Online Blogucation

Simply put, colleges and universities [...]

Why couldn’t teachers create games for their students with the students having no idea they were playing? I started by creating a list of learning objectives in my class. Each starting letter of the list was a corresponding letter of my personal website. To my surprise, several students found it, went to my site, and got a small bit of extra credit! So, I started trying other things. I placed “hot spots” on my pages – white text that blended into the background – the when rolled over sent students to a YouTube video. Some students found it. Meanwhile, other students found a puzzle that I created and, upon solving it, found their way to a wiki. There were 4 sets of students working the game from different angles and they didn’t realize it until they were well into the game. But here’s the cool part…the game was all about the educational stuff I was teaching normally!

Most of us strive to be relevant. In his keynote address at Pearson eCollege’s CiTE 2009 User’s Conference, Michael Wesch talked about the crisis of significance and how education technology can help us be more relevant to our students. As formal educators we are all digital immigrants but more of us everyday are [...]

09/08/09: I’m on a plane on my way to perform my first Project Tapestry training. After in many ways suffering through the curriculum meetings and organized “meet and greet your child’s new teacher(s)” sessions that accompany the beginning of the school year in my own children’s schools, I finally get to say all of the [...]

“Where’s my instructor? Am I being taught by a computer?” “I got an 80 on my paper and the only comment was good work—how do I improve?” Sad to say that these are not uncommon questions, they are all too frequently raised by students in some online courses or at some online institutions. Over the [...]

Yep. Barnes & Noble. Of course, if they wanted to, students could go to Starbucks or several McDonalds these days. They can find Internet access almost anywhere but their own school. These students can find Internet at airports during Spring Break, at Kinko’s for X cents per minute, or by going to the public library, but they can’t access the world wide web, including their online classes from school. Ugh.

My summer courses are winding down again and I wanted to try something different for my final discussion topic where students reflect on what they’ve learned that term. I decided to try using Wordle as a visual tool for summarizing text, instead of simply using the typical discussion board posts.
For those of you who haven’t [...]

“Games have moved beyond ‘edutainment’ into complex topics that require higher-order thinking.”
– Brandon Hall, Chief Learning Officer

 
According to http://screentime.org the average American watches 4 hours and 35 minutes of television every day.  The same organization cites a study saying 1 in 4 children under the age of 2 have a television in their rooms.  In [...]

I am a member of the WCET community and receive their very well researched bi-weekly article digests per email. This week, glancing through the names of the articles being researched, I decided to pull three that seemed to present differing views on the same topic, that of using technology in the face to face classroom. [...]

Enhancing Your Courses – Learning Community
What would be your initial thoughts if you were asked to assess your online courses? Would you see the request as an opportunity to improve your courses or as an unwelcome task in an already busy schedule? Hopefully, the request would be seen as a welcome chance to revisit your [...]