Group items tagged

"Resources and Annotations from UW-Stout's E-Learning and Online Teaching Graduate Certificate Program. Contributors are mainly from the E-Learning for Educators Course & the E-Learning Practicum Course."

Good background information on blended learning. Pay particular attention to the footnotes.

"Online learning is sweeping across America. In the year 2000, roughly 45,000 K-12 students took an online course. In 2009, more than 3 million K-12 students did. What was originally a distance learning phenomenon no longer is. Most of the growth is occurring in blended-learning environments, in which students learn online in an adult-supervised environment at least part of the time. As this happens, online learning has the potential to transform America's education system..."

"The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning  conditions performed modestly better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.... Analysts noted that these blended conditions often included additional learning time and instructional elements not received by students in control conditions. This finding suggests that the positive effects associated with blended learning should not be attributed to the media, per se."

"A blended learning approach combines face to face classroom methods with computer-mediated activities to form an integrated instructional approach." Leads to more links about blended learning as well.

Skip Via explains personal learning networks, or PLNs. Slightly out of date at this point (e.g. Google Wave is gone) but a great explanation of how differentiated learning can happen online.

"Our research shows that the argument that there is a generational break between today's generation of young people who are immersed in new technologies and older generations who are less familiar with technology is flawed," says Dr Jones. "The diverse ways that young people use technology today shows the argument is too simplistic and that a new single generation, often called the 'net generation', with high skill levels in technology does not exist." Press release: http://www.esrc.ac.uk/news-and-events/press-releases/20523/not-all-todays-students-are-tech-savvy.aspx

"This is a really big deal. For the first time in history it is easy for non-specialists to explore and closely examine art from museums across the globe on a single website.... Here are two examples of how the Google Art Project opens the conversation. In 1889, Vincent van Gogh painted three canvases depicting his bedroom in Arles; these now reside in three different museums. Only the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam illustrates another version on its website and remarkably, none of the three museums link to the paintings at the other institutions."