MVCR Tech Tools

The image used in this post is of a small group of students sitting in a room together, (seemingly) energetically talking about the issues at hand. This is an example of synchronous discussion-the students are in the same room, ostensibly discussing the same topic (the caption says they are "debating search engine liability," which sounds really interesting to me, at least).

Blackboard publishes the most current service availability in table form. I love this idea and wish D2L had something similar. It's nice to be able to go there and say to a student or instructor having trouble, oh, yes, there are some status issues with that software.

After making the list of 23 things online teachers should know, I remembered that I found a link checker website and wanted to post it here.

Help desk for Blackboard collaborate

East to learn

For anyone in education including teachers, students, parents, librarians, schools, and universities. Featuring Wikispaces Classroom and Wikispaces Campus. https://cooper-socialwork.wikispaces.com I like this as a means to have a place for the students in that semester's class so they can access this discussed. Contemplating letting students have access through the subsequent semester, as well.

As a professor who favors pop quizzes, Cedrick May is used to grimaces from students caught unprepared. But a couple of years ago, in his class on early American literature at the University of Texas at Arlington, he said he noticed "horrible, pained looks" from the whole class when they saw the questions.

I love this publication on how to facilitate a discussion board. It is easy to read and just has a TON of tidbits on how do run a good discussion board in your online class. I refer to it often. It is a little old, so as I recall, there might be a few links within the document that are broken, but there is a lot of content, so you won't miss it probably.

Thanks for sharing this Christina, Working on facilitating a discussion next week and I found it helpful.

Northwestern University, United States Received 18 May 2015, Revised 14 December 2015, Accepted 18 December 2015, Available online 23 December 2015 * Enterprise social network systems (ESNs) provide online spaces for informal learning. * Community members actively participate in non-mandatory, informal ESN spaces. * Social presence is the most frequent Community of Inquiry element in these spaces.

The Interesting Ways series continues to be a great example of crowdsourcing good quality classroom ideas. It is remarkable what can be achieved and created together if you give people the right way to do it. I like this guy and joined his resource group. I encourage you to check out some of the great ideas for brining technology into the classroom.

TED always has interesting videos!

2015 Hype Cycle Special Report Illustrates the Market Excitement, Maturity and Benefit of More Than 2,000 Technologies The journey to digital business continues as the key theme of Gartner, Inc.'s "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2015."