Group items tagged

"The important point here is that investment in new or adapted physical classroom space should be driven by decisions to change pedagogy/teaching methods. This will mean bringing together academics, IT support staff, instructional designers and staff from facilities, as well as architects and furniture suppliers. Second, I strongly believe in the statement that we shape our environments, and our environments shape us. Providing instructors with a flexible, well-designed learning environment is likely to encourage major changes in their teaching; stuffing them into rectangular boxes with rows of desks will do the opposite."

The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is an Open Source project based at Tufts University. The VUE project is focused on creating flexible tools for managing and integrating digital resources in support of teaching, learning and research. VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information.

The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is an Open Source project based at Tufts University. The VUE project is focused on creating flexible tools for managing and integrating digital resources in support of teaching, learning and research. VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information.

The Online Faculty Competency Certification program is intended for future and existing online teachers. The program is designed to help faculty members become proficient in the use of Blackboard and to become effective facilitators in the online environment.

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.

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments." Arduino is one kind of inexpensive microcontroller now available to the masses. Microcontrollers allow for physical computing, using programming to control physical events, without a high degree of difficulty. 

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.

Canvas test environment

"Faculty Competencies for Online Teaching Teaching in an online environment can be considerably different in nature from teaching face-to-face. The competencies listed on this site are intended to provide faculty and administrators with a better understanding of the instructional requirements of online teaching. Pedagogical Competencies Technical Competencies Administrative Competencies"

"iPad deployment includes all of the steps between buying an iPad and beginning to use the device. For an individual's personal iPad, this is often a very fast and easy process lasting no longer than five minutes: You just open the box, turn it on, download the apps you want on your device, and go. But for a school, or district, with potentially hundreds of iPads-each one requiring a specialized list of apps that need to be purchased before protecting the devices with a case and sending them out to classrooms. As an administrator or teacher, there are a few things you will need to know before you deploy your iPads. Lucky for you, the eSpark Engineering team has created a five step road map to aid in this journey, highlighting the best practices and considerations relevant to deploying and supporting iPads in education environments."

# 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

The Connexions approach Connexions is an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web. Our Content Commons contains educational materials for everyone - from children to college students to professionals - organized in small modules that are easily connected into larger collections or courses. All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons "attribution" license.

"Welcome to the Google Apps Education Training Center. This is an online learning environment dedicated for educators and students to learn how to effectively use Google Apps in an educational context."

"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."

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."  

Twiddla.com Display mutliple digital resources together audio, too

Those concerns about privacy on Facebook have caught the attention of the U.S. Government: Congress recently sent Facebook an open letter asking the company to explain the disclosure of user identities to third parties (as originally reported by the Wall Street Journal), and how the company plans to address this issue. James Clarke, senior consumer technology analyst at Mintel International, makes very clear what's at stake: "It's in Facebook's own interests to provide a safe environment for users to enjoy; the value of their business depends on it."

Why Collaborate? The most important (and most obvious) reason for the facilitator and teacher to collaborate is to improve student learning. Collaboration allows the two teachers to combine strengths, share responsibilities, and learn from each other, bringing the best of both their experiences together to create an improved student learning environment.

 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::

spring 2010 Tamara Stenn's IQl class