Group items tagged

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.

The mission of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy is to promote open scholarly discourse around critical and creative uses of digital technology in teaching, learning, and research. Educational institutions have often embraced instrumentalist conceptions and market-driven implementations of technology that overdetermine its uses in academic environments. Such approaches underestimate the need for critical engagement with the integration of technological tools into pedagogical practice. The JITP will endeavor to counter these trends by recentering questions of pedagogy in our discussions of technology in higher education. The journal will also work to change what counts as scholarship - and how it is presented, disseminated, and reviewed - by allowing contributors to develop their ideas, publish their work, and engage their readers using multiple formats. We are committed first and foremost to teaching and learning, and intend that the journal itself - both in process and in product - provide opportunities to reveal, reflect on, and revise academic publication and classroom practice.

"The American Democracy Project for Civic Engagement is a national, multi-campus initiative that seeks to foster informed civic engagement in the United States. The project seeks to create a greater intellectual understanding and commitment to participate in the civic life of the United States."

Project-Based Learning grabs hold of this idea and fosters deep learning and autonomy by using technology to help students engage in issues and questions relevant to their lives. This resource will direct you to a variety of resources on this approach, the research behind it, and how you can use it in your class to transform your students into engaged and interested independent thinkers.

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.

recommendations:1. Ensure that all readings, articles, presentations and videos (all course material) are available in the course management system.2. "Create a weekly reading assessment that asks students to formulate or discuss the most important things you wanted them to get out the this week's articles."3. "Make your syllabus a living document and let students know about changes via class emails - it will put your class in the forefront of their minds."4. "Use technology to help students engage with one another - create peer review groups for papers or discussion groups online."

The effect of Twitter on college student engagement and grades

Recently, the authors engaged in a collaborative inquiry with a sixth grade science class to explore mind mapping, a graphic organizer that can be used to generate ideas, take notes, develop concepts and ideas, and improve memory (Buzan 1979). With a very limited body of research available on how to best use mind maps in the classroom, the authors decided to explore ways mind mapping could be used for the teaching and learning of middle school science. This article reviews research about graphic organizers, describes the ways the authors incorporated mind mapping into a sixth grade science curriculum, and discusses what they learned by using mind mapping as both a teaching and learning strateg

"Northeastern University is pleased to present "U.S. Political Conventions and Campaigns" as an educational tool for anyone who would like an engaging and in-depth description of the themes and events that have helped shape American political history."

"Nearpod enables teachers to use their iPads to manage content on students' devices. It combines presentation, engagement and real-time assessment tools into one integrated solution."

nstructure has engaged Securus Global to test the Canvas LMS product for security vulnerabilities. Instructure also invited me to be an independent observer - participating in the process and independently reporting on the testing and Instructure's response to any vulnerabilities identified.

Seamlessly integrate content with dozens of popular websites, apps, and social media services. Make ANY web content engaging, interactive and shareable using the same tools your learners use every day.

Colleagues, Last semester 30 faculty and staff participated in a reading group focused on Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring's "The Innovative University." The reading group came together face-to-face on a number of occasions and continued the rich discussion online. It was a great experience and a fascinating book. This semester the faculty and staff participating in the American Democracy Project recommended that we invite the campus community to come together to read "A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy's Future." The work was completed by the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, under the leadership of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. It's a brief volume, rich in examples, on how colleges and universities must reclaim responsibility for civic learning. "A Crucible Moment" is available in PDF here: http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pubs/college-learning-democracys-future/crucible-moment.pdf The reading group will meet once in March and once in April, with opportunities for online discussion. More information will follow later in the month. In the meantime, if you're interested in joining us for this discussion, please email Kim Schmidl-Gagne (kgagne@keene.edu). If you would like to commit to the reading group, but would prefer to read in hard copy, Kim will also order a copy for you. I look forward to this discussion, and I hope you will consider joining us for our spring reading group. Mel

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.

Mobile Learning and Social Media: Increasing Engagement and Interactivity Tanya Joosten | University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Interim Associate Director, Learning Technology Center Lecturer, Department of Communication

"Retrieving legacy files As the old dropbox knew no separation of files by assignment (one of its major limitations), it was not possible to move these files into assignments during the upgrade, and there is no storage area facility available into which they could have been moved, so they are not directly accessible within the application after an upgrade or in courses restored from earlier versions. The old dropbox code used Perl, which has been completely removed from the web application in release 9, so the dropbox cannot be accessed anymore to retrieve the legacy files. A rudimentary Java-based interface is being provided to enable each user individually to download any legacy files they may wish to retrieve. These files can then be submitted in newly created assignments as desired or stored in one's Virtual Hard Drive inside the Blackboard Content System, if that is licensed by the institution and enabled by the system administrator. Unfortunately this interface is not exposed via any link in the application. System administrators or helpdesk staff can however make available such a link to their users, either assisting them with file retrieval on an individual basis or by publishing the download link to their users, e.g. in a system announcement. Community Engagement license holders may also wish to add an HTML portal module with this link, thus simplifying the download process, or add it as external link to the tool panel (in the portal menu column). The location of this interface (relative to your server root) is: /webapps/blackboard/execute/ddb It is important to note that this is not a file system location. You actually have to access the URL via a web browser! Sample HTML for a portal module named something like "Digital Dropbox Download": Download your digital dropbox files here When a user accesses this link, he will either see a message that no files were found for him, or a list of courses in w

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.

Collaboration, literacy, authorship and writing programs. Using social networking tools to engage the wisdom of teachers.

"InstantAtlas™ enables information analysts and research professionals to create highly-interactive web solutions that combine statistics and map data to improve data visualization, enhance communication, and engage people in more informed decision making."