In-class activities can be a great way to foster student engagement in the classroom. Depending on the activity, the results can vary greatly. Sometimes they can fall flat, but every so often an activity manages to hold the students’ undivided attention.
The traditional online course structure violates a fundamental principle of learning by separating the process of getting information from the process of engaging it. The student is asked to go through some sort of resource in its entirety—be it a video, website, or reading—and then
“Aquick search of video sharing sites, as well as the web pages of prominent universities, reveals a treasure-trove of content available to students and interested lay-people,” observe political science faculty members Daniel Mallinson and Zachary Baumann. A variety of software products make lecture capture (the
Online faculty are always on the lookout for a good system for facilitating group work. You want a system that separates student contributions and allows the instructor to view the progression of student work. Google Drive, a cloud-based, shared document editing website, is ideal for
Most teachers consider Wikipedia the devil’s realm, a place where rumor and misinformation are spread. But in reality, studies have found that Wikipedia has an accuracy of a regular encyclopedia. Inaccurate information is quickly corrected by volunteer editors, and there are strict standards for entering
Calls to ban laptops in college classrooms are based on accumulating research showing their negative effects not only on users but also on students sitting nearby. Survey research documents that students believe they can simultaneously pay attention to what is happening in the classroom while
Blogging can be a tool that aids learning. “Blogs provide students with an opportunity to ‘learn by doing’ to make meaning through interaction with the online environment. …” (p. 398) They provide learning experiences described as “discursive,” meaning, students learn by discussing, which makes blogs
Discussion boards. Google documents. YouTube videos. TED Talks. Khan Academy. These are just a few of the many resources some of us have used in our ever-growing arsenal of techie tools. We want to stay on the cutting edge. The Online Learning Consortium predicts this
Organizing and writing ideas and building presentations can be a taxing and complicated process for students. Writing requires multitasking. When some of these tasks are challenging, they can become overwhelming and can often disrupt the creative flow of ideas. One way to help students focus
Publishers are quickly moving into the etext business. Technology makes it possible to provide much more than written descriptions of course content. The authors of an exploration of etexts identify the positive aspects of these technology-enhanced texts: convenience, portability, and currency. But as these authors
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