Leading the charge into the next generation of interactive book design is Robin Mitchell-Cranfield, of Vancouver Film School. I had the pleasure of attending Robin's presentation at Adobe MAX Education Summit as well as speaking with her a bit later at Adobe MAX where she shed some light on what she's working on, why she thinks books could forever change and why tablets have been the impetus for her to get so excited about the future of digital publishing.
Eportfolios are a popular practice the world over. However, although eportfolios have been in existence for over two decades, the effort to share resources about how to develop, implement, and assess an eportfolio program has been a more recent phenomenon. What follows is a partial list of such materials. If you would like to add an item to the list, please send an email to wendebmg [at] gmail [dot] com. Two references are required for new resources.
I've long said that professors who want to explore teaching with technology should begin with a social media tool rather than a Learning Management System. Web 2.0 tools are simple to use, invite student collaboration, and are usually less administratively clunky and complex than an LMS.One of the easiest and most powerful tools is the regular old wiki. Wikis are simply web pages that can be edited by their users. Instead of only carrying content from the administrator, they harness the power of crowdsourcing to create a powerful communal resource.
Gavin Dykes is an independent education and technology advisor who works with governments, agencies, major corporations and institutions across the world on policy and strategy.
This site gives college and university instructors and teaching assistants an introduction to the language teaching methods that are currently used in U.S. universities. The content is based on the material in Modules for the Professional Preparation of Teaching Assistants in Foreign Languages (Grace Stovall Burkart, ed.; Center for Applied Linguistics, 1998). The site was developed for the National Capital Language Resource Center (NCLRC) by Catharine Keatley and Deborah Kennedy under a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, CFDA #84.015A.
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.
Both students and instructors are learning while interacting. Communicating in the online classroom is very different than in a traditional face-to-face classroom.
Students today are using more tech in more places than even Popular Science imagined back in the atomic age. 98% of students own a gadget and 70% of them use a gadget in class-some for note-taking and study, some for poke wars on Facebook during lecture. And while the time spent online in a day might set off some warning bells, the good news is that a breakdown of that time shows much of it is spent learning.