Do you wish you could make one change in your course that would increase student engagement and boost your course evaluations? Research shows that courses with high rates of interaction among students and instructors get better course evals higher student satisfaction and higher course performance. As a matter of fact one of the strongest predictors of student course satisfaction… Read more →
Response to The Trouble with Online College, NY Times I think this article is right on the money about the challenges of online learning– namely that most students wash out and that there is not enough support for struggling learners. I’d like to propose some solutions. See– somewhere in the public excitement over MOOCs is the implicit promise that we… Read more →
I just attended the Flipped Classroom conference yesterday and it gave me a chance to think carefully about how we might approach flipping instruction at SMU. Most of the attendees were K-12 teachers using free tools to flip their own classroom, so it’s a different proposition to try and recommend a set of tools and a preferred workflow that might… Read more →
Until I saw this TED talk, I didn’t care much that free Web 2.0 tools like Google and Facebook were collecting massive dossiers of information about my online habits. I thought they were just using it to serve me more relevant ads and improve my user experience. It seemed like a small price to pay for access to the many… Read more →
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 Ward, who recently passed away after a long career… Read more →
(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 into how to get and keep users’ attention. After all, video game… Read more →
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 capture, the idea is simple– these tools allow you to take a snapshot of your desktop and save… Read more →
(This post is part of a series called “The Connected Class Community”). One essential part of human communities has always been a central meeting place– a location where the community comes to engage in conversations that are bigger than one-on-one interactions can offer. I call this space The Commons and I believe that online communities need to meet this human… Read more →
Lost your job? Put down that remote and listen here! Burrowing a groove in your couch is not getting you any closer to that dream job you want. Why not use your unemployed hours to build your resume? I recently secured my dream job after three depressing months as a laid-off, former high school teacher. I was telling a friend… Read more →
Image by solbronumberone via Flickr This is a presentation I made to help my Beast Bloggers’ Support Group create a Content Plan for their blogs. I wanted them to take a broad view of their objectives and strengths as they develop their blogging identities. I had them list out their objectives, brainstorm a few general topics their blog would cover… Read more →
Reading Lately on Diigo
Stay in Touch