Sometimes a big part of the job of Instructional Design involves simply copy/pasting information from one format or platform to another. I’m working on a project now that has made me very thankful that I’m using a Clipboard Manager. What is a Clipboard Manager? It’s a desktop tool that lets …
In college I had a writing teacher who stressed the point that Writing represents you when you’re not there. –Alberto Rios It was his way of impressing upon us young writers to make sure everything we mean to say actually makes it onto the page. A common pitfall among young …
Hemingway is a markdown editor that coaches you to write more clearly, helping you to emulate Ernest Hemingway‘s trademark sparse, journalistic style. Though I don’t use it as my main markdown editor, I’ve been thinking about ways it can be useful in a variety of learning tasks. Once writing …
Until recently, I worked on Propero.org, a collection of accredited, self-paced, online learning courses where students work at their own pace and pick up college credits with maximum convenience. I joined the team after the curriculum had been developed, so it was my job to review the courses and determine …
I am a big believer in RSS News Aggregators as a core technology for lifelong learning. By allowing each individual person to curate their own interests and get in the habit of consuming a steady stream of news relevant to their interests, RSS lets people build their own personalized diet …
Most LMSes have a “Discussion Forum” tool that you can add into any course unit, and even make it a graded assignment in the course. Many online educators will post a discussion prompt and let students respond below. Here’s a little trick to help spice up your discussion postings with …
I have long been a fan of the h5p.org project, a collection of open source learning objects written completely in HTML5 technologies to add interactive elements to online courses. These are the learning objects used in edX courses, but you can freely deploy them in your own courses. I’m going …
I’ve long been a believer that teachers should explore open source edtech tools as an alternative to all the free, freemium, ad-supported, and privacy-invading web applications that are marketed to us. In addition to all the great open source desktop applications, there are a lot of open alternatives to the …
As a system administrator, or even as a classroom teacher, you probably have several cloud app accounts that hold students’ names, grades, assignments, and communications. How many of these accounts do you protect with a strong password? How many of your passwords give you control over the systems your students depend …
One of the most valuable tools for an instructional designer is a great screencasting app. Being able to record your desktop with voice narration frees us to share techniques on our computers in live motion video. Many of us IDs have learned to depend on tools like Jing, Screenflow, Screencast-O-Matic, …
