Author Archive
Cool stuff
The New Media Centers Consortium (http://www.nmc.org/) does a great job of helping to promote effective use of technology for education. They’ve recently started their “Cool Tech” site to help people find and share cool stuff (OK, some of it may be more cool than useful). Alan Levine, Vice President of NMC and a genuinely cool [...]
You don’t have to be sick in order to use technology for teaching.
This summer I’ve been involved in planning for how we’ll continue teaching in the event of a large outbreak of H1N1 – the dreaded Swine Flu. I’ve been asked to document how teachers can use technology as a substitute for some of the activities that would otherwise be carried out in the classroom.
It’s no surprise [...]
New report on the effectiveness of online learning
The US Department of Education released a new report on 6/26/09 concerning the effectiveness of online learning. This report is a meta-analysis which analyzes the results of prior studies.
The attention-grabbing headline of this report states, “The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction. The difference [...]
Student privacy in a public world
In a previous post, I described some free, commercial tools that instructors and students can use for creating web sites for course projects. But planning a web project requires more than just finding the right technology platform. As an instructor, you need to consider what type of material is – and is not [...]
Free services for student-generated web sites
Many instructors want to get their students involved in contributing content to web sites for class projects; in some cases, they want the students to build a site from scratch. IT support staff (such as myself) are typically reluctant to provision resources on University systems for such projects. Setting up and maintaining sites can consume [...]
Helpful guidelines for structuring online learning activities
I came across a helpful web site that I wanted to share.
http://www.atimod.com/e-tivities/intro.shtml
The site provides a synopsis of a book which is now somewhat out of date (published 2002), but still provides some useful tips in concise form.
The book is called E-tivities by Dr [...]
Keep students informed about their performance
At a recent meeting about technology support for SAS students, several student pointed out that they would like to see their instructors make better use of the Grade Center function in Blackboard. In particular, they were urging their instructors to use the Grade Center to track all graded assignments – not just mid-term or final [...]
Invite special guests to your class via web conferencing
Do you have a research collaborator, subject matter expert or other guest whom you would like to invite to speak with your class?
It’s no longer necessary to reserve special videoconferencing rooms in order to make a connection between your class and a remote participant. The new breed of web conferencing tools – iChat, Skype, Windows [...]
