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 →
With the news that Google Apps for Education will be integrated with Google+ in a few days, it’s time to start thinking about how social media and collaboration can be a reality for schools.
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 →
In Cultivate Your Personal Learning Network Part I, you learned to find and organize information that will teach you, challenge your ideas, and help you stay on top of interesting new developments in your areas of interest. The second part of the Learning Loop is the “Outputs” stage. Here you will need to get in the habit of adding value to… Read more →
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 excellent work in my own work. My favorite search engine for… 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 →
Image via Wikipedia Did you know you can save time and effort by starting a Frequently Asked Questions Discussion Board in your course? Do you get tired of answering the same student questions over and over? Save time and effort by starting a Frequent Asked Questions forum in your course! It is a public way for students to share questions… 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 →
Image via Wikipedia Even in the upper grades, students are struggling to make the transition from “learning-to-read” to “reading-to-learn”. Give a struggling reader a context-reduced novel written in old, antiquated language and you will realize that students need as much life-like context as we can provide. One way to help students access texts is to provide audio versions that they… Read more →
As an English teacher, I always felt like I was drowning in a sea of papers. I needed to get the students to do high quality thinking, and the only way I knew how to evaluate that thinking was through their writing. Last semester, I got smart and had them turn in their final art reflections as MP3 files that… Read more →
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