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researcher at the National Education Policy Center, said research has so far failed to prove that online instruction is superior to face-to-face education. Jeff Hunt, who runs Indian Prairie's online program, said such critiques are a caution to those who want to expand Internet-based learning. "We have to do this well because we can't do it over," he said. "(Poor results) will verify to critics that there's no quality there." Tribune reporter Lawerence Synett contributed. jkeilman@tribune.com Get the Chicago Tribune delivered to your home for only $1 a week > Copyright © 2011, Chicago Tribune Share61(2) RECOMMENDED FOR YOU 2 charged with prostitution at Evanston spa (Chicago Tribune) Ind. couple pleads guilty to duct-taping children (Chicago Tribune) Hospitals drowning in noise (Chicago Tribune) Chicago's at top as gas prices jump again (Chicago Tribune) Chicago discussed as terrorist target, document says (Chicago Tribune) FROM AROUND THE WEB What?! Prince in foreclosure?! (BankRate.com) Every Parent's Nightmare: Your Grad Is Moving Home (CNBC) Little-known credit card perks (BankRate.com) Riskiest Places to Use Your Credit Card (CNBC) Mary Robbins Dies Just 12 Days After Husband (The New York Times) [what's this]   Comments (2)Add / View comments | Discussion FAQ ckotarch at 10:55 PM April 25, 2011 Online learning offers the people who can learn faster than their peers the opportunity to work ahead and learn more and do more in the same amount of time.   The fact that students are graduating early is testament to the fact that there are some superior advantages to it when used that way.  Credit recovery too gives kids the opportunity to catch up to meet their goals of graduation where without it, they would not.  What more evidence does one need?   The benefits are self evident. Arrive2.net at 9:57 PM April 25, 2011 "Gene Glass, senior researcher at the National Education Policy Center, said research has so far failed to prove that online instr

What training resources does Instructure provide their clients? Instructure is working hard to provide clients with materials that will make it even easier to train Instructors, LMS Admins, and Students on the basics of Canvas. Suggestions for improving or adding to these materials are always welcome.

The short version is that iCloud Keychain does a good job of automatically entering passwords in websites on Apple's Safari browser, both with iOS devices and Macs. It does not work with any third-party browsers on OS X or iOS. It cannot fill in passwords on an iOS app unless the developer of that app has done some legwork to integrate with iCloud Keychain. Worse, it stores the passwords in an inconvenient location on iOS, making it hard to copy and paste passwords for those cases when iCloud Keychain can't automatically fill them in.

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?

While I was revisiting the topic of the 21st century pedagogy which I have covered in several posts here in Educational Technology and Mobile Learning, I come across this awesome graph created by our colleague Andrew Churches. I couldn't find better and more comprehensive graphic than the one below. Andrew did a fantastic work in capturing most of the concepts that make 21st century pedagogy. I know it could have been richer in information if  definitions or explanatory snippets  were added to some concepts ( like for instance information literacy, media fluency, technology fluency ) but still that does not lesson from its importance as a starting point to ponder on the topic of 21st century pedagogy. For those of you who are not familiar with the terminology included in this graphic please refer back to the posts I have published here a while ago particularly : 14 technology concepts every teacher should know about, and 6 Learning concepts for the 21st century teacher.

Contributions from many including: Bryan Alexander Howard Rheingold is book, and accompanying website, is a resource for selforganizing self-learners. With YouTube, Wikipedia, search engines, free chatrooms, blogs, wikis, and video communication, today's  have power never dreamed-of before. What does any group of self-learners need to know in order to self-organize learning about any topic? e Peeragogy Handbook is a volunteercreated and maintained resource for bootstrapping peer learning. 

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.

US DOE Office of Educational Tech report on analytics: what is needed and how to get there.

The Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education asked SRI to talk to industry experts and convene a panel of researchers to understand the state of the art, the state of the practice, and the emerging field of learning analytics and educational data mining.

costs $25. I'll bet there's a free tool out there that does the same thing.

No limit on number of authors

Scroll down to find the 1:38 Canvas Instructor Training Demo 1 and 2

"What does it cost? You can use most features* free for a 14 day trial period. There are no call time limits during the trial. After the 14 day trial, these features continue to be free for all calls to people running the VodBurner free or licensed version. If you wish to use VodBurner for calls to non-VodBurner users after the 14 day free trial, a purchase is required." $99

book publisher W.W. NORTON & CO originally created this blog for students and teachers of sociology, and it is informative and quite accessible for those familiarizing themselves with this field. Visitors will find its pledge to "keep things interesting" refreshing. The pledge is accomplished by ensuring that "all of the posts on this site will pass the 'so what?' test that some academic research frankly does not." The blog entries are written mainly by those individuals who have doctoral degrees in sociology, along with a smattering of posts by sociology students. Visitors who prefer to get their daily dose of sociological thought in video form should check out the "Video" tab to watch sociologists speak on a range of news stories and other timely topics. The videos are generally just a few minutes long, and have recently covered such topics as "Commodifying the 'Ghetto'", "Communities Becom[ing] Poverty Traps" and "Fears about Halloween Candy Poisoning

The following video does an excellent job of exploring this idea, answering the following questions: 1. What is visual recording? 2. What tools (and apps) are available to make it work? 3. What do you need to understand to be able to do it? 4. Post-production, what do you do with the recordings when you've finished? It is also honest, offering the pros and cons of each app, and of the iPad itself in various learning domains.

You can just use Photoshop Alternatives to edit for simple piece of work. These Alternatives allows users to resize photos, some can does cropping and adjust colors, brightness, contrast by using various usable functions. Give up Photoshop for a while and try hand on web based online photo editing sites. There is no need of any expert knowledge just follow few simple steps and put final touch to your project.

The nuances of Copyright and Creative Commons and the differences between them can be confusing. I recently came across this neat little video that does a good job of explaining Creative Commons and what Creative Commons licenses allow or do not allow people to do with your works. A PDF of the images in the video can be found here.

How does visualization support telling a story with data? How do journalists think about data visualization as part of their stories? How can visualization tools help data storytellers construct narratives? Interactive journalism

 It is possible to use social media in such a way as to enhance the learning environment, and to provide an education. Here are 13 case studies that show that social media does have a place in the classroom::

A key reason some ideas are so successful, conventional wisdom has held, is that a few highly influential people espouse them. In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell wrote that what he calls "social epidemics" are "driven by the efforts of a handful of exceptional people." Those exceptional people tend to be experts on a subject who love to talk. Such people can convince dozens of others of their opinions. An excellent sales strategy, then, would be to find those few critical people, persuade them of the value of your product, and leave it to them to convince others. It's a compelling idea, but does it really work? Social network theorists Duncan J. Watts of Columbia University and Peter Sheridan Dodds of the University of Vermont in Burlington decided to put the notion to a test. What they found is a disappointment for "viral marketers" who specialize in selling products by influencing influential people.