series was created in 2003 by Oregon Public Broadcasting and it features segments like Exploring Borderlands, Native Voices, and Regional Realism. Each program is also accompanied by a number of lesson units, plans, and additional classroom activities. Visitors can also read detailed program descriptions, and look over a list of Related Resources

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.

Google has developed this helpful web-based tool to help citizens, journalists, and others stay abreast of various political campaigns throughout the United States. Visitors can view and interact with a clickable map of the United States to find out information about each candidate and his (or potentially her) activities. Additionally, visitors can use the Issues area to track news items on topics like the economy, immigration, healthcare, and others. This version is compatible with all operating systems

 It shows that 20 million active users have created 3 billion drawings since the app launched just seven weeks ago.

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).  

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larning activity: search for mystery image using google search-by-image