MVCR Tech Tools

Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. Never email yourself a file again!

Love Dropbox! This has been so helpful to me when I was working on my dissertation and also for preparation for courses and sharing them to students and colleagues.

This document summarizes issues, solutions and resources surrounding academic honesty in online courses

Adding Audio to Your Online Course: Topic is revisited from more than 2 years ago. Dan and Susan look at how universal voice is when teaching online. Are people using voice and if so, how

Stories for Change is an online meeting place for community digital storytelling facilitators and advocates. Learn more about how we're using this unique medium for social change and join the network.

One potential casualty when courses move online - or even when face-to-face courses incorporate web-based technologies - is collaboration. Many instructors fear they will lose opportunities to interact with their students - and that their students will lose the ability to interact with one another.

For as long as there have beenexams, there has been cheatingon exams. Online exams are nodifferent, although they do providesome challenges that set them apartfrom traditional face-to-face exams.These include a heightened opportunity to collaborate with others,greater possibility of using unapproved resources, and an increasedlikelihood that someone other thanthe student is taking the test

This article presents a rather extensive list of things to put in place in order to reduce cheating in online classes. It is unlikely that cheating will be eradicated in online or in f2f classes but every effort towards its reduction is an effort that enhances the value of a certification from the institute.

Sometime in June Sandy McAuley, Bonnie Stewart, George Siemens and I decided to apply to SSHRC for funding for researching the place of MOOCs in the digital economy. We did a little work creating videos to allow people to understand what was going on in a MOOC and decide if it was something they might want to do.

professional development ideas from Educause

eMints resources and links

description and list of some of the early MOOCs with definitions and links

Twitter as an acceptable, non-intrusive side conversational tool in class or online. Such a tool may actually make synchronous learning vibrant .

Overview/Introduction We've been waiting a long time for computers to dramatically change education, but for the most part, that promise remains unfulfilled. Unlike in the business world, where the computer quickly became a fixture on every desk and transformed both day-to-day tasks and the business landscape as a whole, computers have not transformed the goals of educators, or even the methods used to achieve those goals.

Focuses on the importance of web2.0 in educational networking.

Guidelines to excellence in instructional design

Teaching students in the 21st century has new implications for today's classroom at all educational levels. Accompanying these implications are expectations that faculty must engage students through instructional strategies and activities of value to students. Twenty-first century learners live in an age of new technologies and information sharing. Cell phones, laptops, handheld PCs, electronic devices, and social online communities are a few examples of students' constant immersion in technology (see Figure 1). The exception to this constant exposure can be found in the classroom. One might reasonably ask, "How are faculty integrating technology into the curriculum to enhance learning?"

This article provides a good global study of faculty, and addresses the needs, technology needs in particular, that are essential to faculty effectiveness as we transition to the 21st century classroom.

Video regarding one method to discourage cheating in online courses

Study regarding faculty acceptance of online education

The Journal of Online Learning and Teaching: Interesting article regarding online teaching with humor

Probably a site most have heard of before, but well worth the look if you haven't. Basically, it's one man who sits at his computer with a slate and narrates videos explaining an idea/technique as demonstrated on a simple whiteboard. He's recorded a large compilation of these videos from a variety of fields in math and science. "The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) with the mission of providing a world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Despite being the work of one man, Salman Khan, this 2100+ video library is the most-used educational video resource as measured by YouTube video views per day and unique users per month."

This is a free online whiteboard where students can collaborate on chemistry and math problems without worrying about typing symbols. Also students can work on group projects together.

very cool. that's neat that's it's free. I need to play around with it a bit to get used to the interface, but I might try it out.

This is a wonderful, cutting edge tool on the web for using the power of Mathematica to computer along with the endless databases of facts and figures that can be found on the internet at large. It can be a great resource for students, but it could also be something they use to cheat in certain situations so be aware. "Wolfram|Alpha is more than a search engine. It gives you access to the world's facts and data and calculates answers across a range of topics, including science, nutrition, history, geography, engineering, mathematics, linguistics, sports, finance, music..."