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Here's a quick video I recorded in which I share some ideas for how to use a Flip video camera in your classroom.

Students use technology in natural ways that allow them to do what they want: communicate with anyone they want, in the time and space that suits them best. Easily accessible and user-friendly, collaboration tools allow students to explore, share, engage, and connect with people and content in meaningful ways that help them learn. By relying on the familiar ways students use these tools, faculty can enable new forms of communication and engagement in the classroom, permitting extensions and variations of the informal interactions already occurring in classrooms and hallways, and creating new frontiers for collaboration across geographic boundaries.

Derek Bruff, assistant director of Vanderbilt University's Center for Teaching, has written a book that reviews the uses of clickers and offers advice for institutions and professors. The book -- Teaching With Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments -- is just out from Jossey-Bass.

In the era of technology students do not pass notes or try and whisper quietly to one another, they send text messages from their cell phones or Facebook messages to one another if on a computer during class. These actions are done silently and do not cause a disruption in the classroom. But is it distracting? Maybe. Is it beneficial? I think so.

Edupunk, as defined by the New York Times, is "an approach to teaching that avoids mainstream tools like Powerpoint and Blackboard, and instead aims to bring the rebellious attitude and D.I.Y. ethos of 70s bands like the Clash to the classroom." The term was coined by Jim Groom, Instructional Technology Specialist at the University of Mary Washington.

Twitter is the class' main mode of communication, and he writes that Twitter has replaced three classroom technologies: listserv, email, cardboard box to collect papers.

Blogs are considered an extension of the classroom and therefore are subject to these guidelines as well as the rules and regulations of Arapahoe High School and Littleton Public Schools.

Registration for the 2009 Summer Faculty Institute -- the premier event for faculty who want an in-depth, hands-on opportunity to work on their technical skills and address their classroom and online instruction needs -- is open until midnight Wednesday, April 15.

A computer science professor at an Australian University is doing something revolutionary with YouTube - he's offering students who can't attend his classes college credit for watching his videos. Richard Buckland, a senior lecturer at the University of NSW in Sydney, Australia, was frustrated that high school students with a passion for computing and capable of studying at the college level were not able to make the commute to the university fit into their school day.

Instructors' extra time and effort aren't being rewarded financially or professionally, and what's more, online education doesn't translate into better learning outcomes, said respondents in the faculty survey.