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"Welcome to Miss Baker's Biology Class Wiki! This is a companion site to our class blog, Extreme Biology. A wiki allows users to add and edit content collectively. Go here if you want a more in-depth look at how we use this in our class!"

Throughout the ages of educational ideas and philosophies teachers have been big fans of having their students keep a journal. Journals are kept in language arts, foreign language classes, and I have seen them in science classes. Students don't particularly like doing them unless they enjoy writing. If given a choice between keeping a journal in their spiral notebook and keeping it online, I would wager that a majority of students in this digital age will prefer to keep it online. So why not give them the choice and tool of Penzu.

An integral part of nearly all online classes is the threaded discussion-it is where students interact on a nearly daily basis, posting their thoughts and information on main discussion topics, your postings, and the postings of other students. While you have measured control over the content, length, and tone of student postings, you have full control over your own. To ensure that your responses to student postings in discussion are effective, incorporate the following ideas:

In this article, Errol Sull provides us many good reminders of what we should be doing to make sure our online learning environment is effective and positive for our students. I feel confident in his guidelines because he's been teaching in the online environment for fifteen years. His suggestions also make sense in both an online and f2f discussion.

This article by Errol Sull presents us with suggestions for online discussions. I personally have been nervous about having all class online discussions after a Moodle incident I had last year. Fortunately, my Moodle settings were set so that only two students were able to get a at each other. I will apply these ideas to my classes in August.

This article explores ways to enhance online communication between students.

Rob Kelly discusses how to he used online discussion boards in a skills based course. This concept could be followed for any type of study group. Given students learn best when they not only teach the information but share and collaborate with others, this idea enhances the learning process.

I'm the only Accounting teacher and have been teaching for 2 years at the high school level. I feel this article does a great job not just on how discussion boards can help and guide deeper levels of thinking among Accounting students, but provides the opportunity to take baby steps including technology in the classroom and push critical thinking. I can appreciate this article greatly because I believe we all learn through experience and as Gee mentions, some of the students have worked in the field and may be able to offer their peers another insight.

This article outlines the notion of flipping the classroom to ensure there is more time in class "doing" your discipline and working on skills together, rather than "listening" or "looking" at how it is done. Being selective about what media you ask students to consume for HW, having them do blogs or discussion posts as HW and then using class time to work in groups and go deeper with the analysis of bias, perspective, sourcing, etc. is a great model. If we want to push the thinking further on the media literacy, we need to have class time to do this work with them.

This article is something I did not think about. Professors need to learn how to properly run an on-line class. Interesting topic.

I created this as a presentation tool for a school law class a few years ago. Our assignment was to research a current topic and share that with the class. I thought that this would be a way to make it seem relevant and purposeful. I wonder if I were to rewrite this...what would I change?

Found lots of interesting ideas I'll try out during the year. Some ideas are geared towards elementary but I can see many of them working in my secondary classes as well. Especially like the idea of a question chain reading blog in which the teacher posts a question and a student answers the question and posts another question. Each student would need to answer a question and post another and no question can be repeated.

A lot of TI Graphing Calculator activities, both user submitted and created by TI

There are some amazing tools listed on these sites, including a Mind42 map of Web 2.0 Tools. I can see that my map is quite lacking compared to these. But, now I have an idea as to what to aim for. It would be great to set my students loose of some of these tools. "If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow." (John Dewey). This has been one of my favourite quotes along with "We need to prepare our students/children for jobs that have not been created yet" (Unknown). For me, they sum up what we as teachers need to strive for and that we need to keep on trying to stretch ourselves and our students...after all, we are 13% of the way through the 21st Century. It's exciting.

This professor uses blogs to have students discuss readings before they are due.  It supports HOTS because they are connecting the readings to current events as well as evaluating perspectives. Plus the prof. felt she was able to better tailor the class discussions after reading the posts to force students to think more deeply.  Students reported that the blogging helped them understand course content and improve their critical thinking and writing skills.  The prof. had students reflect as a part of their final about how their verbal exchanges on the blog shaped their understanding of the events.  In other words, students explored how they were constructing their knowledge through the blog.  Interestingly, this professor had her students post anonymously to the "class blog".  She believed this encouraged honest and open participation.

Brenda offers some great suggestions and ideas for using Voicethread in classes. Brenda suggests using Voicethread as an assessment tool for teachers but I am thinking it might be a great tool for students to assess/comment on each other as well.

