Group items tagged

"Since 2004, the annual ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology has sought to shed light on how information technology affects the college experience. We ask students about the technology they own and how they use it in and out of their academic world. We gather information about how skilled students believe they are with technologies; how they perceive technology is affecting their learning experience; and their preferences for IT in courses. The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2009 is a longitudinal extension of the 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 studies. It is based on quantitative data from a spring 2009 survey of 30,616 freshmen and seniors at 103 four-year institutions and students at 12 two-year institutions; student focus groups that included input from 62 students at 4 institutions; and review of qualitative data from written responses to open-ended questions. In addition to studying student ownership, experience, behaviors, preferences, and skills with respect to information technologies, the 2009 study also includes a special focus on student ownership and use of Internet-capable handheld devices."

What does it do? Develops the four skills of language learning Can be used with any language Utilises existing resources; audio, text books, worksheets and graphics Enables live monitoring of an individual student or a group of students Provides private communication between the teacher and student or a group of students Motivates learners of every ability using familiar technology Easy Assessment - All student work is saved as mp3 files or web pages The addition of a headset with a microphone turns any pc network into a language lab How does it do it? Using two small software programmes, a student module and a teacher module, that will run on virtually any pc and network. Items containing text, graphics and audio recordings are viewed by students who can record themselves and can also enter text or make selections. The teacher can communicate to students individually, or by group, and can monitor progress live.

The Student Assessment of their Learning Gains (SALG) website allows instructors to gather learning-focused feedback from students. The SALG survey asks students to rate how each component of a course (e.g., textbook, collaborative work, labs) helped them to learn, and to rate their gains toward achieving the course goals. The SALG survey can be customized to fit any college-level course, and can be administered multiple times per course. A baseline instrument allows faculty to compare gains relative to incoming student characteristics. Once registered on the SALG site, you can: * customize the SALG survey to fit your course goals and methods; * search for an existing SALG survey in your discipline; * have students complete the survey on-line; and, * download and review analyses of the students' responses.

In this paper, we describe how Tablet PCs are being used at Georgia Tech Savannah (GTS) to improve student learning in a distributed classroom environment. The Tablet PC is an attractive technology for use in synchronous distributed learning environments because of its mobility, and its ability to not only serve as an effective note taking device but also as a high-resolution course content viewing device and a tool for interactive assessments. The research questions addressed here are: 1) "What impact does the Tablet PC have on student perceptions of their engagement in a distributed learning environment?" and 2) "Can the Tablet PC be used to improve student learning in a distributed learning environment?" In this project, the instructor and students were given a Tablet PC to use during the semester, and surveys were administered to evaluate student attitudes about the use of Tablet PC technology as a means of receiving, processing, and learning course material. The significance of this work is that it serves as a case study on the use of Tablet PCs as an effective technology for implementing established educational practices in distributed education environments.

"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."

Learnosity's Voice-based products use the telephone to enable language students and teachers to interact on a one to one level. * Makes it practical for students to practice Oral and Aural skills, * Is efficient and effective for teachers, as they can listen to each student individually at a time to suit them, * Can be used for homework assignments or "High Stakes Assessments" Learnosity's OnScreen learning and assessment tools allow secure online testing across all subject areas. * Technology is mature and proven - over 5 million tests delivered, * Designed to work for "Special Provisions" students, * Extensible design allows new question formats to be added

TAGARELA is an intelligent computer-assisted language learning (ICALL) system designed to be fully integrated into the Portuguese Individualized Instruction Program at The Ohio State University. It can be viewed as an intelligent automatic workbook that provides students with opportunities to practice their reading, listening, and writing skills. Because it is a web-based system, it can be used anywhere there is a computer with internet access. TAGARELA uses state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to analyze students' input, and detect spelling, morphological, syntactic and semantic errors. Its NLP components allow the system to handle activities that go beyond the usual multiple choice or fill-in-the-blanks used by regular CALL systems. Its exercise types are similar to the ones typically found in current workbooks, such as: * listening and reading comprehension * picture description * vocabulary practice * phrasing and re-writing TAGARELA has a student model that keeps track of each student's individual performance, and an instructor model that carries information about activity and error types. Together the student and instructor models allow the system to choose the best feedback strategy to use with each individual learner based on the level of the activity, type of task, characteristics of error, and learner profile.

"Lingt Classroom helps teachers enable their students to speak. Create online assignments that make engaging and assessing spoken performance as natural as giving out a worksheet. Make oral exams that take a fraction of the time to administer and assess. Offer targeted feedback to individual responses to maximize student improvement. Incorporate video and images to create media and culture-rich exercises. Archive all your assignments and students' responses to reuse next time and track individual improvement."

Eta Sigma Phi is the national honorary collegiate society for students of Latin and/or Greek. Members are elected by local chapters which have been chartered by the society. The purposes of the Society, in the words of the Constitution, are "to develop and promote interest in classical study among the students of colleges and universities; to promote closer fraternal relationship among students who are interested in classical study, including inter-campus relationship; to engage generally in an effort to stimulate interest in classical study, and in the history, art, and literature of ancient Greece and Rome."

