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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.

Improved Ability to Understand Nuance: Students indicated that they were better able to understand the instructor's intent. Students also indicated that instructor encouragement and emphasis were clearer.Increased Involvement: Students felt less isolated in the online environment and were more motivated to participate when hearing their instructor's voice.Increased Content Retention: Students reported that they retained audio feedback better than text feedback. Interestingly, they also reported that they retained the course content to which the feedback was related better than with text feedback. These self-reported findings were supported by the fact that students incorporated into their final projects three times as much audio feedback as text feedback.Increased Instructor Caring: 

use graphics, less words, display your notes to only you & keep slides clean

"Canvas has drastically improved this process, so you should be able to easily import courses from your existing Blackboard course archive files. [Learn more about finding your course archives.] "

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

10 Foundational Principles for Using and Safeguarding Students' Personal Information High-quality education data are essential for improving students' achievement in school and preparing them for success in life. When effectively used, these data can empower educators, students, and families with the information they need to make decisions to help all learners succeed. Everyone who uses student information has a

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.

Any author (with or without a disability) can use the Accessibility Checker feature to find potential accessibility issues and instructions for how to fix them. This article provides details on the issues the Accessibility Checker looks for, and gives some information on how to resolve them. Through notifications in the Backstage View and a task pane that helps authors navigate to, and resolve issues in their file, the purpose of the Accessibility Checker is to help authors improve the accessibility of documents, spreadsheets, and presentations that they create.

We are thrilled to announce major enhancements to our PowerPoint to video conversion engine and they are: Support for embedded video (WMV & AVI) in video conversions Support for Transition effects in video conversions Improved conversion engine with fast conversion time and more accurate results

Good teaching and exposure to students from diverse backgrounds are some of the strongest predictors of whether freshmen return for a second year of college and improve their critical-thinking skills, say two prominent researchers.

TimeGlider is a data-driven interactive timeline application built on the (Adobe) Flash platform. You can "grab" the timeline and drag it left and right, and zoom in and out to view centuries at a time or just hours. TimeGlider allows you to create event-spans so that you can see durations and how they overlap. Being web-based, TimeGlider lets you collaborate and share easily. You can create timelines about the last year of your family, the last century of world events, or about pre-historical (bce/bc) times. Currently, one can zoom out to a scope of millenia: In 2009, we plan to improve the breadth of our zooming capability to include the Big Bang.

I tried it and couldn't quite figure it out quickly. Looks complicated. (It might not BE complicated, but it looks like it, which is a liability.)

One of the best, most concise explanations of why the antipathy to technology in education.~JB The conflict between computers and schools is really a conflict between educational paradigms. The traditional and dominant paradigm is rooted in the book and the pedagogy is one of transmission. Teachers, who have presumably read more books than their students and listened to more scholarly lectures, transmit what they've learned to their students in a similar fashion. The students who do best within this system are those who can capture the transmission - as unfiltered as possible - and mirror back to the teacher what they have delineated. Within this model, digital technology can provide improvements, but they are cosmetic. Teachers can enhance their lectures with presentation software, videos and other forms of multimedia, but the methods stay the same. For teachers who don't understand how these new tools can enhance what they are teaching, then technology can be a distraction. Within this system of learning, (Inquiry based and student centered) there is real value in having the widest range of technological tools for not only consuming information in all its multimodal forms, but for creatively demonstrating what one has learned.

He says 'effect sizes' are much the best way of answering the question 'what has the greatest influence on student learning'. An effect-size of 1.0 is typically associated with: * advancing learner's achievement by one year, or improving the rate of learning by 50%, * a correlation between some variable (e.g., amount of homework) and achievement of approximately .50. * average students receiving that treatment exceeding 84% of students not receiving that treatment. * A two grade leap in GCSE, e.g. from a C to an A grade. An effect size of 1.0 is clearly enormous! (It is defined as an increase of one standard deviation)

A new program will give grants to a variety of high-tech teaching projects, with the hope of helping low-income students better succeed in their studies. Next Gen Learning Challenges, led by Educause, a nonprofit that supports education technology, is designed to find technology-based approaches to improve college readiness and completion among low-income students.

"Voices en Español n. voi-ces in s-pan-yol 1. A bilingual blog 2. A conversational Spanish podcast 3. A fun way for intermediate to advanced students of Spanish to improve their listening comprehension "

We welcome you to our wiki and blog for supporting iPod & iPad devices in education. Although our focus is K-12, many of the techniques should work for you at any level and with any number of devices. On the wiki side of this site are the deployment and management articles, and on the blog side, you will find the classroom activities (written primarily by teachers) where iPods are supporting achievement improvement for our students. We are posting as many help and how-to articles here as we can and as quickly as we can so you can continue to be successful using iPod devices in your classroom. Please let us know if there are more or different things that you would like to have included here.

purchasing a captioning solution such as DOC Soft (www.docsoft.com). This is a piece of hardware that enables you run all you video files through and the technology spits out caption files (the caption files are not always 100% accurate, so you need to do some quality assurance). It also allows for setting up profiles where you can train the technology to improve the accuracy rate, which is especially useful for videos recorded in-house by repeat faculty.

it is misleading to suggests that all, or even most, aspects of providing an education should, or could, be placed into the hands of [teachers] Historically, it has been impractical to break up the roles of the teacher. You need a certain scale even to have a separate person assigned as a librarian or an audio-visual coordinator. You need a much greater scale, not to mention much better coordination, to have separate people assigned as lecturers, coaches, theorizers and evaluators. Yet relatively few of these roles need to be performed in person, and most of them scale pretty well. This means that with improved information and communications technologies we can begin to rethink how we've organized labor in education. This is in fact what is happening online, at least, outside the circles of formal education

NCAT is an independent non-profit organization dedicated to the effective use of information technology to improve student learning outcomes and reduce the cost of higher education.

"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."