Laurel, I agree that students could also use Voicethread in class as a tool for commenting on peers' work. I could see groups viewing each other's work and offering feedback, as well. I like that you can add images to this. Have you used Voicethread before? I will have to spend some time checking this out.

I have never been a fan of lecturing during class...for either the high school or college classes I teach. If there is information I need to share, I will always use a Power Point (or something similar) and then make those files available for students to download. But even when presenting information in this manner, I continue to engage students with questions, asking for real life examples, etc. And I limit the time, or break it up with another activity. It seems to work pretty well and the ideas from this article pretty much confirm what I have always felt about the lecture style class.

"Welcome to Mr. Seufert's Classroom Wiki! This Wiki will be dedicated to the students in our class. They will develop the web pages found here and fill them with topics and ideas that are important and interesting to them. The students just posted a new play on our Creative Corner page. There is also some reviews of movies, books, and games at Critic's Corner. Check them out!! "

This article provides great tips for incorporating video into your lessons, including helpful technical tips, such as "clipping" the video off a dvd at the beginning and end of the video clip that you need so you don't waste time or lose momentum in class setting up the video.

Nice blog on how to get students to communicate more efficiently in class discussions,as well as in the classroom. Getting the students to become more active and enjoy being a part of the class activity.

"Kurt Wootton, co-author of A Reason to Read. "In my view, the repetition must not come before allowing students to participate in the creative tasks, but rather repeated practice walks side-by-side with the creative process."" I find this statement to "hit the nail on the head" as the debate between rote memory and creative "aha" moments continue. The analogy of the musician practicing for hours playing scales as well as note for note renditions of other's work is appropriate to this discussion. The book, "Outliers",by Malcolm Gladwell, addresses the 10,000 hour rule. To paraphrase; To become world class at anything, it takes 10,000 hours of focused practice. The author's examples range from Bill Gates to The Beatles. When two sides are set up as an US vs THEM debate, it misses the oppoprtunity to combine perfect practice with creative inspiration. Putting together a perfect meal is based on proper choices of various food combinations. Putting together a perfect learning environment is very similar in that a combination of repetitive learning and creative opportunity helps the learning as well as creative process.

"Kurt Wootton, co-author of A Reason to Read. "In my view, the repetition must not come before allowing students to participate in the creative tasks, but rather repeated practice walks side-by-side with the creative process."" I find this statement to "hit the nail on the head" as the debate between rote memory and creative "aha" moments continue. The analogy of the musician practicing for hours playing scales as well as note for note renditions of other's work is appropriate to this discussion. The book, "Outliers",by Malcolm Gladwell, addresses the 10,000 hour rule. To paraphrase; To become world class at anything, it takes 10,000 hours of focused practice. The author's examples range from Bill Gates to The Beatles. When two sides are set up as an US vs THEM debate, it misses the oppoprtunity to combine perfect practice with creative inspiration. Putting together a perfect meal is based on proper choices of various food combinations. Putting together a perfect learning environment is very similar in that a combination of repetitive learning and creative opportunity helps the learning as well as creative process.

This article was very interesting. It indicated that grades meant different things to different people. If students received a C, some people would say that the teacher wasn't presenting the material correctly. Lessons should aim to motivate, and inspire students to learn. One professor began class by asking if all students would complete all assigned tasks. When they agreed, he told them they would all get As. He claimed that not one of his students fell back on their word and that work submitted was better than ever. They were more concentrated on learning and understanding rather than worrying about their grade. While this article does not directly relate to online communication, it does relate to how we communicate course expectatioins.

I found a link from the Newstand that connected me to an article from mashable.com, which discusses a new educational program from the people at TED talks. The program allows teachers to turn any YouTube video, including TED talks into a lesson. The article aligned this new tool with the phenomenon of flipping classrooms. To flip a classroom means to prepare a lesson that students can complete at home. The pedagogical foundation of flipped classes is connected to project-based learning. The proponents of this approach believe if students can cover lessons at home, then classroom time could be used for collaborative student projects. The new TED-Ed program allows for teachers to create a unique URL, where student can access the video as well as a series of questions. The types of questions vary from multiple choices, to short answer, to more high order thinking questions. These HOT questions expand the ideas from the video into high order thinking akin to Bloom's Taxonomy. The TED-Ed team is also producing their own educational videos, which are a collaboration between educators and animators. At this point there aren't many of the TED-Ed videos produced, but the ones I explored are quite interesting. The mashable.com article has links to TED-Ed. I am not the biggest proponent of flipped teaching, but I am intrigued by TED's involvement.