Official webpage of the AIM Commission: "The Advisory Commission on Accessible Instructional Materials in Postsecondary Education for Students with Disabilities, established by the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, will study the current state of accessible materials for students with disabilities in postsecondary education and make recommendations to the U.S. Congress for improving access to and the distribution of instructional materials in accessible formats. This is the first commission in history charged with examining accessible instructional materials for postsecondary students with disabilities."

Free online tool for managing Q&A in classes. Students can submit questions; answers are given in wiki format (students can all edit 1 student-contributed answer, instructors can edit instructor-contributed answer). 

"With ThingLink's easy-to-use editor, teachers can create immersive and engaging experiences by adding tags to any image in a few minutes: Create authentic, valuable, and rich interactive stories around historical events using media (video, sound, photos, written words, etc.) found online. Annotate graphs and timelines. Record an instructional message to students inside an image. Embed interactive images into student blogs. Enable students to curate content inside an image to demonstrate understanding of a topic."

"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."

"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."

"This platform is aimed at supporting university educators and mobility coordinators to organise and run online intercultural exchanges for their students. In these exchanges, students from universities in different countries collaborate together using online communication tools to carry out collaborative projects and to learn about each other's language and culture. By taking part in such projects, students can develop foreign language skills, intercultural awareness, electronic literacies as well as learning more about their particular subject area. If you are a teacher working at a university in Europe or elsewhere, this platform will help you to find partner teachers and classes in other countries, to read about tasks, successful projects and evaluation tools and to exchange questions and experiences with an experienced community of practitioners."

Stanford Humanities Fellow Edith Sheffer had an idea of how she could personalize history for her students. This led to an innovative use of the wiki. The following are highlights from a conversation in January 2009 about her course "Germany and the World Wars, 1870-1990.″. The idea was to have a writing assignment that would function like weekly response papers but be slightly more interesting to the students. Each student would create his or her own character that was born in 1900 and be in complete control of their persona. Beyond the initial introductory sentence that gave their parent's occupation, and birthplace and gender, they could make life choices.

What Is Faculty Inquiry? Faculty inquiry is a form of professional development by which teachers identify and investigate questions about their students' learning. The inquiry process is ongoing, informed by evidence of student learning, and undertaken in a collaborative setting. Findings from the process come back in the form of new curricula, new assessments, and new pedagogies, which in turn become subjects for further inquiry. When faculty pursue such inquiry in the company of colleagues and students, they create a "teaching commons" on their campus-a set of interconnected forums where conversations about learning take place, where innovations in curriculum and pedagogy get tried out, and where questions and answers about education are exchanged, critiqued and built upon.

Pics4Learning is a copyright-friendly image library for teachers and students. The Pics4Learning collection consists of thousands of images that have been donated by students, teachers, and amateur photographers. Unlike many Internet sites, permission has been granted for teachers and students to use all of the images donated to the Pics4Learning collection.

"This customizable easy to use toolbar (See the toolbar in action in its video tour) seamlessly integrates with familiar applications including Microsoft Word, Internet Explorer, and Adobe Reader, allowing students to access the support tools they need from within mainstream software programs. It highlights and reads text aloud using natural sounding voices and also includes a comprehensive set of support tools for reading, writing, studying, research, and test taking. Read&Write GOLD allows teachers to provide the differentiated instruction that is necessary to meet the needs of diverse student populations and ensure that all students reach their potential and achieve success. "

ANVILL (A National Virtual Language Lab) is a speech-based toolbox for language teachers. Like the language lab console of old, it's focused on the practice of oral/aural language, but at its core are very modern web-based audio and video tools from duber dot com: Voiceboards (an asynchronous speech tool), LiveChat (a 4-way conversation tool), and Voicerecorder (a widget for instant recordings). Each really opens up the scope and sequence of spoken language tasks. Creating media-rich lessons in ANVILL is simple and straightforward. There are templates for audio, video, and image tasks; there are also tools for text-based discussions like blogs and forums. ANVILL's assessment tool,Quizzes and Surveys, gives teachers an easy way to assign and respond to spoken language tasks. In addition, ANVILL is a course management system. Teachers who are doing distance or hybrid courses have a simple means of managing their students as well as their curriculum. We think you'll find that ANVILL is quite flexible, and permits the kind of extra listening and speaking practice that language students need so much. ANVILL is a project of the Yamada Language Center at the University of Oregon. These tools are currently in use at UO and at a select number of K-12 sites around the Northwest. Thanks to our National Foreign Language Resource Center partners at CASLS, we are able to offer ANVILL to educators at no cost. Here is an overview of its features. If you think it would be helpful to you and your students, contact us to set up an account. Our two-year pilot study has just gotten underway and we're looking for language teachers at all levels to use it and tell us what they think.