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Digital Learning Day is a nationwide celebration of innovative teaching and learning through digital media and technology that engages students and provides them with a rich, personalized educational experience. On Digital Learning Day, a majority of states, hundreds of school districts, thousands of teachers, and more than a million students will encourage the innovative use of technology by trying something new, showcasing success, kicking off project-based learning, or focusing on how digital tools can help improve student outcomes.

In order to help educators integrate iPads effectively, we have compiled a list of apps focused on learning goals consistent with the CRCD framework. While many of these apps have also appeared in our iPads in the Classroom section, this list is driven by specific learning goals that promote critical-thinking, creativity, collaboration, and the creation of student-centric learning environments. 

The PER User's Guide is a web resource for physics educators to learn how to teach more effectively by applying the results of physics education research (PER) and teaching methods based on these results. Research in the field of PER has made enormous advances in understanding how students learn physics most effectively and in developing teaching methods that apply this understanding to achieve improved student learning. The goal of this site is to provide a synthesis of decades of physics education research in a format that is easy for busy physics instructors to understand and apply.

"Aside from a few institutions' references to improvements in retention or pass rates, most interviewees did not explicitly mention a desire for better learning outcomes as a main factor behind their decisions to increase their online offerings," write Bacow and Bowen. To the contrary, "the belief that students in online courses may learn the material better than their traditional-format counterparts did not appear to be widely held."

The ECP submission form and the extensive ECP rubric provide an outstanding frame of reference for reflecting on and reviewing online course elements.  Through the years I've served as a director in the program, I have spoken with many individual faculty members as well as many members of design and development teams. Many have used the ECP rubric in a number of creative ways - helping to raise awareness on what is needed for quality online learning strategies and guiding course evaluations.  In fact, the ECP rubric identifies seventeen important elements needed for effective online learning and provides details on the criteria that would deem each category exemplary.  The ECP submission form requires careful thought and reflection about course design, interaction and collaboration, assessment, and learner support as well as a narrative describing the best practices demonstrated in the course for each category. 

"There was a uniform assertion at all types of institutions that faculty feel much better about teaching repurposed courses or reusing course materials created elsewhere if they are able to do some customization." Providing a way for instructors to "brand courses as their own" is the most glaring barrier to machine-learning adoption at traditional universities, according to the report. Inconveniently, it might also be the most difficult to solve. "To date, no sustainable platform exists that allows interested faculty either to create a fully interactive, machine-guided learning environment or to customize a course that has been created by someone else (and thus claim it as their own)," Bacow and Bowen write. "This is perhaps the largest obstacle to widespread adoption of ILO-style courses."    

 Motivational scaffolding consisted of using chat to run study skills support groups, where stu- dents were helped to stay on task, and instructor office hours. Students were classified as either high or low procrastinators, and randomly assigned to each version, and two instructors alternated between versions taught from one term to the other. Results showed that procrastinating students, for whom the lack of structure of distance learning may be problematic, performed better in the motivationally-scaffolded version than the traditional, while non-procrastinating students performed equally in both.

Academic staff generally perceive students to be more digitally capable than is really the case. A JISC study of 3,500 learners found that while the so-called Google generation have high expectations of digital technology, for example that it will be robust, flexible, responsive to their personal needs, and available anywhere, many learners do not have a clear understanding of how courses could or should use technology to support their learning.

Part 1 of edited highlights of a talk given by John Hattie who has led a team at Auckland University, New Zealand which compares the effect on learning of over 100 classroom interventions. This section looks at methods with negative, or very low effect sizes. Hattie points out that most educational debate is about things which do not really work well. See also Part 2 of the lecture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pD1DFTNQf4&feature=related

We describe a collection of interactive animations and visualizations for teaching quantum mechanics. The animations can be used at all levels of the undergraduate curriculum. Each animation includes a step-by-step exploration that explains the key points. The animations and instructor resources are freely available. By using a diagnostic survey, we report substantial learning gains for students who have worked with the animations.

Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) today announced the launch of edX, a transformational partnership in online education. Through edX, the two institutions will collaborate to enhance campus-based teaching and learning and build a global community of online learners.

most of those systems do not yet allow instructors to deeply tailor the material to meet their course needs. And highly-interactive systems are often too complex for pioneering professors to adopt and sustain on their own.

Students in academic difficulty who took the "Learning and Motivation Strategies" course in their first quarter at Ohio State were about 45 percent more likely to graduate within six years than similar students who didn't take the class. Average-ability students who took the course were also six times more likely to stay in college for a second year and had higher grade point averages than those who didn't take the class. "We are taking the students who are least likely to succeed in college and teaching them the skills they need to stay in school and graduate," said Bruce Tuckman, a professor of education at Ohio State, and creator of the course.

Lifelong learners need to be skilled in finding, filtering, collating, evaluating, collaborating, editing, analyzing and utilizing information from a multitude of sources. Instead we could prioritize "content construction". Textbooks are an important gateway - a starting point from which students can learn and then begin their exploration of information on any topic (although even on that point I feel we should encourage the "critical reading" of textbooks). However the days when students could responsibly rely on any textbook as a singular information source are gone. Also, the process of accessing, synthesizing and utilizing information is often as important as the product. The skills developed are an essential component of education and life today. We have access to an exponentially growing amount of information to process and apply. There are many excellent tools we can all use to help in constructing and organizing that content. Here's a short selection of some of the more popular ones. They can be used by individuals and also by students or teachers collaborating in groups.

They "don't want to ask librarians or tutors in the study center or stuff like that," she says. "It's more the informal networks that they're using."

Science, math and engineering departments at many universities are abandoning or retooling the lecture as a style of teaching, worried that it's driving students away.

As part of our effort to understand which LMS features our faculty depend upon from Blackboard 8, we polled them (84 responded) and we created this breakdown of how they are using our current LMS

Welcome to the world of Diigo, one of the leading Top 10 research tools. Diigo is a cloud based information management system that helps you organize relevant facts you find online. With Diigo you can keep track of those favorite websites and revisit them from any computer at any time. Diigo is a great way to improve your online productivity and is widely used by educators. Educators, worldwide, have enjoyed the use of this social bookmarking site. Diigo is a great web-based tool for teachers to utilize,

a collaborative catalogue for online tools for participation

Social is one of the hottest trends in enterprise software, and many companies are considering rolling out products and services that make it easier for employees to share information with each other and communicate with customers and suppliers.