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""Adults vote with their feet," a favorite adage of adult educators, is frequently used to describe a characteristic of adult learners. In most circumstances, adults are not captive learners and, if the learning situation does not suit their needs and interests, they will simply stop coming. In discussing adult education, Knowles (1980, 1984) distinguished between teacher-centered and learner-centered instruction. He promoted the latter because it viewed learners as mutual partners in the learning endeavor (Merriam and Caffarella 1991). Known as the andragogical model, the use of learner-centered instruction--which supports addressing the needs and interests of learners--is regularly championed in the literature as the most effective way to teach adults. However, Merriam and Caffarella (ibid.) assert that "adult learning in formal settings, for the most part, is still instructor designed and directed" (p. 26). Given the wide support for learner involvement, the discrepancy between adult education theory and practice is perplexing. How can instructors of adults become more learner centered in their practice? This ERIC Digest suggests guidelines and strategies that can be used in formal settings by instructors of adults to involve learners more effectively. "

ADULTS LEARN DIFFERENTLY than young people. But more importantly, their reasons for learning are very different. Andragogy (Knowles, 1984), the theory of adult learning, attempts to explain why adults learn differently than other types of learners.

"Speck (1996) notes that the following important points of adult learning theory should be considered when professional development activities are designed for educators: "

"Effective online instruction depends on learning experiences appropriately designed and facilitated by knowledgeable educators. Because learners have different learning styles or a combination of styles, online educators should design activities that address their modes of learning in order to provide significant experiences for each class participant. In designing online courses, this can best be accomplished by utilizing multiple instructional strategies. Teaching models exist which apply to traditional higher education learning environments, and when designing courses for the online environment, these strategies should be adapted to the new environment."

So where do you start learning how to integrate technology into your classroom as well as how to use it for your ongoing professional development? And how do you stay current with the almost daily changes in the technology landscape? To find answers both general and specific, I talked to three strong advocates for incorporating technology into the learning process: Darren Draper, director of technology services for the Canyons School District, in Cottonwood Heights, Utah; Louise Maine, a science teacher at Punxsutawney Area High School, in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania; and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, a digital-learning consultant and a cofounder of Powerful Learning Practice, a professional-development company that aids educators in adopting 21st-century teaching and learning practices.

NBC Learn is the education arm of NBC News. We are making the global resources of NBC News and the historic film and video archive available to teachers, students, schools and universities. NBC News Archives on Demand (K-12 and Higher Ed) unleashes the power of the NBC News archives and makes thousands of video clips available to teachers, students, schools, colleges and universities. What's Your iCue? is the video trivia challenge that blends learning and gaming. Original video content from NBC Learn is engaging, innovative, and makes learning fun!

"Summer has officially started for many of you! I know that you will probably be relaxing for the first few days, but eventually you may feel the need to be inspired and motivated for the upcoming school year! Social media provides us with incredible opportunities to choose the way we want to develop professionally. You can choose the topic, the medium, and who you want to learn from. You can choose the way you like to learn, because social media provides us with several multimedia experiences, such as webinars, LMS, live video, and more. The experience is usually dynamic and motivating because you are learning with others around the world! Additionally, you will be developing your Personal/ Passionate Learning Network (PLN)."

"Chris Dede, a professor of learning technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is a leading authority on online teacher professional development. For 16 years, beginning in the early 1990s, Dede taught a course at HGSE called "Learning Media That Bridge Distance and Time." The rapid changes in interactive technology during that period brought the potential of online teacher learning into sharp focus for Dede. "I saw it as an important way of scaling up quality instructional practice, and an important lever for education reform, but also I saw that it wasn't going far very fast," he explains. Dede's investigations into online professional development led him to gather a group of researchers, distance-learning experts, and professional development providers at a conference at Harvard in 2005, and subsequently to publish, as editor, Online Professional Development for Teachers: Emerging Models and Methods (2006). The book, which explores the strengths and tensions of online teacher training, has become a key resource in the field."

