Educational Technology
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Google Docs for Teaching and Learning
[social-bio] Google Docs have been around for about five years now and it “…is a free, Web-based office suite and data storage service offered by Google within its Google Drive service. It allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating in real-time with other users” (Wikipedia) I originally found Google Docs to be very convenient to be able to have access to my files on multiple computers. As I have experimented with them more, I have found them to be extremely useful in an educational setting. I have used them as both a teacher and also as a grad student. Note that once you create a document you…
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Remind 101: Text Messaging for Instructors
[social-bio] How do your students do the majority of communication? The obvious answer is text messaging. Students seem to live on their phones and always have them with them; I think that we need to use this to our advantage! Remind101 is a free service that was designed for K-12 teachers, but can easily be used in a higher education setting. It allows teachers to send messages to students in the form of a text message. The teacher simply creates an account on Remind101.com and sets up his or her class(es). The site then provides a number and a code. The students must subscribe to messages from the instructor by…
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Instead of a MOOC, How About a SOOC?
[social-bio] This post was originally published on Heather Ross’s blog on October 3, 2012 There’s been a lot of talk about MOOCs lately. I’ve even written a couple of posts related to them here and here. We were talking about them during a recent staff meeting and the term SOOC came out of my mouth. My boss said I should trademark it, but I’m not sure that A) someone else hasn’t already said or B) trademarking such a term would be in the spirit of what I’m advocating. A SOOC is a “small open online course” (as opposed to the “massive open online course”) and I’m currently building one for…
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Teaching Online: A Practical Guide
[social-bio] The Book Ko, S. & Rossen, S. (2010). Teaching online: A practical guide (3rd ed.) New York, NY: Routledge. The target audiences of this book are post-secondary instructors and instructional designers. It is extremely thorough and covers three main topics of Getting Started, Putting the Course Together and Teaching in the Online Classroom. Getting Started is an overview of online teaching, including answers to many common questions or concerns, reasons why classes should be offered online and also a detailed look at your institution’s level of readiness. At the University of Saskatchewan we fall into the high-readiness category, which bodes well for any instructors that are moving into teaching…
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Organizing With Evernote
[social-bio] Sticky notes, notebooks, loose leaf, Word documents…we all have different ways of taking and storing notes. Many of us even have multiple methods of taking notes. Last fall I began experimenting with Evernote and haven’t looked back. Evernote is an application and also a website that is designed to take notes. You can easily type out text-based notes, take pictures, record audio and save online content. This may sound fairly common but there are a few things that set Evernote apart from its competitors. Free – there is a premium account but 99% of users only need the free features Works on all operating systems and devices – PCs,…
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Open CourseWare at the U of S
[social-bio] Are you teaching a class this term? Would you consider opening some of your class resources to the public? Students thinking of taking your class next year could look up your notes to get a better idea of what to expect. People outside the university could find out more about what we do. Your colleagues could learn more about what you do. Using the U of S Course Tools, you can hand-pick files within your course for sharing more widely. Every course using U of S Course tools has a built-in public view. By default, the public view is very limited, and you can chose to share as many…
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Getting Started with Blended Learning
[social-bio] Blended learning, defined as using online tools to support face-to-face instruction, is a popular term these days in education. It can represent a very wide spectrum of ideas from posting lecture materials online all the way to holding some of your classes online. There are many possible benefits to employing blended approaches and with growing pressures to offer more courses online, I think now would be a great time to start exploring. If you are thinking of doing some blending, here are ideas of where you could begin: Post your course syllabus and lecture notes – or portions of notes – to your course’s Blackboard page. This will give…
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Diigo for Portable Bookmarks and Sharing Resources
[social-bio] For many years I did what most people do when I wanted to bookmark something online – I would save it in whatever browser that I was using and if I was away from my home computer I would email the link to myself. If I wanted to share the link with others I would email it to them. This worked fine for awhile, but then I started working on multiple browsers and on multiple computers and I would become frustrated when I realized that the link I needed was stuck in the bookmarks on a different computer. Does this sound familiar? Today, I never worry about such things…
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An Open Letter to Canadian Universities
Guest Author, George Siemens The following post was written by George Siemens from the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute at Athabasca University. It is reprinted here with his permission. An Open Letter to Canadian Universities Dear Canadian Universities, You are, as the cool 4chan/Reddit kids say, about to get pwned. The dramatic entrance of elite US universities into online learning will change the education landscape globally. Where we, as Canadian higher education institutions, should be leading, we are laggards. The geography and distributed sparse population of Canada lends itself well to technology-enhanced learning. Remote northern communities can benefit substantially from being able to join classes on subjects where local expertise…
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Making History With Technology in the Classroom
[social-bio] Last December someone pointed me towards an article about John Boyer, a professor at Virginia Tech, and his intriguing uses of technology in his World Regions class. By the time the column about Boyer was published, he had already “used his viral YouTube tactics to lure actors Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez to present their film, ‘The Way’.” He had also had his students create clearly fake Twitter accounts to pose as current world leaders in government and business to respond to current world issues. The most amazing part of the story, however, was what was yet to come in Boyer’s class of 3000 students. He and his students…