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A course is a sequence of experiences. What are some good learning experiences? (in the abstract)

The Community of Scientists project seeks to pair up NH classrooms for inquiry-based science co-investigations, using technology for video and voice communication.  Teachers at Winchester School (K-8) in Winchester, NH, are working out initial technology questions by creating a Community of Scientists with Elementary Education Methods II students at Keene State College. The pilot project is to co-investigate hydroponics as a sustainable option for growing food rapidly in smaller areas. It entails setting up a simple classroom hydroponics station where students will explore how to best grow plants hydroponically.  KSC students will conduct and monitor their hydroponics experiments while students in Winchester School conduct similar experiment in their own hydroponic station in their classroom.  Students will then video chat with their co-investigators and share their findings.

Thanks for diigoing this.

The following are archived videos from the ELMS Pilot Evaluation Webinar Series. In those webinars, ELMS pilot faculty members talk about their experiences with each of the five ELMS pilot systems: Blackboard 9.1, Desire2Learn, Canvas, Moodle, and Sakai. The ELMS pilot evaluation faculty members give an overview of each system, highlight unique features, and talk about what works and what doesn't. Most of the webinars are available to watch either in Wimba Live Classroom or on YouTube. The following are archived videos from the ELMS Pilot Evaluation Webinar Series. In those webinars, ELMS pilot faculty members talk about their experiences with each of the five ELMS pilot systems: Blackboard 9.1, Desire2Learn, Canvas, Moodle, and Sakai. The ELMS pilot evaluation faculty members give an overview of each system, highlight unique features, and talk about what works and what doesn't. Most of the webinars are available to watch either in Wimba Live Classroom or on YouTube. Introduction

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.

Reading content on the web feels so 2007. I don't Delicious because I don't bookmark, and I don't bookmark because I'm no longer searching for and jumping around the web looking for content. Nowadays I consume most content on my iPad or Touch, using apps such as the one from the NYTimes. The app may restrict where I go, meaning less variety but a higher quality consumption experience. I imagine that over time more of the magazines and journals I read will morph into apps, providing high quality multimedia reading and viewing experiences on portable devices. Reading the NYTimes on my Touch or iPad is better than through a browser because I'm in "lean back" consuming mode. If I'm on my browser it means that I'm on my computer, with all the attention pulls from e-mail and writing projects.

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

No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable About Open Educational Experience minute 28:15-29:46 says Disc Boards should be personalizable

Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett is public radio's weekly program about "religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas." We are produced and distributed by American Public Media and currently heard on over 200 public radio stations across the U.S. and globally via the Web and podcast. Krista takes a narrative, or first-person, approach to religious and philosophical conversation. She draws out the intersection of theology and human experience, of grand religious ideas and real life. A weekly national program since July 2001, Speaking of Faith is not so much about religion per se, but about drawing out compelling and challenging voices of wisdom on the most important subjects of 21st-century life; thereby creating a different kind of in-depth, revealing, illuminating dialogue than can be elicited by traditional journalistic treatments and debates. Topics range from "Einstein and the Mind of God" to "The Spirituality of Parenting" to "Diplomacy and Religion in the 21st Century."

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.

When we gather to discuss our experiences in online and hybrid classes, we often end up talking more about technology than about the subjects we're studying/teaching. For me, it's like sitting down to write an essay with pen and paper and becoming distracted by ruminations about the nature of No. 2 pencils and loose-leaf paper. Likewise, discussions of digital pedagogy can quickly become preoccupied with best practices for using technology and not best practices for teaching. 

The Century America compilation of websites are a part of the COPLAC digital history project, a collaboration of several colleges in which student researchers have explored their local community's experiences during the Great War. Spearheaded by Dr. Bill Spellman, and under the direct leadership of Dr. Ellen Holmes Pearson from the University of North Carolina Asheville and Dr. Jeffrey McClurken from the University of Mary Washington, the project combines digital technologies, distance mentoring, and undergraduate research. The UNC Asheville website explores parts of Western North Carolina, with particular emphasis on the college's home city of Asheville, during the Great War.

I am adoring the virtual instrument apps that I have on the iPad for my elementary music classroom. Some of the apps that I am experimenting with or using in my classroom can be found here. In the recording above, my 3rd grade class is singing and performing "Chatter with the Angels" utilizing orff instruments, recorders, voices, and an iPad using a autoharp app plugged into the stereo amp. This was recorded using the GarageBand app on my iphone. The microphone is the phone's internal microphone.

E-Publishing is here to stay.  We're here to provide answers to all your E-Publishing questions. We're using real numbers, real data, and real examples from our experiences.  Sit down, settle in, and breathe in the future. WG2E

About Science Pond Welcome to the pond! For this Twitter experiment we'll need science nerds of all stripes, including scientists, bloggers, journalists, educators, and students. The criteria for inclusion: on-topic feeds in English that are interesting and useful--to your peers at the very least.

Frequently when one hears about the Native American experience in the United States, the focus is on the loss of traditions, folkways, and language. In contrast, this website was created to highlight a recent documentary by Anne Makepeace that focuses on the ways in which Native American languages have recovered and thrived in recent times. On the site, visitors should start by clicking on the interactive "Language Map". Here visitors can learn about twelve different languages, including Crow, Cherokee, Dakota, Euchee, and Lakota. Clicking on the "Voices" area gives visitors the opportunity to listen to Native Americans from different tribal communities speaking in their mother tongues. Additionally, visitors can send an electronic postcard from the site, read the site blog, and learn more about the project and the documentary [Scout Report]

Viewshare.org is a free web application for generating and customizing unique, dynamic views through which users can experience cultural heritage digital collections. The intended users of Viewshare are individuals managing and creating access to digital collections of cultural heritage materials.

To experience the world of high quality reporting from North Korea, meditations on the state of journalism, and a wide range of other stories, direct your browser to the Global Journalist website. Originally created for the International Press Institute in 1995, the publication moved to the Missouri School of Journalism in 1999. Today, journalism students work with staff members to produce content for the site and its accompanying radio show, which is broadcast on KBIA, central Missouri's NPR affiliate. With funding provided in part by the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, the people at the Global Journalist provide users with current and archived radio shows on the homepage. After listening to a few recent stories, interested parties may wish to click on the Free Press Watch section. Here they can use the interactive map to learn about various transgressions committed against members of the press around the world. Also, users shouldn't miss the Blogs area, which contains links to high-quality news blogs from "Persian Letters" (billed as "a window into Iranian politics and society") to the Guardian's "Newsblog

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

The developing themes have influenced the design and strategy of media production at SCE, including: Strategizing videos to tie directly to course assignments and/or assessment Advising faculty members to use conversational language in production; also encouraging them to use humor and draw on past experiences Adding audio/visual elements to the video that supplement the content; the videos should not convey information that students could just read as text Producing high-quality videos (despite mixed findings related to production values, elements such as professional sound, lighting, and graphics are considered important when creating high-quality media) Keeping the four-minute view time as a design consideration, especially when producing longer-form content lectures that can be broken up into shorter segments

The online degrees therefore cater to musicians whose careers prevent them from moving to Boston. Applicants with professional experience can submit their portfolios and receive up to 30 prior learning credits. Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/31/berklee-college-music-launches-first-accredited-bachelors-degree-programs-music#ixzz2jJ7Obpkh Inside Higher Ed