In a learning community, ice breaker activities loosens the group dynamic with an engaging activity that pertains to the topic being studied or a topic that is completely irrelevant to the learning material. It causes people's shoulders to relax, mouths to grin, and warms up the room and provides a segue to the task or topic for discussion. Whether you are in a traditional classroom setting, or an online learning community, ice-breakers play a vital role in developing a sense of community in a learning environment

25 Tools : A Toolbox for Learning Professionals 2009 version This is the 2009 version of this popular resource. The 2009 Toolbox contains 25 categories of learning tool. Within each tool category are the names of the most popular tools from the emerging 2009 Top Tools for Learning, as selected by learning professionals worldwide. The majority of tools in the Toolbox are FREE tools, although a number of commercial tools are included. Some of the tools are desktop tools; others are online services.

Here's the emerging Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009 list, where you can compare the rankings of the tools with the last two years. Note, by "learning" we mean both formal and informal learning .

One of the major benefits of using technology in the classroom is the ability to differentiate instruction to meet the needs of every student in every lesson. Just as every student grows and develops at different rates, they learn in different ways and at different speeds. Technology makes it possible to pace lessons appropriately for each student's learning level and can be used to promote learning in the multiple intelligences. Below you will find website suggestions that address the different learning styles in your classroom with the help of technology:

"Challenge Based Learning is an engaging multidisciplinary approach to teaching and learning that encourages students to leverage the technology they use in their daily lives to solve real-world problems. Challenge Based Learning is collaborative and hands-on, asking students to work with other students, their teachers, and experts in their communities and around the world to develop deeper knowledge of the subjects students are studying, accept and solve challenges, take action, share their experience, and enter into a global discussion about important issues."

"Because learners have different learning styles or a combination of styles, online educators should design activities that address their modes of learning in order to provide significant experiences for each class participant. In designing online courses, this can best be accomplished by utilizing multiple instructional strategies"

"What do you want to use technology for? To help you answer this question, we've outlined some teaching/learning activities below that are used across the disciplines and tried to suggest through examples from the Web how each might utilize a certain kind of technology or a combination of different technologies to accomplish specific learning objectives. Each example represents a different discipline, and there are over 40 disciplines represented in the examples."

You can find just about anyone on Twitter, and leaders are no exception. Whether you're looking for motivational speakers, authors, social media experts, or politicians, you can find quite a few interesting personalities. Read on to learn about 100 leaders on Twitter that you can learn from.

"When instructors adapt their course materials to the online environment, they should be sensitive to the advantages and disadvantages of the Virtual Classroom. Web-based learning is well-suited for communications, collaboration, and information acquisition, but not for reading long text files. It is difficult to read screen after screen of text on a computer. In the Virtual Classroom, text-based lectures should be short and few. With this being the case, where are students going to get the information they need in obtaining the learning objectives?"

Let's explore the idea that there is at least one excellent free learning tool (or site) for every learning problem, need or issue!

"The most powerful and ample resource for change in education is teachers' own expertise. Yet, teachers are regularly overstepped when it comes to leading school improvement. In the United States, less than one-fourth of teachers feel that they have great influence over school decisions and policies in seven different areas, as noted in the National Center for Educational Statistics' Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) database for 2003-04 reported by the National Staff Development Council (NSDC) in Professional Learning in the Learning Profession: A Status Report on Teacher Development in the U.S. and Abroad."

"About Our Motivation: Challenges and opportunities, created by our global society, invite teachers, administrators, and students to rethink the way they teach, lead, and learn. The rise of social networking, the ease with which information is shared, and the growth of our global economy are just a few factors that have made it obvious that the 21st century is a much different world than the 20th century. And yet, when we take a good, hard look at the culture within our schools, do we see that much has changed from yesterday to today? We may see more technology used in the classroom and maybe more discussions on the "content vs. skills" debate in the faculty rooms. But underneath it all, have things really changed? Have we successfully forged a culture where life-long learning, personal growth, and collaboration are valued and practiced among all members of the school community? In Richard DuFour's article "Why Look Elsewhere?: Improving Schools from Within," he states that "it is context-the beliefs, expectations, behaviors and norms that constitute the culture of a given school-that plays the largest role in deciding whether a professional development program will make a difference in that school." If a school's goal is to improve student achievement, and a school considers learning to be the crux of its community, then effective professional development-where teachers and administrators themselves become learners-is the bridge to achieving that goal."