MVCR Tech Tools

This is a great article on Edutopia. It contains good practical ideas on how to use an online course's discussion forum.

Best practices, strategies and tips for successfully facilitating online discussion boards.

How to integrate technology into the classroom: PowerPoint, Blackboard, Video, iclickers, online discussions, ePortfolios, blended learning, survey tools, etc.

One of the most frequently asked questions from veteran and novice online faculty alike is, "How many weekly discussion posts should I contribute?" The reality is, there is an intricate balancing act to achieve the coveted "guide on the side" role in discussion forum facilitation.

Instructional Design Central (IDC) provides instructional designers & learning experience (LX) design professionals access to content and resources.

Colleges and universities are beginning to embrace social media and realizing the potential power and implications for using it as a component of their overall marketing mix. This guide will introduce you to some of the more popular forms of social media, including Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, blogs, and del.icio.us.

List.ly, according to co-founder Nick Kellet, is "true social curation with lists as a metaphor." List.ly is all about creating and curating lists. You can create lists of tips or lists of websites or lists of anything you can think of that your potential clients would be interested in.

List.ly is an excellent tool for curating web resources. You can then embed these lists into your blog, wiki, or content pages in your institutions learning management system. Other list.ly users can even request to add resources to your curated list. You can sign up for list.ly and it's free.

Millennials live and breathe on social media, so teachers are learning how to incorporate the medium into the classroom successfully. In doing so, teachers not only encourage students to engage actively in the material, but they also provide online communities for students that might not exist for them in real life.

Suggestions include: having students use Twitter, Facebook and Flickr to share work, using hashtags to live tweet, requiring students to blog, using LinkedIn to reach out to experts, using Google Hangouts for virtual office hours, post assignments and messages in Edmondo, conducting class in Second Life.

"It's Super Easy to Create These Simple 'Bookmarks' so Viewers Can Pop to Different Section of Your Video"

I like this! Very helpful and I will share this with my students.

@ionstudent I agree. In fact, I just learned about this today. This can come in handy for instructor-created videos, but I can see students taking advantage of this for video projects as well.

In a recent survey by the Center for Education Policy, nearly all teachers agreed that collaboration is generally a good use of their time. To get that valuable time and space to collaborate with fellow educators-in their city, state, country or across the world-some teachers are taking to online networks and DIY-ing their own face-to-face meet-ups.

Colorín Colorado is a national multimedia project that offers a wealth of bilingual, research-based information, activities, and advice for educators and families of English language learners (ELLs). Colorín Colorado is an educational service of WETA, the flagship public broadcasting station in the nation's capital, and receives major funding from the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association.

It wasn't so long ago that scientists had only a couple of ways to share their work with the world: publishing in a research journal or presenting at a scientific meeting. This often limited exposure to a relatively small sphere of scientists.

A peer reviewed article from BYU that discusses the benefits and risks to technologies such as Facebook for academic purposes.

Edpuzzle is a Web-based application that allows instructors (and students) to upload videos or use pre-existing streaming videos from YouTube or Vimeo and overlay test/assessment items to create a more interactive lesson. Instructors can stop videos at anytime and present assessment items to check for understanding. Videos become lessons and engaging presentations. Great for flipped classrooms...............and it's free!

There seems to be a widespread belief that every college or university is already deeply enmeshed in online learning. The reality is that many schools are still trying to figure out their online learning strategy. If you are thinking about investing in a new online learning program then you will have no shortage of advice.

For the next generation of college students - or Generation Z - technology has been a part of life since birth. It's no surprise that 93 percent of these students said in an Adobe Education survey that technology in the classroom was essential for their career preparedness.

This is a nice article on trends in higher education and distance learning.

For those who may be a bit unclear on how to use Twitter for a class, the article includes varied strategies. Some of the ideas have already been mentioned in our discussions and responses as we worked through the second module, but there are a few other points that may be noteworthy. Second, the article affirms some of the ideas already shared, especially for those of us who were initially unfamiliar with twitter's potential application.

I'm still not convinced I want to use Twitter in my classes, but this gives a lot of good information.

I must admit that when I first heard about Twitter I thought it represented the apex of what concerns me about internet technology: solipsism and sound-bite communication. While I obviously spend a great deal of time online and thinking about the potential of these new networked digital communication structures, I also worry about the way .....

In this resource, provided by Southern Oregon University, best practices in online course design are discussed. This is a great resource for educators who are committed to providing a high-quality online experience for students.