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Ted Curran

What the Best Online Teachers Should Do - 0 views

  • we explore methods of fostering student engagement, stimulating intellectual development, and building rapport with students when teaching online
  • What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain (2004) identified a set of core characteristics of exemplary college teachers
  • The FLC was supported by funds provided by the Academic Affairs Division, and its members received a stipend of $500 for their participation.
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  • arguments and evidence are more important than facts and figures
  • communicating clear goals and expectations
  • incorporating multiple active learning opportunities
  • providing frequent, prompt, and constructive feedback
  • creating teacher support resources
  • an exploratory study of the practices of exemplary online teachers, Lewis and Abdul-Hamid (2006)
  • efforts to provide constructive and individualized feedback to students
  • facilitating student interaction
  • paying attention to how a course is organized and how teacher presence is enhanced
  • involvement and learning
  • most of the literature deals with the “science” of online teaching rather than the “art” of online teaching. In this paper, we attempt to remedy this state of affairs
  • Faculty Learning Community
  • The program typically includes a curriculum about enhancing teaching and learning with regularly-scheduled meetings and activities that provide participants with opportunities pertaining to the FLC’s major focus. An important component of an FLC is an emphasis on the scholarship of teaching and learning
  • eLearning Pedagogy FLC
  • Its general goal was to increase faculty interest in learning and teaching with instructional technologies
  • Peers are viewed as important in the learning process by creating an environment where “students can reason together and challenge each other” (p. 53) and grapple with the content together while building a sense of community
  • participants attended monthly meetings that included teaching and learning activities, development and training opportunities, and community building
  • participants read the literature on the scholarship of teaching and designed individual projects that allowed the assessment and evaluation of their instructional changes, suitable for presentation or publication in a professional journal
  • At the start of our FLC, we read Bain’s book, with the goal of discussing it in terms of its implications for teaching online
  • during these discussions, each FLC member listed out the major and most interesting points from Bain’s book
  • understanding is more important than remembering
  • we analyzed the advantages and disadvantages of what the best teachers studied by Bain did in terms of online teaching
  • creating effective student interactions with faculty, peers, and content
  • fostering student engagement
  • s timulating intellectual development
  • confronting intriguing, beautiful or important problems, authentic tasks that will challenge [students] to grapple with ideas, rethink assumptions and examine mental models of reality
  • building rapport with students
  • behaviors such as demonstrating and encouraging trust and potential in students, flexibility, self-directed learning, communicating learning and success intentions to students, and conveying realistic goals and expectations.
  • Fostering Student Engagement
  • foster engagement through effective student interactions with faculty, peers, and content
  • see the potential in every student, demonstrate a strong trust in their students, encourage them to be reflective and candid, and foster intrinsic motivation moving students toward learning goals
  • The best teachers want students to learn, regularly assess their efforts and make adjustments as needed, and accommodate diversity with sensitivity to student needs and issues
  • we summarized the major categories of behaviors shown by Bain’s best teachers that are most applicable to online teaching and learning
  • Class content – through its design, lectures, discussions, and assignments – supports the student learning objectives
  • Accordingly, the best teachers use meaningful examples, stimulating assignments, and thought provoking questions to motivate students to know more about their discipline
  • creating a community of learners where the quantity and quality of interactions with peers and faculty foster student engagement
  • Student-to-faculty interaction is considered paramount in fostering student engagement
  • student-to-student interaction is equally important as the quality and quantity of exchanges are predictors of success
  • students should “feel a personal and emotional connection to the subject, their professor, and their peers
  • In the online environment, lecture need not and should not be the primary teaching strategy because it leads to learner isolation and attrition
  • The most important role of the teacher is to ensure a high level of interaction and participation
  • This is achieved by means of greater student-to-faculty contact, participation in class discussions, and a more reflective learning style
  • it is imperative that students be active, not passive, to create a true learning environment
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    An account of a professional development project based on exemplary teacher best practices.
Ted Curran

