Digital Learning

Here are seven tools that you can use to create annotated screen capture images and screencast videos.

Great Post! This article will be of great help for teachers. Amongst all the seven, i feel Jing tool is helpful for my students as they are completely comfortable using this screen capture tool. They use it with their own knowledge and they don't require much help while using it.

Last month, we began inviting students across the countries to fire up their Web cameras or camera-phones to send us video commentaries about whether lectures work for them. Below are highlights from the first batch of submissions, which are full of frustration with "PowerPoint abuse" - professors' poor use of slide software that dumps too much information on students in a less-than-compelling fashion.

In the 21st century, we flip Bloom's taxonomy. Rather than starting with knowledge, we start with creating, and eventually discern the knowledge that we need from it.

The C.R.E.A.T.E. (Consider, Read, Elucidate the hypotheses, Analyze and interpret the data, and Think of the next Experiment) method is a new teaching approach that uses intensive analysis of primary literature to demystify and humanize research science for undergraduates. Our goal is to use the real language of science-the journal article-as an inroad to understanding "who does science, how, and why?"

All of us - teachers, parents, and students - retain outdated ideas about learning that are based largely on our previous experiences in school. Modern brain science has helped steer us in the right direction. Here are a few of the biggest myths:

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

The first, Booktype, is free and open-source. Once the platform is installed on a Web server, teams of authors can work together in their browsers to write sections of books and chat with each other in real time about revisions. Entire chapters can be imported and moved around by dragging and dropping. The finished product can be published in minutes on e-readers and tablets, or exported for on-demand printing. Booktype also comes with community features that let authors create profiles, join groups, and track books through editing.

It is a social bookmarking program that allows you to save your 'favorites' online, so that they can be accessible from any computer with an internet connection. However, Diigo does much more than this.

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.

Johnston's title is an easy-to-update, "good-enough" product that didn't require millions of dollars and years of effort to create and manage. A cadre of Duke computer science graduates, in fact, built the platform in one semester on a $5,000 budget.

Alarmed by the tendency of engineering programs to hemorrhage undergraduates, at a time when the White House has called for an additional million degrees in science, technology, engineering and math fields-known as STEM-education researchers here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science proposed ways to improve the numbers. At a symposium on engineering education, one group outlined a broad revamping of curriculum, while another proposed more modest changes to pedagogy.

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.

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. 

Review of Literature on Remote and Web-based Science Labs

Who ultimately ends up on top has huge implications for educational technology leaders, who must determine which company is the best fit for their needs, and at a cost their districts can afford in still-difficult budget times. Complicating those decisions are changes in the technological landscape that are raising questions about the long-term educational relevance of interactive whiteboards. Do classrooms really need them in the age of iPads?

Instructional consultations have consistently been shown to have a positive impact on teaching, and though one factor that influences their impact is the kind of data that guide them, little research has rigorously analyzed this aspect of the consultation. In this study, instructional consultants used either data from a midterm student feedback (MSF) session, videotaped class sessions or student ratings data as the basis of a consultation. The impact of consultation on the instructor's teaching was then assessed. Our research shows that the kind of data used in consultations has a significant influence on the impact of the consultation. In general, faculty who received MSF-based consultations had greater gains in student ratings, reported more detailed changes in teaching, and rated most aspects of the consultation at least as high as faculty who had not received such consultations. During an MSF, the instructional consultant observes part of a regular class. Afterwards, the instructor leaves the room, and the consultant confers with students about what is going well and what changes would improve their learning. The consultant prepares a summary report for a follow-up debrief with the instructor. Findings from this study also demonstrate that the instructional consultant plays a key role in assisting the faculty member to both interpret the available data and to identify strategies for teaching improvement. Drawing on their experience and professional judgment, instructional consultants had the ability to quickly direct faculty attention to specific teaching practices and avoid overwhelming the instructor with too much information.

The Engineering Design Process: 1.            Identify a need 2.            Establish requirements 3.            Conduct research 4.            Brainstorm possible approaches 5.            Pick best approach 6.            Develop, design and build prototypes 7.            Test to see if the design works 8.            Begin production         

here is a handy guide to some of the most common arguments made against the use of technology in education, and how to counter them

So what's wrong? In short, the common thread I see throughout all the failures is quite simply a lack of empathy. There is no authentic encounter with students, or what Martin Buber called "a genuine meeting." When we use all the right methods, and we still fail, it is most likely because we are encountering our students as objects and not as the rich and complex individuals that they are.

In practice, we found Explain Everything to be more useful to our teaching than Educreations. While the simple screencasts of Educreations are fun to create, truly effective delivery of content such as screencasts depend on flexibility, and that means owning the video output directly. Since Educreations hosts videos only on its own site and only provides various linking and embedding options, neither students nor teachers can download them. Explain Everything offers full ownership and possession of the videos hosted at YouTube, or in MP4 format when downloaded from DropBox