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    Free Language Learning Resources from Universitiesandcolleges.org

    August 20, 2009

    BY NICK YINGLING

    Lately, during my lunch break, I usually sit at my desk and drop crumbs of food into my keyboard. That’s a terribly boring way to pass your lunch hour. So, naturally, I started watching my favorite show, The Golden Girls, on a streaming TV site. The main problem now is that most sites don’t have full episodes, just the excerpts. So I dug deeper. One site that streams shows is based somewhere in Asia. There are all sorts of foreign characters bannered across the top of the screen and the subtitles can sometimes take up one-third of the screen. How cool would it be if I managed to learn to read Chinese from passively exposing myself to the subtitles on my streaming episodes of The Golden Girls during my lunch break?!

    (more…)

    Free course opportunity from Game Design Concepts

    June 24, 2009

    BY NICK YINGLING

    Free course, y’all! (I write Southern now.) Game Design Concepts is an experimental class in game design and pedagogy being taught by Ian Schreiber, a game designer with several years in the video game industry. Registration in the course is free, but there is a required textbook. No problem there, right now it is listed for less than $20 on Amazon. You had better act fast — the class starts Monday, June 29th. Sorry for the short notice on this one.

    The aim of this course isn’t to teach you the technical code work involved in designing a game, but rather the theoretical and conceptual design issues. You know, the kind of stuff that keeps a really good video game from ending up like Lee Carvallo’s Putting Challenge.

    At the end of this course you should be familiar enough with the processes to start developing your own games. This can be particularly beneficial if you’re kicking around the idea of being a consultant for some game-based learning developers. At the very least, though, it will help a teacher in any capacity gain a more critical eye when evaluating games for their classroom.

    Game Design Concepts

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    Photo credit: striatic on Flickr.

    Free online professional development course: Introduction to Online Learning

    May 20, 2009

    Looking for a way to get your feet wet in the online classroom? LEARN NC, Instructify’s parent organization is offering a free professional development course, Introduction to Online Learning, to get you acclimated to virtual schooling. The course begins Wednesday, May 27 (that’s one week from today, folks) and it’s free to up to 15 North Carolina public school personnel on a first-come, first-served basis.

    Introduction to Online Learning introduces first-time online learners to the characteristics, requirements, tools, and practices of distance learning. You’ll learn how to use the discussion forum, participate in a synchronous chat, and review both formal and informal online courses in a welcoming, patient atmosphere. Participants who complete the course will receive a certificate for 1 CEU.

    LEARN NC will offer IOL again this fall, but if you wait till then it’ll cost you. Don’t miss your opportunity to take it for free! To register, please click here. -BILL FERRIS

    Introduction to Online Learning

    Photo credit: selva on Flickr.

    Monday by the numbers

    April 13, 2009

    3 Challenges to Wiki Use in Instruction
    Every teacher’s got a wiki these days. So what do you do with it in class? Integrating a piece of technology doesn’t lend itself to flying by the seat of one’s pants. THE Journal presents 3 Challenges to Wiki Use in Instruction, discussing what factors must be overcome to get the most out of wikis in education.

    The World of 100
    Imagine if the world were condensed into a village of 100 people. Now imagine if these villagers’ lifestyles were documented in the form of snazzy-looking charts. Toby Ng Design has created The World of 100, an illustration project in which demographic information such as population, literacy and air quality are depicted in striking graphic representations.

    Learn 35+ Languages for Free in iTunes
    LifeClever presents this list of free language courses available on iTunes. Good for your language students, or for anyone who’d like to converse in another language.

    100 Free Online Lectures that Will Make You a Better Teacher
    As a dedicated teacher, you’re always looking to improve professionally, right? A good tip at the right time can make a world of difference. This list of online videos will give you knowledge and ideas for getting even better at what you do. These videos deal with instructional suggestions, technology demos, and rules of the road for new teachers. -BILL FERRIS

    Photo credit: One Good Bumblebee on Flickr.

    Instructifeature: Communication in your online course

    March 24, 2009

    This is the second in a series of feature articles about online teaching. Keep checking Instructify every week for a new feature. Click here to read part one, click here Taking the plunge into online teaching — your students.

    Every educator knows that a significant component of good teaching is good communication, and most of us are quite skilled in communicating with students who are in the same room with us. But some of the communication cues that we use in brick-and-mortar classrooms don’t always translate to the online environment.

