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this site provides users with fun interactive examples of idioms and other ELA concepts.

Several interactive art games and activities.

SurveyMonkey is a free online service used for surveys and questionnaires. Need to get anonymous feedback? Create a survey using SurveyMonkey. It's quick, it's easy and best of all the basic package is free. This can also be an excellent resources to receive feedback about your interactive presentations.

This shows how communities of practice is defined, explains the process of how they've created and what they look like. Further explanation into how they can be applied in a wide variety of environments. The application part discusses how specifically it can exist within education both internally and externally. For EDTECH students, web communities of practice enable us to " extend the reach of our interactions beyond the geographical limitations of traditional communities."

I forgot to add my summary! This is an excellent source that fully explains what a Community of Practice is and how it can be applied. "Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly." I particularly liked the section about what CoPs actually look like. This is a must have resource for every EdTech student.

The author lists three "must-haves" to be considered a community of practice: the domain - shared interest, the community - learn from each other, the practice - share a repertoire of resources. Communities of practice fall back to learning theories. The term community of practice refers to a living curriculum. The concept is being applied in organizations, government, education, associations, social sector, international development, and the web.

Interactive infographics are the next level presentation tool. Here's a great example/infographic on inofgraphics. "Enjoy our HTML 5 interactive infographic that explains why infographics are so successful"

This website was a fantastic resource for me this week when learning how to create interactive slides. This is a great element to add to any PowerPoint presentation to get the students involved. Creating links on the slides to travel through the questions in the correct order takes some time to organize in your head but once it is created, it is awesome!

Great short clip that explains communities of practice for educators.

This brief but detailed summary of Wegner's 1998 idea of Community of Practice gives a basic understanding of the idea. The videos included can be useful for seeing how the idea can be helpful in education.

This resource explains what CoP is and when the theory was developed. The concept of CoP was developed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger. The author uses quotes directly from their book to explain CoP. There is a video that illustrates how CoP can be used in a K-12 classroom and another video that shows how CoP can be applied in other fields. The article also differentiates between Communities of Practice and Team members. The categories include objective, membership, organization, termination, value proposition, and management. My take away from the chart was that the major difference between CoP and being a team member is this: what will be the outcome of the participant?

This is a short but direct explanation of PLN and how they can be helpful for an individual's own professional needs.

This article takes a brief but clear view of a PLN. The short video makes it easy to see the importance of being involved and what a PLN can do for professional development. #EDTECH543 #EDTechSN #PLN

Suggests that understanding how members of a learning community converse is an important component of understanding connectivism. The tone of the interactions in a forum rely on the design and management of the space. Furthermore, learning depends on sharing in conversations and interactions which themselves can be meaningful activities. During communication among learners, there is a balance of what is good for each individual and the ability to move towards a common purpose.

In this article, Andrew Ravenscroft explores a "dialogue rich view of connectivism" and how we can develop learners that can "think, reason and analyse." He takes inspiration from social constructivist theory to focus on dialogue as a vehicle for learning. Ravenscroft begins by detailing Siemens 8 principles of connectivism. He then asks 3 questions: how can we understand the dialogue processes of a networked world, what dialogue features make for quality connections and how do we design to promote quality connections. He starts to explore the questions with Socrates and the Socratic method. This method has applications for 21st century learning. He reviews Hegel's dialectic as well. Ravenscroft maps these positions to connectivism because dialectic helps refine knowledge from a diversity of opinions, supports the capacity to know more, consideration of alternative viewpoints, fosters a constant evolution of knowledge, and promotes critical and collaborative dialogue. Then he discusses dialogic processes and how they map to connectivism. Dialectic and dialogic can work, not in opposition, but together in different aspects. Dialectic focuses on the epistemic and cognitive dimensions of learning, while dialogic focuses more on emotional and interpersonal aspects. The author then details dialogue game interactions and how they can foster learning. To be successful they need to balance orchestration and openness. This article proposes that language and dialogue remain a "most powerful semiotic system."

What a fascinating article. Ravenscroft's discussion of a scaffolded system to build a learner's dialogic skills reminds me of research I did for my EdTech504 class on self-regulated learning. Roger Azevedo is developing and experimenting with a similar game, MetaTutor, which scaffolds student learning as well. I think self-regulation is complex and difficult to teach in the classroom, and am amazed that researchers are creating software to build self-efficacy!

This case study examines which factors play into a successful MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). Some of these factors include peer interaction, professor engagement, and accessible course resources. The researchers concluded that these factors are as important in MOOCs as they are in traditional classroom settings. The article implies that classes based on the philosophy of connectivism are effective, but a number of factors must be taken into account when planning instruction.

It is difficult to maintain continuous student engagement in a traditional class setting. It is doubly so when the setting is online. This study researched what characteristics promote student engagement in online classes. Course takers identified 5 characteristics of MOOCs that encouraged their continued participation in the course. For the most part, courses that focus on problems and clear solutions, contain high levels of peer interaction and teacher participation, and include many active learning activities with accompanying course resources are well-liked by MOOC participants. The authors are certainly right to suggest that future research examine courses that are not as highly participatory as the MOOCs that are focused on in this study. I wondered as I read the article if the same level of engagement can be seen in other courses.

As this study emphasized, online courses have a unique challenge when compared to traditional brick-and-mortar courses because learners are physically separated from an instructor by a computer screen. Instructors do not just have to overcome motivation barriers, but also administrative obstacles. The article's "Table 2: Summary of Strategies Used" presented some well-designed methods to increase instructor accessibility---from the "Code Clinic" to weekly live interactive discussions.

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!

Global Closet Calculator"-a two-part interactive game that introduces the concepts of interdependence and globalization.

Hotseat was created by Purdue University to allow students to Twitter and text messages during and after class. The conclusion was that there was more interaction, more engaging, and resulted in higher-performing students.

After placing students into one of two social network groups, this study finds that Twitter was more effective. One group used Ning to interact with lecturers and the other used Twitter. The Twitter group scored on average one grade higher than Ning users.

This blog has an entry titled: "Building School-Based Social Networks for Inquiry, in which he discusses building a social network for students named "Youth Voices." This site is for students to write and respond to each other and teach the value of peer interaction. The process of responding to each other has motivated student begin new posts.

Professional development for real estate agents housed within the LinkedIn social network allowing agents to interact with other professionals from around the country and around the world in the exchange of new tools and information.

541, power point, interactive technology

541, interactive presentations, power point