At Top Hat, we’ve been working on making education more effective and affordable since 2009. Now, we’re happy to make a move that delivers on both fronts. Beginning April 12, with the launch of our Open Content Initiative, we’re offering completely free access to thousands of textbooks and other Open Educational Resources (OER)—freely accessible and openly licensed learning materials—on the Top Hat Marketplace.

To effectively engage in online learning that involves interactivity, students need to develop a sense of technology competence. While our most tech-savvy students have no problems jumping right in, others may need a scaffolded approach to engaging in online interactivity.

Our Online campus is seeking a full-time Writing Specialist whose primary responsibility will be to coordinate and provide writing support services for students in Online Masters and Doctoral programs. The writing specialist will provide individual and group learning opportunities and coordinate all services from the Center to help students develop their academic and professional writing skills. This position will report to the Dean of Academic Affairs Online.

These days more and more colleges are setting up systems that automatically email students when an algorithm determines they are academically at risk

Computational thinking is defined by Cummins as a process that "encourages students to explore solutions to problems that remain unsolved. (It) inspires innovation and supports problem-solving skills".

Design thinking, as stated by Scholastic, "is a creative problem-solving process that calls for thoughtful solutions to real-world situations.".

"...one great choice for graphic organizers is Google Drawings. See below for directions on how to create graphic organizers with Google Drawings (including a help guide and a recorded webinar) as well as 30 free sample graphic organizers that you can copy, use, and modify as needed."

Four simple ways to model and promote compassion, which is especially important for students with adverse childhood experiences.

Tools for Making Vibrant Videos by Jaimie Hoffman and T&L Innovations is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Learn Moodle 3.5 Basics
This free course is designed for anybody who wants to use the Moodle learning platform for teaching, whether it be in a school, a university, a company or just personal interest!

The four-week course is also a great opportunity to connect with the vibrant Moodle community dedicated to sharing resources, ideas and anything that could help inspire better teaching practices everywhere.

The courses are designed for educators interested in a graduate certificate professional development program, not a mathematics teaching license/certification.

 

Our students include:

 

Title I math teachers

Math interventionists
Elementary and middle school math teachers
Mathematics coaches
Mathematics resource teachers
Lead math teachers
Special education teachers

There’s plenty of good research on study strategies that promote learning. It’s also well-documented that students don’t always use them. As most of us are well aware, procrastination gets in the way of learning. Cramming ends up being mostly a shoveling exercise—digging up details and dropping them into short term-memory. But there’s also evidence that students don’t know that some strategies do more for learning than others. And guess what? Neither do some faculty.

Learn by giving feedback! Peergrade is a free online platform to facilitate peer feedback sessions with students.

One potential culprit captured by the study: Faculty may lack the training necessary to take advantage of smaller class sizes, open classroom layouts and other strategies meant to reduce the reliance on conventional lecturing. Lectures did occur less often in smaller than larger classes, the study found, and open layouts did correlate with more student-centered learning. But about half of the courses with those advantages still featured more conventional lecturing than interactive or student-centered teaching styles.

A collection of emerging tools just right for humanizing your online course.

Peruse the buffet, click on the links, and sample what looks intriguing and helpful to you!

Establishing a connection with online learners is a demonstrated strategy for increasing student motivation in online classes (Jones, Kolloff & Kolloff, 2008) and a marker of instructor excellence (Palloff & Pratt, 2011). Employing the the behaviors and strategies noted below is an effective step towards making your online students' learning more relevant and increasing their investment in your class (DuCharme-Hansen, Dupin-Bryant, 2005).

Video Overview of PBL (Project Based Learning). 

This page gathers all of the Bloomin' Apps projects in one place.

Each image has clickable hotspots and includes suggestions for iPad, Android, Google and Web 2.0 applications to support each of the levels of Bloom's Revised Taxonomy.

As institutions expand their commitment to online education, many now recognize the value of dedicated staffers who assist faculty members in translating old courses to a new format and creating new courses out of whole cloth

My late friend Hans Rosling called the labels “outdated” and “meaningless.” Any categorization that lumps together China and the Democratic Republic of Congo is too broad to be useful. But I’ve continued to use “developed” and “developing” in public (and on this blog) because there wasn’t a more accurate, easily understandable alternative—until now.

For the last 24 hours the Twittersphere has been buzzing about the recent changes to Padlet. While none of the following tools have as many features as Padlet, they all provide the core element of a digital wall to which you apply digital sticky notes. Here are five alternatives to Padlet. These are in the order in which I prefer

How can you build a Makerspace in your school? How can you support the learning by doing maker movement in your classroom? Learn instructional strategies and how to use tools (physical or virtual) to support building models, prototypes, inventions and innovations and encourage creative problem solving and team collaboration across a wide range of subject matters and all grade levels.

When procurement decisions focus too heavily on inputs like enrolling students in online courses or filling tutoring time, it’s hardly surprising to find tools merely providing cheaper seat-time-based learning models. Pockets of the market, such as credit recovery, have largely fallen victim to this trend. Moreover, even if schools want to focus on learning outcomes, they may be purchasing tools blindly when little to no efficacy data exists to inform their decisions.