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Evernote is a great web service and software application that we can use in education. A lot of ink has been shed on this topic and just one click in a search engine is enough to get hundreds of links to guides and tutorials about Evernote. I have been going through so many of these resources and have collected ideas, videos, notes and many more. If you are a loyal reader to my blog ( I am glad most of you are ) you would clearly notice that guides I write here are different in that they are simple. to the point, address teachers and students direct need, and most of all written in an easy and simple language.
Promethean By Lillian Mongeau In the race to develop the classroom of the future, tech giant Promethean has taken another step forward this year with a new product called ActivTable. Think iPad on four legs. The newest gadget is the latest in Promethean’s range of interactive classroom products—smart boards, classroom response systems that resemble game show buzzers, teacher dashboards—and is the first of the company’s products designed especially for small group learning.
Students at the University of Wisconsin (UW) can earn college degrees based on proven competency in a subject, making UW the first publicly-funded school to launch a competency-based degree program.
An open online course, Current/Future State of Higher Education, offering in fall 2012 will evaluate the change pressures that face universities and help universities prepare for the future state of higher education.
What is it like to teach a free online course to tens of thousands of students? Dozens of professors are doing just that, experimenting with a format known as Massive Open Online Courses. And there are more providers than ever, some working with elite universities, and others that allow any professor to join in. The Chronicle asked four professors, teaching on different platforms, to share their thoughts on the experience so far. The responses are based on e-mail interviews, which have been condensed and edited for publication.
Though educators are finding smart ways to integrate technology and learning, the road has been and continues to be challenging on multiple fronts. The NMC Horizon Report: 2012 K-12 Edition, a collaboration between the New Media Consortium, the Consortium for School Networking, and the International Society for Technology in Education, takes the birds-eye view and encapsulates some of the significant challenges that must still be addressed and offers the following assessment.
Tinkering with the curriculum is doomed if children are not engaged, policy-makers warned
When it comes to online learning, there’s a new old kid in town. iTunes U is getting a killer feature that has been sorely lacking: social. Like relatively new start-ups Codecademy and Udacity, most iTunes U will finally let you learn alongside others, ask questions, and work on things in a more collaborative environment.
The European Learning Industry Group (ELIG) and the United Nations University are preparing a publication on the emergence of open education as a concept, a production process and a delivery preference in the world of education and learning. They are seeking compelling case studies and contributions. Do you have an academic story to tell?
MIT Professor of Physics David Pritchard is running a free online physics course this summer to help teachers and students brush up on their knowledge.
What happens when you invite the whole world to join an online class? As The Chronicle reported last year, a growing number of educators are giving that idea a try by offering free “massive open online courses,” or MOOC’s, to anyone who wants to learn. Today, that experimental idea gained some more traction in mainstream higher education. The University of Illinois at Springfield announced a new not-for-credit MOOC devoted to examining the state of online education and where e-learning is heading. Nearly 500 people from two dozen countries have registered so far, with 1,000 expected to sign up by the time the course begins next Monday.
Conceptboard is an app for simple, visual teamwork: Create sketches, brainstorm or work together on documents. Directly in your browser or on the iPad.
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OpenScout - Skill-based scouting of open management content. The OpenScout demonstrator provides access to distributed open educational resources in the area of management education and training. Students, professionals in SMEs or large enterprises as well as teachers or course designers can search for open management content that fits their specific needs. The OpenScout demonstrator provides users with an interface to start a keyword based search, filter search results, include competence search criteria, or add social metadata like tags, comments or ratings. Additionally, the user is presented with recommended tools for working with a selected resource.
Why would anyone spend over $2,000 bucks on a new laptop, only to use it like a $500 Chromebook? This is precisely what I think that I am trying to do with my new MacBook Air. A prediction: By 2015 college students will no longer store any files locally. All of their content will live in the cloud - and this will be a commercial (not a university provisioned) service. (With the exception being when a university has partnered with a commercial provider such as Google or Microsoft). I'm less convinced that applications will totally migrate from the device to the cloud, as local applications (that interact with web data) offer some advantages in flexibility and features. Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/should-we-turn-our-macbooks-chromebooks#ixzz1ysawJkqL
Inside Higher Ed
Yes, mobile devices and social networks can produce a lot of distractions, and resisting that may be difficult -- as critics like Joe Kraus point out. But is this really a disaster in the making, or just another social evolution we need to undergo?
In this blog post I want to describe seven principles of learning design. I would welcome comments. Are there any others I have missed for example? The first is that teachers are bewildered by the plethora of tools available and lack the skills necessary to make informed learning design decisions. Therefore a key facet of all the tools is that they attempt to provide practitioners with some form of guidance and support around their design practice. The aim is to help them shift from an implicit, belief-based approach to design to one that is more explicit and design-based (Conole 2009). Evidence of the evaluation of the use of these tools shows that they do help shift practitioners from a focus on content to activities and the learner experience.
The open access movement has gained increasing traction within universities, leading to the creation of numerous courseware repositories of open educational res...
As a result of reading the recent IDB study on the impact of the One Laptop Per Child project in Peru, my World Bank colleague Berk Ozler recently published a great post on the World Bank's Development Impact blog asking "One Laptop Per Child is not improving reading or math. But, are we learning enough from these evaluations?" Drawing insights from his readings of a few evaluations of technology use (one in Nepal [PDF] and one in Romania) he notes that, at quick glance, some large scale implementations of educational technologies are, for lack of a more technical term, rather a 'mess':
A vast and ever-increasing number of the world’s students are studying for degrees without ever setting foot on a campus. Open Universities Australia (OUA), the 20-year-old antipodean pioneer of online learning, is a prime example – it has experienced an unprecedented doubling in enrolments over the past four years.
Learning is a social process and the ability to collaborate, whether online or face-to-face, is a key skill for schools and colleges to foster. The advantages of collaborative learning are clear and have been discussed on this blog many times. However there is always a darker side to everything and a new report has caught my attention. It's called Are Online Learners Frustrated with CollaborativeLearning Experiences? (IRRODL, Vol 13, no 2, 2012) and has been written by Neus Capdeferro and Margarida Romero of Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) in Spain. They have investigated students' frustration with online collaboration and outlined some of the problem areas.
"We know the current pricing of textbooks is discouraging students from purchasing the mandatory reading, but we are changing that," said Thomas Buus Madsen, chief operations officer of Bookboon.com, a company that makes its digital textbooks...
Some of us are on a mission to see how many friends we can acquire on Facebook or followers we can grab on Twitter. You can't help but wonder: Are we so busy making new friends and spending time with them online that we are failing to nurture real-world friendships the old fashioned way? Is how we socialize online eroding our real-life relationships? Or maybe just changing them?
While technology brought disruptive change in many industries, education is only now hovering at the brink of deep and fundamental changes. Open Education and online education challenge the traditional bricks and mortar institution and several forces are driving disaggregation and democratization of the entire educational value chain. A learner now can take a course taught by Yale professors from the comfort of his living room in a remote part of the world. While much has changed, one significant problem of education, assessment needs to be reinvented.
Dave White’s presentation to FSLT12 yesterday included a number of thought-provoking ideas. In the past I have heard Dave speak a number of times about ‘Visitors and Residents’ in the online environment.
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