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The article intends to simplify the different aspects of podcasting. The article covers types of podcasts; the pedagogical benefits of podcasting; the connection between theory and podcasting; answers to questions, queries, and apprehensions. Before trying out a new tool, it is important to understand why we do things the way we do. A crucial part of using any tool or technology is to understand, test, and determine the pedagogical appropriateness of it for specific context. Through the article, the author has tried to suggest some of the uses of podcasting along with the pedagogical appropriateness in different scenarios. At the end, the author has tried to (through pictorial representation) describe the podcasting community and the tasks performed by the community members. Also, through a pictorial representation, the author has provided a gist of the podcasting creation process as a producer and as a consumer.

"ScienceDaily (Dec. 17, 2009) - Are you a verbal learner or a visual learner? Chances are, you've pegged yourself or your children as either one or the other and rely on study techniques that suit your individual learning needs. And you're not alone -- for more than 30 years, the notion that teaching methods should match a student's particular learning style has exerted a powerful influence on education. The long-standing popularity of the learning styles movement has in turn created a thriving commercial market amongst researchers, educators, and the general public."

A site built for librarians, but has several tools that can be useful for instructors, such as a Public Domain Slider, a Section 108 Spinner, Exceptions for Instructors, and a Fair Use Evaluator.

The Encyclopedia of Educational Technology (EET) is a collection of short multimedia articles on a variety of topics related to the fields of instructional design and education and training. The primary audiences for the EET are students and novice to intermediate practitioners in these fields, who need a brief overview as a starting point to further research on specific topics. Authors are graduate students, professors, and others who contribute voluntarily. Articles are short and use multimedia to enrich learning rather than merely decorate the pages.

"How Technology Wires the Learning Brain February 23, 2011 | 9:45 AM | By Tina Barseghian FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Research, Neuroscience, text, video games * 9 Comments * * Share447 * Email Post * Link to this post Getty Kids between the ages of 8 and 18 spend 11.5 hours a day using technology - whether that's computers, television, mobile phones, or video games - and usually more than one at a time. That's a big chunk of their 15 or 16 waking hours. But does that spell doom for the next generation? Not necessarily, according to Dr. Gary Small, a neuroscientist and professor at UCLA, who spoke at the Learning & the Brain Conference last week."

Collaborative tagging describes the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content. Recently, collaborative tagging has grown in popularity on the web, on sites that allow users to tag bookmarks, photographs and other content. In this paper we analyze the structure of collaborative tagging systems as well as their dynamical aspects. Specifically, we discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, bursts of popularity in bookmarking and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given url. We also present a dynamical model of collaborative tagging that predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge.

"Summary: This course provides practical strategies and pedagogical advice for instructors teaching in an online environment. The course includes advice about: preparing to teach in an online environment, managing the teaching of a course, and addressing larger issues surrounding online teaching (e.g. workload, intellectual property, etc.) The course includes interviews from a number of teachers who have taught in an online environment. This course is based on a training session offered to faculty who teach at The World Campus at Penn State University."

"Facebook isn't just a great way for you to find old friends or learn about what's happening this weekend, it is also an incredible learning tool. Teachers can utilize Facebook for class projects, for enhancing communication, and for engaging students in a manner that might not be entirely possible in traditional classroom settings. Read on to learn how you can be using Facebook in your classroom, no matter if you are a professor, student, working online, or showing up in person for class."

Change Magazine - March/April 2010 "We always tell our students that there are no shortcuts, that important ideas are nuanced, and that recognizing subtle distinctions is an essential critical-thinking skill. Mastery of a discipline, we know, requires careful study and necessarily slow, evolutionary changes in perspective. Then we look around for the latest promising trend in teaching and jump in with both feet, expecting it to transform our students, our courses, and our outcomes. Alternatively, we sniff disdainfully at the current educational fad and proudly stand by the instructional traditions of our disciplines or institutions, secure in our knowledge that the "tried and true" has a wisdom of its own."

"Blackboard announced on Wednesday it is buying out two software companies in an effort to bolster its real-time collaboration features and satisfy a generation of professors and students increasingly shaped by social media. The company, infamous to some in higher education for its habit of swallowing up smaller fish, said it is buying Wimba and Elluminate, top providers of software that lets students work together online, for a total of $116 million."

Responding to student writing in an effective and timely manner is important to student success. And we want students to succeed, to be good writers. However, students don't often expect to receive detailed and intricate feedback on their work; they expect to see the dreaded "red pen" marks. They assume that we don't really read their writing, that we give each page a cursory glance, and that we are only looking for spelling and grammatical errors. This implies-and the students believe-that "writing" is only "writing correctly." But writing is much more than that, and as professionals we understand this. We know that revision has a key role in the process of writing, but good revision requires good feedback.

Technology alone does not guarantee successful online learning or collaboration among faculty and students. However, when you leverage it properly, technology can offer huge possibilities for improving communication and learning. This document identifies a collection of best practices for using Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro. You'll see some innovative ways to use Connect Pro in education and explore a process for successful online teaching and collaboration.

Using YouTube videos with students can be really great, but finding a video with the exact language you want and at a suitable length with too many other distractions around can be really difficult. That's why SafeShare.TV is so useful.

"Our Setup Wizard renders the code you need to implement a specific JW Player 5 setup. It's also a useful tool to experiment to see what's possible with the player."

A seven-step plan to set up (and benefit from) a simple social measurement program. With the emergence of social networking, it's important to have some type of assessment plan in place to reinforce the benefit of using this platform in higher ed

"What kind of learning environment would be best for you: a traditional setting or a distance learning program? Choose the answer that best describes you. When you complete this page, click Submit at the bottom of the page."

In team-based learning, students work in groups on outcome-based or problem-based assignments. Assessing the work produced by teams, however, presents a significant challenge, and this difficulty is especially prominent in online environments. Developing and implementing a transparent assessment process that both supports and recognizes individual and group learning can generate a powerful combination of interdependency and peer cooperation. Online assessment tools that evaluate both individual and group effort support this dynamic, fostering the reliance on community that is becoming an increasingly important feature of the online academic landscape.

Suggestions for how to assessment collaborative learning in an online course/setting.

"A growing appreciation for the porous boundaries between the classroom and life experience, along with the power of social learning, authentic audiences, and integrative contexts, has created not only promising changes in learning but also disruptive moments in teaching. "

"A growing chorus of voices argue that the internet is making us dumber. Web-connected laptops, smartphones and videogame consoles have all been cast as distracting brain mushers. But there's reason to believe some of the newest devices might not erode our minds. In fact, some scientists think they could even make us smarter."