Excellent way for students to share research projects, book reviews, poetry, language classes, music lessons, etc..! Teachers can sign up for a free account which includes 1 grid with multiple topics.
I purchased Camtasia a few years ago and find to be invaluable. It is quite intuitive as long as you aren't afraid to play a bit and figure out the transitions, etc. I recommend practicing some of the zooming and highlighting techniques on a test video so you aren't trying to learn it all right when you need to create a video for class.
Blend My Learning is a blog that provides readers with information from educators that are developing and creating blended learning environments. The educators that contribute to the blog share their ideas, strategies, successes, and challenges of making the shift to a blended learning environment. The goals of the blog can be summed up by their slogan of "innovate, transform, and share".
The avatar activity encouraged studentstudent interactions by drawing upon personal experiences and interests and specifically dedicating small amounts of time to peer socializing.
By creating opportunities for students to create social-relational constructs in online learning environments, personal risks are minimized because students choose which experiences they wish to share and look for common interests upon which to base their sense of belonging.
Online student interactions can benefit from personal sharing exercises intended to create social connections.
Recognition of the importance of social presence, and the building of trust and a sense of belonging in online course design, can positively affect the quality of students’ learning experiences.
Online trust and connection do not happen by chance, but rather require careful course design
Catlin Tucker, teacher and author of Blended Learning for Grades 4-12, shares how you can utilize blended instruction and technology in your classroom, no matter how high-tech or low-tech it is.
Easy to read and includes some great real life examples. This would be a good article to share with teachers in your school or district as part of PD for blended learning.
Vocaroo is an easy way to create and download voice recordings and when its smashed with Google Drive it can become one power tool!!! When using Vocaroo as a voice recorder I prefer to download the sound files into Google Drive. Vocaroo allows the user to download voice recording as MP3, Ogg, FLAC, or WAV files.
A TED talk with excellent background information about the development of Massive Open Online Courses. This Stanford professor shares the powerful lessons learned about course design and how MOOC's are moving education from being driven by hypothesis to data driven.