Digital Natives » Blog Archive » Instructional Technology in College Courses - 0 views

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    A student-led inquiry into how teachers are using digital tech in college courses.
Ted Curran

Exam Questions: Outsourcing vs. Crowdsourcing - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Ed... - 0 views

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    This outlines how (and why) to let students create the final exam questions using wikis as a constructivist learning activity.
Ted Curran

Blackboard vs. Moodle: North Carolina Community Colleges Assessment - 0 views

  • “The end-of-term student and instructor surveys showed that Blackboard and Moodle are not that different.” All of these systems are pretty good/bad.
  • “The real difference is found in student perception of their teachers’ comfort level with the application. There exists a significant correlation between student survey scores of both Blackboard and Moodle with the perceived comfort level of instructors using either application. Thus, student perceptions of both CMSs were influenced by instructor experience, training, and skills.” The fact that your faculty reviewers are more familiar with your old system than some of the alternatives may bias their evaluations significantly.
  • “Case studies of four exclusively Moodle institutions indicated that while transition to Moodle was challenging, ultimately the case study students and faculty preferred Moodle over Blackboard.”
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  • “The CMS application functionality comparison by online administrators (application and network) and online instructors indicated that Moodle 1.9x has a higher perceived functionality than any version of Blackboard evaluated. The large number of “did not use” responses suggested that neither CMS platform was utilized to full capacity.” Having a system with 39,000 seldom-used features that require a course to learn how to use is not as valuable to you as having a system with 39 features that most people will find useful and can figure out how to use on their own.
  • “The analysis revealed the total pre-transition year cost for all four case study colleges totaled $184,410. There was a 35% increase in total cost in the transition year to $248,300, due to supporting two CMSs simultaneously. Lastly, the post-transition year cost of ownership was $52,296, which accounted for a 72% decrease in total cost compared to that of the pre-transition year. The total cost savings from preto post-transition years for all of the case study colleges was $132,114.” Consider long-run costs as well as short-run costs. Migration may be cheaper than staying put, and the more expensive migration in the short run may be cheaper in the long run.
Ted Curran

Top 6 Teacher Tasks - What Teachers Do - Top Teacher Tasks - 0 views

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    These are the top 6 "teacher tasks" that faculty employ. What percentage of these tasks do we spend our time on, and how many of those tasks could be automated?
Ted Curran

10 reasons why Microsoft Office 365 rocks | TechRepublic - 0 views

  • IE 7/8, Firefox 3, or Safari 3.1.2 and through mobile devices including Windows Mobile 6.5.x, Windows Phone 7, Apple iPhone 2.0 and above, and Nokia E and N series.
    • Ted Curran
       
      So SharePoint online doesn't work with Android (AKA "the most popular smartphone OS on earth")? Odd choice.
  • the most popular Web browsers. There is a Light version that supports older and alternative browsers.
    • Ted Curran
       
      I'm interested to know how they define "the most popular web browsers". On our system, that means "IE", while Firefox, Safari, and Chrome fall into the "alternative browsers" category. 
  • Also supported is PowerPoint broadcasting, which lets you broadcast your slide shows across the Internet even to people who don’t have PowerPoint.
    • Ted Curran
       
      does this require you to be online while you're "broadcasting"?
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  • With the Lync 2010 client software
    • Ted Curran
       
      How is this considered "cloud-based" if it requires desktop software to work? "Cloud" means "web-based" or "not dependent on desktop software". Confounding.
  • using the Lync client
    • Ted Curran
       
      again-- client, not web. What happens if you don't have the client?
  • Lync Online directly over the Internet (without having to be on the corporate network via VPN or RAS)
    • Ted Curran
       
      does this mean "connect to Lync Online VIA THE CLIENT or THROUGH A BROWSER"?
  • Opera Mobile 8.65
    • Ted Curran
       
