Group items tagged

The most popular complaints about online learning are lack of engagement, slow response time from the instructor, and a loss of the sense of community.

Anxiety is the enemy of learning. Students need to know their teacher, environment, and peers. In a virtual environment, you can only rely on your user interface to do this for you.

A Participants List

“Mobile learning is here to stay. There doesn’t appear to be an end in sight as smartphones and tablet devices become more and more pervasive. Through continual evaluation and analysis, mobile learning strategies will become an effective component of any learning strategy.”

Drilling down a bit more, Google has revealed that more than half of those schools involved with cloud computing are either using or considering Google Apps. Currently, 62 of the US News and World Report’s top 100 Universities are using Google Apps for Education.

The SECTIONS decision-making model

Students

Ease of use; portability

social commonplace book

The Findings experience is centered around shared passages and user libraries.

Synchronous tools can help humanize the classroom

Setting up open office hours via a synchronous tool allows students to reach out in a specific time window with questions and get a real-time answer.

Many synchronous tools allow us to use video or face-to-face chat, allowing the student to see our faces as we speak to them about their direct concern.

The traditional definition of a flipped class is:Where videos take the place of direct instructionThis then allows students to get individual time in class to work with their teacher on key learning activities.It is called the flipped class because what used to be classwork (the "lecture" is done at home via teacher-created videos and what used to be homework (assigned problems) is now done in class.

The Flipped Classroom is NOT:

The Flipped Classroom IS:

Through regular classroom observation and targeted professional development activities, it is our hope that over time teachers will be able to effectively monitor their progress through a continuum of technology integration levels

Those factors include integrating technology into intervention classes; setting aside time for professional learning and collaboration for teachers; allowing students to use technology to collaborate; integrating technology into core curricula at least weekly; administering online formative assessments at least weekly; lowering the student-to-computer ratio as much as possible; using virtual field trips at least monthly; encouraging students to use search engines daily; and providing training for principals on how to encourage best practices for technology implementation. Only about 1 percent of the 1,000 schools surveyed by Project RED followed all those steps, and those that did “saw dramatic increases in student achievement and had revenue-positive experiences,” Ms. Wilson said.