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"DTF Teaching Tip - Mike Heller, "Designing Multimedia Assignments"" : An educator outlines 5 tips for creating multimedia assignments.

Connects students with one another to allow them to collaborate on assignments and projects.

This project has students creating a blog account for a character in a Shakespeare play and updating it throughout the unit. Students each get assigned a character and have to create a blogging platform for their character. They use this site for all of their assignments during their unit. They need to have a blog post for every scene their character is in and comment on other scenes that their character isn't in. They also need to memorize one passage and record themselves saying it on their blog. I like this as an organizational tool for the assignments over a unit. It gives students a good way to interact with each other and practice their writing while they deepen their understanding of Shakespeare. This project is great because it can be applied to any reading that is being done in a class over a long period of time. A Shakespeare play is read every year in high school in my district and this is something I would want to use in my English class to support that.

Doing my assignment this week in EDTECH 541 on interactive presentations led me to this article. Wow! How right he is and the fact that it was written 9 years ago and things haven't really changed since then is amazing!

At the University of Southern Florida, students use Facebook, instead of Blackboard, for assignments and discussions.

Teacher uses Facebook to push assignments to students.

After reading a book or covering a topic in class, create a Facebook page for a character or a fan page for a cause that you read about. You can personalize the Facebook page, like other "peoples" pages and participate in "online discussions" that these people could have had if Facebook had been around at that time.

This blog post outlines an assignment in which students must create a Facebook page for a literary character.  This is a great idea.

A K-12 district, the Tri-Creek School Corp., has implemented a one-to-one laptop initiative for middle and high school students, allowing them to use social media for their school work. They are using Edmodo and Google Apps to submit assignments, leave notes for teachers, ask questions, and comment on each other's work.

This article shows how to engage students and improve learning and comprehension of subject material, without the traditional lecture.  I will need a little latitude with this article and the assignment of social media in the classroom. This article does not focus on the use of social media but explains how systems can be used to prime students prior to coming to class and at the same time inform the instructor what areas students are having difficulties with at the time.  This is great because instructors and students do not have to go over information that has already been learned. Social media can be the vehicles used for this type of communication. 

This article summarizes the results from two research studies of how communities of practice can improve the classroom experience and instruction. Interactions among students and social opportunities were the emphasis of the studies. Some key questions in the studies were: How does relationship building affect student learning in communities of practice? How do different types of assignments and class activities affect learning?

This is a more atypical resource for our assignment but I felt that it was very appropriate for many of my K-12 peers. This text discusses the history of PLN and how educators must use PLN as a part of their learning tool kit today. Both authors are educators as well as business men who ofter a mix of experience in their attempt to convince you that PLNs are one of the major ways to captivate and engage students in the learning process.

Edutopia writer Vicki Davis discusses how PLNs have empowered her students to guide their own learning experiences. She discusses the weaknesses of PLNs and how they work.

While this blog posting from Edutopia does point to some "how tos" and practical application, it does offer key theoretical practices for setting the stage for applying the PLN model for student use. Vicki Davis, the teacher and author of the blog post, states that her students are familiar with breaking news due the development of their own PLN that acts as a "virtual locker." She goes on to discuss how their research builds the content of their PLN and the content changes based upon the assignment. The big idea is that the PLN model allows students to act as the orchestrator of their own learning and allows them to analyze information via an avenue that is personalized to student's learning needs. It also teaches students to embrace connectivism where they make connections between domains in order to form a more complete understanding.

The article goes into the role of a PLN for students. Students can create their own networks to possess information at their fingertips on any topic they could ever desire. By establishing a networking system, the students don't necessarily have to go out and scour the internet for sources when their network could bring relevant information to them.

This started as a project among edubloggers and has now expanded beyond the original 50 who started it. It is an excellent example of what could be done as a classroom assignment- having students photograph something relevant to your content matter and upload it to a Flickr site. Being a Flckr site, discussion is available.

8th grade students in New York were given the assignment to tweet about the book and movie animal farm as they studied those. The students felt that it took a potentially "boring" project and made it more fun. They got deeper insight into the material than if they had just done it by themselves. This assignment could be done for any number of topics or mediums.

This research paper looks into success factors for communities of practice. Although the "success factors" portion of the article may fit better with future "how-to" assignments, I found the breakdown of CoPs helpful. Retna covers the basic idea that adults learn from day to day experiences, not just activities specifically designed for learning. Knowledge transfer is explained with emphasis on what it looks like in organizations. The paper goes on the account for CoPs in a multi-national company based out of Singapore. The findings are explained in the three components domain, community, and practice. The key success factors are identified as leadership, culture, and individual motivation to learn. 

First thing that caught my attention was, "An employee picks up the most relevant know-how in an organisation from day-to-day activities and by watching and talking with other employees." This absolutely defines what a community of practice is. Professional development is a great way to learn, but many of us learn best by seeing a theory, action, or idea in practice. Communities of practice connect people who have similar interests, providing them with a wide range of resources to draw upon. Motivation is also a major part to making a CoP a success. Once a member, one must stay active. Having a responsible leader helps to maintain motivation and organization of the community. I especially appreciated the emphasis on informal CoP. Members are there because they want to better themselves and periodically the leader may provide a reward however I believe knowledge is reward enough. Great paper!

I like how this article talks about knowledge is best understood as a "habitus". This habitus is everything that a person does that helps them acquire knowledge. This includes their activities and life experiences.

This article focuses on the role of personal learning environments in higher education. I particularly appreciated the description of the PLE in the article. Pointing out what it offers that Learning Management Systems do not, the PLE is explained as the future of education where the student takes control and responsibility from the reigns of the institution. It also suggests that PLEs have staying power in education due to the fact that they are not wrapped up with a specific technology, rather they have the ability to adapt and change as technology around us continues to do so. The author discusses how students should be given challenging situations rather than ridged assignments. The article finishes with an example where this idea was implemented in an online learning environment. Väljataga, T. (2010). Learner control and personal learning environment: a challenge for instructional design. Interactive Learning Environments, 18(3), 277-291.

Great online tool for students to check spelling and use a thesaurus feature. Reads words out loud if needed, and will find words that are spelling "close enough".