      So Android users would have to install Opera Mobile?
Ted Curran

oer + opencontent - SWiK - 0 views

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    Content Tagged with oer + opencontent AcrossWorld Education | Connect. Collaborate. Innovate. Monday, March 28, 2011 opensource: del.icio.us tag/opensource education opensource opencontent OER My #CCK11 Talk - Sharing to Connect, Interact and Learn! Thursday, March 17, 2011 opensource: del.icio.us tag/opensource sharing opensource opencontent OER openness cck11 elesig OPAL - The Open Educational Quality Initiative Saturday, March 12, 2011 opensource: del.icio.us tag/opensource opensource opencontent OER opened EDUCAUSE Review Magazine Thursday, February 10, 2011 Volume 45, Number 4, July/August 2010 | EDUCAUSE Article about OPEN: Open Educational Resources, Open Faculty, etc. opensource: del.icio.us tag/opensource opensource opencontent OER Content on Congress 2011 -- THE Journal Tuesday, January 04, 2011 opensource: del.icio.us tag/opensource open opensource Conference opencontent OER OpenCourseWare- Open High School of Utah Tuesday, January 04, 2011 opensource: del.icio.us tag/opensource open opensource resources opencontent opencourseware OER MERLOT - Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching Saturday, January 01, 2011 opensource: del.icio.us tag/opensource Web2.0 open education opencontent higher OER lessonplans The Cape Town Open Education Declaration Thursday, October 21, 2010 "It is at once a statement of principle, a statement of strategy and a statement of commitment. It is meant to spark dialogue, to inspire action and to help the open education movement grow. Open education is a living idea. As the movement grows, this idea will continue to evolve. There will be other visions initiatives and declarations beyond Cape Town. This is exactly the point. The Cape Town signatories have committed to developing further strategies, especially around open technology and teaching practices." opensource: del.icio.us tag/opensource education opensource openaccess opencontent OER declaration openeducation Home - OLCOS Thursday, October 21
Ted Curran

How to Use Diigo for Education - YouTube - 1 views

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    This is a great video to introduce you to using Diigo as a teacher for education.
Ted Curran

To Share or Not to Share: Is That the Question? (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

  • The use of open materials by faculty is something of a continuum, with those who closely guard their intellectual property and privacy on one end, with faculty who seek out and use open content and technologies in the middle, and with those who actively contribute to open content on the other end.
  • All the faculty I spoke to could think of at least a few contexts in which they would not be willing and/or able to share or participate openly.
  • For example, few faculty are willing to embark on large, time-intensive projects, such as writing textbooks, without some guarantee that they will be compensated for their personal investment (time
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  • Research faculty may need to closely guard patentable research under the terms of their institutional contracts, even if their inclination drives them to share openly
  • Science faculty, for example, often publish their research with multiple authors and may be more used to a collaborative model, whereas humanities faculty write for publications that favor a single-author model.
  • Commonly, faculty will lock down some content (research or texts) under intellectual property laws but feel morally obligated to share in another aspect of their field.
  • Two factors delineate a faculty member's attitude toward openness: a nature influence and a nurture influence.
  • the strength of a person's inclination toward sharing
  • On the one end are the keepers, faculty who ask themselves: "Why would anyone outside my course want to know what I think?" At the other extreme are the sharers, faculty who believe that their contribution to the conversation, content, and/or community is invaluable.
  • The second factor that influences attitude toward openness is how strongly the person feels a moral responsibility to share freely with his or her community.
  • Many said something to the effect that they felt it was their duty as an educator to share
  • that everyone in education should share
  • Open faculty see sharing their ideas and expertise as a way to quickly validate or refute ideas, to promote important academic programs, and/or to mentor those instructors with less experience or to be mentored by those with greater experience or more creative ideas. Open faculty value the ideas and content shared by others in their networks and feel an obligation to share alike. This sense of moral responsibility to share is so strong in some faculty that it bothers them when ideas and content are closely guarded. They see this as an affront to their values.
  • In the category of faculty who are strong sharers and strongly open, we find project leaders and thought leaders.
  • What's the difference between those faculty who share with colleagues locally and those who share on the web? Technology skills.
  • Open faculty are learning some of these technology skills from formal workshops and professional training, but many spoke of learning technology skills from other open faculty (or even students) during on-the-fly informal learning sessions.
  • Many of the faculty I spoke to suggested (strongly) that participation in open digital activities (e.g., blogging, writing open-source software, being a curator of open-source materials) should count toward tenure and promotion.
  • Naturally, administrators worry about open digital faculty. What if they say something the institutional leaders don't agree with? What if their work with students on the web creates a liability? Administrators can do three simple things to minimize these issues: If a faculty member writes or shares content openly on the web, using space provided by the college, the inclusion of a simple disclosure statement can provide some separation between the individual and the institution (for example, "These views/materials are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my institution"). To guard against liability, administrators can make sure that open faculty receive training on copyright issues with materials used, privacy issues with students, and security issues with web technologies. These days, most campus activities involve the potential for liability. All administrators can do is make a good-faith effort to protect the institution by ensuring that faculty have a solid grounding in the potential risks. Today's students live much of their lives in the digital world. Faculty have the potential to model and promote good Internet behavior to future workers and leaders. Administrators can support open digital faculty by making an effort to understand what the faculty do: read some of what they write; take them to lunch and discuss their latest projects; try to understand that these faculty are public ambassadors of the institution and stealth faculty developers on campus. In gaining the trust of open digital faculty, administrators will more likely be seen as advisors than as adversaries.
Ted Curran

