Group items tagged

"The Georgia Institute of Technology has stripped, at least for now, more than 10 years of class work from its collaborative-learning Web sites, known as Swikis. Following a student's complaint to the university that his name was listed on the Web site of a public course, Georgia Tech officials decided on Monday to remove all Swikis other than ones from the current semester, said Mark Guzdial, a professor in the School of Interactive Computing, who is a co-creator of the Swikis."

"Georgia Tech's interpretation of FERPA is that protected information includes the fact that a student is enrolled at all... Yesterday, in one stroke, every Swiki ever used for a course was removed... For example, you can't have cross-semester discussions or public galleries, because students in one semester of a course can't know the identities of other students who had taken the course previously."

"Hosted by: Dr. Abigail Grant Scheg (Elizabeth State University) Date: November 29, 2012 Text messaging, in and out of the classroom, is often viewed as a negative communicative mode which results in poor grammar and poor idea representation, let alone student procrastination from more important projects. However, as Web 2.0 technologies increase in number and popularity, these tools are changing the face of education, business, and communication at large. This session will discuss the pedagogical possibilities using text messaging and ways to incorporate texting into the classroom or as part of a class in a way that will make the instructor feel comfortable. Starting with the idea that our students are experts in the technology of text messaging, this session will allow the instructor to utilize students' skills in a positive light rather than dismiss them as unimportant. In this presentation, author Dr. Abigail Grant Scheg will discuss her IGI Global chapter, Textperts: Utilizing Students' Skills in the Teaching of Writing. Her research explores both the theoretical and practical implementations of text messaging into the composition of the classroom with careful consideration of the positive and negative impacts."

"PeerWise is an online repository of multiple-choice questions that are created, answered, rated and discussed by students. Typically, at the beginning of a term, a course using PeerWise begins with an empty repository. This grows gradually as the course progresses and students author and contribute relevant questions. All activity remains anonymous to students, however instructors are able to view the identity of question and comment authors and have the ability to delete inappropriate questions."

"Does listening to something, perhaps once, perhaps more than once, perhaps over and over again, mean that it is learned in a way that is useful to the student and that they can retrieve and re-use in an appropriate context at a later date? It is a proposition that seems to conflict with the situated learning theories of researchers like Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989), which assert that learning always lies in the interactions between people rather than in the content itself or in the minds of the individual learners. The general premise that listening is often more engaging than the written word and that diction, intonation and inflection add meaning might be acceptable at face value, but as Hargis and Wilson (2005: 6) point out, 'there are currently no examples which clearly indicate proven foundational pedagogical uses and outcomes for podcasts.'. Though the technology is quite recent, it may tend to lead teachers towards outmoded, didactic approaches to delivery rather than the constructivist, collaborative activities recommended by more recent learning theorists."

Use gClassFolders Template to create a paperless classroom by automatically create shared folders for students. This script was created to accompany the Google Class Model that I recommend for teachers to help organize the classroom: Google Classroom Model Each Classroom set up a Class Edit, Class View, and Dropbox folder.  Make sure to include both the name of the student and the class so that multiple classrooms are not using the same naming convention.