This post discusses how to build your own Personal (or Professional) Learning Network. Instead of starting by telling you which tools to use, I want to talk about why you would do this in the first place.…
This is a photo of my high school math teacher, Coach John Wa...
As part of our LMS Evaluation, we’ve investigated concerns around Instructure’s viability and longevity as a business. Recent events surrounding Blackboard should lead us to question its viability with equal diligence.
First there was last week’s report that Blackboard had retained a finan...
When I’m doing a creative project (or just working on a presentation) I am always looking for large, beautiful photos bearing a Creative Commons license. Works released in the Creative Commons can be reused, remixed, redistributed, and revised for free– this makes it easy for me to share this ex...
Ge.tt is a great free tool for quickly and easily sharing files that are too large to send by email (up to 100mb). As a digital art teacher, I often had students trying to send me videos, flash files, audio, or big presentations. As a digital designer, I use this ty...
As faculty, you likely spend several hours every week carefully reading, evaluating, and grading student work. Research shows that students report higher course satisfaction when they get better grades and when faculty exhibit “immediacy and presence behaviors”. This finding suggests that giving i...
During the process of evaluating Blackboard as our Learning Management System (LMS), we came to a basic and fundamental question:
“Which tools do faculty really use?”
Although most of the core functions of an online course can be managed with a blog, Learning Management systems come stuf...
The adoption of Android and iOS smartphones “skyrocketed” in 2010, which means ever more health sciences students, faculty, and staff have access to powerful mini‐computers in their pockets. With this rise came a new crop of excelle...
(This post is part of a series called “The Connected Class Community”).
A popular reason for exploring gamification in online learning is because we want to increase student engagement with the content. Games are nothing if not engaging, and the very best games can give educators deep insights...
Online teachers and instructional designers need access to good tools for capturing screenshots and annotating them. These tools are invaluable for giving step‐by‐step computer instructions to students and faculty, and can really help you communicate information visually.
If you’re new to screen...
(This post is part of a series on online learning communities called “The Connected Class Community”). The purpose of these posts is to explore the vital components of an online learning community using abstract, timeless qualities.
For most of human history, information was stored in books,...