Previewing Microsoft's Office 365 | Microsoft - CNET News - 0 views

  • Lync's planned client for Windows Phone 7 and the iPhone.
    • Ted Curran
       
      No Android, and not as ubiquitous as GTalk for Apps (which runs on ALL platforms).
  • It's also one of the places where Office 365 shows its strengths, since you can get into a shared group of documents and very quickly give them a read and an edit in the same place without leaving the page to go off to some other property
  • This is what a cohesive Web office experience should feel like, though like we mentioned earlier, it still feels like its on its own island instead of being more tightly knit with the Office 365 start page, and Outlook client.
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  • While really impressive, there are still some questions over Microsoft's vision of making Office 365 less of a jump-off point for its software and more of a one-stop solution for getting things done from any computer, anywhere.
  • it's worth looking at Office 365 for what it is, which is Microsoft continuing to move some of the very complicated pieces of its Office software ecosystem into the cloud--in part to make it easier for businesses large and small to get going. The Office software itself is a separate part of the equation--one that's well on its way in that direction.
  • Notably absent from Office 365's overall interface is Microsoft's suite of Office Web Apps, which is where many of those comparisons to Google Docs have centered
  • The first thing we should say up front is that Google Apps this is not.
  • The good news is that in our brief testing, everything worked as advertised. The bad news is that you can't get it right now, and it's still a long ways off from something that lets you every feature out of the Office ecosystem without installing software.
  • If you actually want to create something, there's still a reliance on having to have the Office software, or go off to the Office Web apps site itself, where users can save to their SharePoint.
  • The net result of all of this is that Office 365 is not yet quite the true jump to a cohesive set of all of Microsoft's services, gone online and tied together in a way where you can hop from task to task between different 365 components.
  • There is still an incredible reliance on the software itself, which is bound to change down the road, but for now makes basic workflows like creating a document and getting feedback from team members a hybrid experience, or one that involves juggling products.
  • In our preview with it, the Web client of Outlook was fast loading and had a few nice tricks up its sleeve, like letting you open up Office attachments in a pop-up Window--something that's quite useful if you're on a public computer that does not have Office installed.
  • Lync is Microsoft's an instant messaging system with presence; an audio and video conferencing tool; and a voice call service. By design this is something that users install and run locally,
  • How Lync translates to the Web experience is that users can get a slightly less capable version of it inside a browser window--all without having to install the software client
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