One of my former 12th grade Digital Design students has stayed in touch with me since his graduation in 2009, and he just asked me to help him start a crowdfunding campaign to support his tuition costs at Cal State Channel Islands. It was a great opportunity for me to …
The role of the instructor has become ever more complex in the last century as technology, pedagogy, and student expectations have advanced with the times. Today’s teacher is expected to not only be a Subject Matter Expert, but to serve as their own Instructional Designer, provide high-touch student Mentoring, and …
One of the hardest things about teaching young students is actually envisioning the ways the world will be different when they’re ready to join the workforce. What skills will they need in ten years, or twenty, or fifty? These days, it’s hard to know which industries and jobs to prepare …
A longtime friend, colleague, and collaborator of mine who works in new teacher education is starting a blog, and asked me for some help on getting started. Here’s my email response… Hi Friend, There’s some degree of “stage fright” that comes with blogging, so I’ve had to tell myself a …
If you’re a student or an academic, you probably have a large volume of reading you need to do every week, and there’s only so many hours that you can be hunched over your desk reading. Why not clip your next few readings to Pocket, the read-it-later app for iOS …
As a teacher and frequent presenter, I always carry a MacBook Pro DVI to VGA adapter in my bag so I can connect to any overhead projector or flat screen wherever I’m speaking. This approach works well, but has several downsides that the amazing $35 Google ChromeCast can improve upon: …
Sending short text messages is one of the most popular ways to communicate with friends from your mobile device. It’s great because you don’t need a smartphone, a special app, or to all be using the same service — it works from any mobile device. It’s just a private, one-on-one …
Amara, formerly Universal Subtitles (which I thought was a better name) is an open source tool to let your audience contribute subtitles to your videos, wiki-style. You post your video to a service like YouTube or Vimeo, give Amara the URL, and it gives you a “wrapper” to …
One challenge about creating reusable eLearning content is that designers often fall back into the banking model of education, creating a passive and dependent learning experience for students. This often looks like packaged PowerPoints or blocks of text readings that students are expected to click through and answer multiple-choice comprehension questions …
I was recently quoted in Devon Haynie’s U.S. News and World Report article on the topic of Automated Essay Scoring, and when I saw the finished article I realized that there’s more to say. Ms. Haynie’s article was intended to briefly introduce students to the concept of AES, not to …
