academic technology

Many teachers go to school each day, teach their students and leave. If they're struggling with how to teach a lesson that will engage their students, they might ask for advice from the teacher down the hall, but a lot of times, they struggle alone.  That's not the case for educators who have built a network of people who share resources, advice and techniques, whether they call it a personal learning network or something else. Here's why educators should start a personal learning network, or PLN.

Just a lighthearted reminder that, even if the lure of the connected digital world gets people to skimp on the Gilligan's Island reruns, that doesn't necessarily mean their replacement behaviors will be any more productive. They could instead bring an ever greater capacity for distraction and disengagement and slingshot precision.

Designing a Blended course: Here is a three-step process: Establish clear learning goals for the topic. Design activities to help students meet the learning goals. Sort the activities into two categories: online and face-to-face. Very short article that might be useful in CELT's blended classes.

When designing a blended learning course, the instructor should remember to use the online portion as an opportunity to create more exciting face-to-face interactions.

For the teacher who wants to create a website, here are ten good platforms to try.

cheap but not free. Education dept uses it.

FERPA is one of the most misunderstood regulations in education. It is commonly assumed that FERPA requires all student coursework to be kept private at all times, and thus prevents the use of social media in the classroom, but this is wrong.

billion dollar graphic

n his Edge feature "Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus", Clay Shirky noted that after WWII we were faced with something new: "free time. Lots and lots of free time. The amount of unstructured time among the educated population ballooned, accounting for billions of hours a year. And what did we do with that time? Mostly, we watched TV." In "The End of Universal Rationality", Yochai Benkler explored the social implications of the Internet and network societies since the early 90s. Benkler has been looking at the social implications of the Internet and network societies since the early 90s. He saw the end of an era: For those of us like me who have been working on the Internet for years, it was very clear you couldn't encounter free software and you couldn't encounter Wikipedia and you couldn't encounter all of the wealth of cultural materials that people create and exchange, and the valuable actual software that people create, without an understanding that something much more complex is happening than the dominant ideology of the last 40 years or so. But you could if you weren't looking there, because we were used in the industrial system to think in these terms.

n a lot of ways, millions of users have found Twitter as a useful tool. Take journalists, for example. According to a recent survey, 37 percent of journalists said they are on Twitter. It's no longer a small tech company that is troubled by servers being down (keeping fingers crossed). Now your non-techie friends are using it. It's referenced in commercials. It's mainstream.

Free online blackboard Create up to 5 course websites, free.Engage students in social learning.Weave multimedia into class content.Assess performance and manage grades.

Want to enhance the viewer experiences and discussions around the YouTube videos you embed for free? With our first release*, you can now upgrade your embeds with real-time reactions, DVD-like controls, and more without having to alter original content.

weak ties beat close ties for many purposes.

tweet answers to class hashtag

lists of free software for certain types of activities, reviewed.

sample online course from SUNY Herkimer

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