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Connecting teaching with technology.

Have you been thinking about authoring an elearning course (Life as a 360 Author), but are having a hard time getting a sense of how much content to create to end up with about an hour of seat time?

The following provides broad high-level guidance for authors, subject matter experts, and instructional designers when planning an online course. Note that these are guidelines only. Design for actual courses should reflect learner needs with respect to course objectives.

Discussions are sometimes called the engine of an online course. Discussions provide an opportunity for students to engage with the course content, with each other, and with you—the professor—simultaneously, which means they have a lot of potential for meaningful learning and high retention.

There is no guarantee that students will really apply themselves by just creating a discussion. What you get out of a discussion assignment depends on what you put into it. Here are some tips for writing your discussion prompt, selecting your settings, and participating in the discussion.

WHAT Is Digital CitizenShip? Well, there is a lot of different views! WE will explore THE BEST way to teach and to learn about Digital CitizenShip (hashtag on Twitter is #digcit) AND THEREFORE ...

Social Media: Then Vs Now [INFOGRAPHIC]

The beginning of the new school year is a great time to introduce students to new web search strategies or review the ones they already know. The folks at Canva put together a nice infographic abou...

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Edueto is a teaching tool that allows educators to quickly create customised assignments and tests that target their student’s needs.

Teaching Information Fluency describes the skills and dispositions of information fluency adept searchers. Readers will receive in-depth information on what it takes to locate, evaluate, and ethically use digital information. The book realistically examines the abilities of Internet searchers today in terms of their efficiency and effectiveness in finding online information, evaluating it and using it ethically. Since the majority of people develop these skills on their own, rather than being taught, the strategies they invent may suffice for simple searches, but for more complex tasks, such as those required by academic and professional work, the average person’s performance is adequate only about 50% of the time. The book is laid out in five parts: an introduction to the problem and how search engine improvements are not sufficient to be of real help, speculative searching, investigative searching, ethical use and applications of information fluency. The intent of the book is to provide readers ways to improve their performance as consumers of digital information and to help teachers devise useful ways to integrate information fluency instruction into their teaching, since deliberate instruction is needed to develop fluency. Since it is unlikely that dedicated class time will be available for such instruction, the approach taken embeds information fluency activities into classroom instruction in language arts, history and science. Numerous model lessons and resources are woven into the fabric of the text, including think-alouds, individual and group search challenges, discussions, assessments and curation, all targeted to Common Core State Standards as well as information fluency competencies.

35 Educational Pinners You MUST Check out! I love Pinterest! It’s kind of hard to believe this is my first post about this wonderful curation tool. Pinterest is NOT just for crafts and recipes, and...