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!

Flu season is right around the corner and many are contemplating flu vaccines. However, as I’m dealing with yet another situation of academic dishonesty (which unfortunately seems to happen about once a semester… so hopefully this is it for a while!), I’m reminded of a great article from our Educator’s Voice newsletter on “Vaccinating against [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This professor of communications and lover of cheese steaks bought a new pair of running shoes a few months back. Then, he bought the Nike sensor system – a small sensor you put in your shoe somehow. This sensor sends information to your iPod during a run. That data tells you (in real time) how you’re doing, but it also allows you to see any trends in your running after you upload the data to the Nike+ website. Apparently he’s run about 340 miles and his average speed has increased by 1 mile per hour. He can tell you how many calories he’s burned and he’s delighted to tell you how many pounds he has lost.

Questions about copyright and the fair use of copyrighted materials for education come up a lot during out work with educators on different campuses. I was planning on writing about this topic anyway, and then I came across a great resource that I knew I had to share. It’s an interactive guide to using multimedia [...]

I was trying to guess for someone today how many trainings I’ve performed for eCollege.  Wow…I’ve been at the company almost 7 years and my first job was as a trainer.  Now, as the manager of that same group I don’t “train” as much as I used to, but I still keep my toe in the pool.  I would [...]