As an online instructor, I came up with some ways to, I believe, increase engagement and learning as well as developing useful skills. Here are my favorite e-learning tips.
Collaborative mindmapping online rocks!
invites students and professors nationwide to upload their class lecture notes, making them available to anyone with a free Knetwit account.
Every time a student's notes are downloaded, they are awarded "Koins," or Knetwit currency. Every "Koin" is equivalent to four cents. When a student reaches the $10 mark, he or she can cash in or buy a product
Harvard University?s Interactive Media Group will host a half-day Immersive Education event, on December 8th 2007 from 2-5pm, that is open to the public and free to attend. From the article: "Educators, researchers and administrators from Harvard University, Boston College, MIT Media Lab, Amherst College and the United States Department of Education will give a series of presentations and demonstrations to provide attendees with an overview of Immersive Education and how virtual world and game-based learning technologies are used in and out of the classroom today. Immersive Education Day at Harvard is a precursor to the Immersive Education event at Boston?s Digital Media Summit in January, 2008.
DAMN! Why didn?t I read about Zotero 2 months ago? I just finished my first research paper in 20 years and, let me tell you, it was not a pleasant experience. Thanks to Innovate, the Journal of Online Education, I now know about Zotero, an open source firefox plug-in. If you have a paper due soon check out the video tour.
The course-oriented, teacher-centered approach of the LMS was not enough to cope with this new ideas in e-learning, and a new concept was used: the Personal Learning Environment (PLE). Personal Learning Environments are systems that help learners take control of and manage their own learning, they are distributed, social and learner-centric. They are composed of a suite of tools that the learner uses to learn whatever they want. So, the learner chooses their own personal learning environment, taking whatever tools that help them to achieve their own goals. Different people have different ideas to build their own PLE.
IClarence has been a classroom teacher for the past 13 years. He blogs professionally at remoteaccess.typepad.com, with his class at thinwalls.edublogs.org and has spoken at conferences across North America. Clarence has won several awards, including one of Canada’ highest teaching awards, the Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching for his integration of technology into daily classroom life. Clarence
In the late 90s a couple of companies, including Microsoft and Apple, noticed (just a little bit sooner than anyone else) that Moore’s Law meant that they shouldn’t think too hard about performance and memory usage… just build cool stuff, and wait for the hardware to catch up. Microsoft first shipped Excel for Windows when 80386s were too expensive to buy, but they were patient. Within a couple of years, the 80386SX came out, and anybody who could afford a $1500 clone could run Excel.
As a programmer, thanks to plummeting memory prices, and CPU speeds doubling every year, you had a choice. You could spend six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.
The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from all educators from around the world who are interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This is a FREE conference run by volunteers and open to everyone, no registration is required. The conference theme is “Playing with Boundaries”. The 2007 conference begins with a pre-conference keynote the week of October 8, 2007. The following two weeks, October 15-19 and October 22-26, forty presentations will be posted online to the conference blog (this website) for participants to download and view. Live Events in the form of three “Fireside Chats” and a culminating “When Night Falls” event will be announced. Everyone is encouraged to participate in both live events during the conference as well as asynchronous conversations.