Often we instructional designers are given hours of video footage of recorded lectures or webinars, and it’s our job to edit them down into easily consumable, topic‐focused chunks of video. This can be challenging due simply to the sheer workload of reviewing hours of video, but it’s even harder whe...
In my role as an instructional designer/ Learning Content Developer, a big part of the job is taking instructional materials that my subject matter experts (SMEs) have already created and transforming them into something that’s more attractive, instructionally effective, and optimized for online lea...
I wanted to drop in a quick plug for familiarizing ourselves with the Mozilla Web Literacy Standards and 21st Century Skills. Though edtechies have lots of great tools that are focused on education, it’s also good to have a more fundamental understanding of basic web skills. These are skills a...
I have been researching open source user feedback tools, and I stumbled upon a very nice app called AllOurIdeas.org. The app takes a novel approach to user feedback, allowing your audience to choose between two suggested answers that you “pre‐seed” into the survey. This is great if you have alre...
You can think of BitTorrent Sync as “Dropbox without the Cloud”. Not to be confused with the underlying technology of BitTorrent, this is a way of keeping a folder and files sync’d across mul...
This year, I talked our charter organization’s IT master into switching all our (5) schools and the main office to Google Apps for your Domain. This means that our schools don’t have to maintain their own email servers anymore.… all of the backend is provided by Google, although we still keep the ou
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One of the most revolutionary new products that I’ve brought into my school this year is Google Docs. GDocs is an online office suite (a la MS Office) with a word processor, spreadsheets, and presentation software. On their own, they are fine products (although typing a paper on the web still isn’t...