    Online vs. face-to-face

    In a face-to-face classroom, we can see who is in the room and can use students’ facial expressions and body language as informal feedback, helping us gauge students’ interest, engagement, and understanding.  A simple glance around the classroom can tell us whether or not students “get it” and help us realize when we may need to slow down, speed up, add another example, ask a question, or explain something again. Students working on group projects see each other in class and can easily talk to one another about their ideas or quickly compare schedules to set meeting times for a long-term project.  Students and teachers have time before, during, and after class to check in with each other, ask questions, and request or offer advice and feedback. Our physical proximity, ability to interact instantaneously, and visual and auditory cues all help us communicate with one another and understand how our students are responding to our teaching.

    Online courses present a different set of challenges. In an asynchronous online course, participants often log in at different times, making it rare for everyone to participate in the course simultaneously. If a student doesn’t post comments or ideas in class discussion forums, she can be “invisible” to their instructor and their peers. That silence could signify any number of problems — perhaps the student simply isn’t logging in. Maybe she doesn’t understand the material, or doesn’t know what to add to the discussion. Unless your online course uses video chat options, you won’t have visual cues (facial expressions, body language, etc.) teachers and students take for granted in classroom interaction. In an asynchronous environment, the lag time between posting a question and receiving a reply may make it more difficult to quickly resolve a question or to schedule times for group work sessions, chats, or other real-time features of the course. As instructors, we need to make an extra effort to overcome these potential difficulties and help our students become effect online communicators.

    Find your students’ comfort zone

    In my experience, students differ in their comfort level with online communication. Some students are hesitant to join an online conversation if they don’t yet feel a sense of connection to their peers. Others may be uncomfortable with the technologies involved or may not log in regularly enough to take a meaningful role in an ongoing discussion. On the other hand, some students may be shy in a face-to-face setting or prefer written to oral communication, making them more comfortable in an online discussion than they would be in a face-to-face classroom. Others may appreciate the ability to think through their answers to questions and write them out in a deliberative way rather than being put on the spot in a real-time discussion. Whatever your students’ preferences, you’ll find that establishing a rapport and encouraging interaction early and often will probably help everyone participate more fully and begin to create a vibrant online learning community.

    I like to use introductions and ice breakers early in the course and to encourage a lot of first-week interaction to try to get to know my students and help them get to know each other. I usually post a photo of myself along with a warm introduction that shares my professional qualifications and some of my personal interests in an effort to make myself real to my students, and I invite my students to do the same. I start to make connections between students by noticing common threads in their introductions and suggesting ways that the students might benefit from each other’s experiences and expertise.

    Lines of communication

    As the course gets underway, I use all of the communication tools at my disposal — email, discussion boards, chats, etc. — to stay in touch with students and foster communication (both student-teacher communication and student-to-student communication). If someone hasn’t posted to the discussion board in a couple of days, I send them a personal message making sure that they aren’t having technical difficulties and inviting them to jump into the conversation. Don’t forget that the telephone is also a tool that online teachers can use to get in touch with students when higher-tech strategies have failed or when speedy communication or a stronger personal connection might be more beneficial.

    Of course, one of the best ways to ensure good communication is to model it for our students. Logging in daily (even several times a day), promptly replying to emails and discussion posts, reaching out to students who are not yet participating fully, posing open-ended, thought-provoking questions, and responding generously to student questions and comments all set the tone for an inviting, engaging learning community. Once you’ve found your own communication style in the online environment, I think you’ll find that online communities can be places where students and teachers communicate very effectively, developing a strong rapport and engaging in exciting discussions that will get everybody thinking and learning.

    In my next Instructifeature on online teaching, I’ll explore some of the ways that you can share information with your students in an online course. -KATHRYN WALBERT

    Dr. Kathryn Walbert has developed and taught several online courses in the fields of online teaching and U.S. history. She serves as a consultant on U.S. history, oral history, and academic skills to LEARN NC and other organizations throughout North Carolina. 

    Photo credit: larskflem on Flickr.

    Win a free online course in online teaching. Online.

    March 18, 2009

    In honor of Kathryn Walbert’s new series of feature articles on online teaching, Instructify is giving one lucky teacher a free online course in LEARN NC’s Carolina Online Teacher program.

    The COLT program is a certification track in online teaching. The program shows teachers the particulars of online pedagogy, collaboration, and how to navigate the virtual classroom. All COLT courses are online (duh), allowing you to work on them where and when you’re most ready, whether that’s during your planning period, or at 11 p.m. in your jammies. For more information on COLT, please click here.

    How to win

    We want to hear  your questions, insights and thoughts about online teaching and learning. Simply post a comment on the article, Instructifeature: Taking the plunge into online teaching — your students. One randomly selected commenter will win a free spot in a COLT course.

    Please note, your comments must add something to the discussion. Writing “I like online courses,” or “Here’s my comment,” won’t work. However, something like “Online courses provide teachers the unique opportunity to engage different types of learners…” would probably work better.

    Deadline

    To qualify for the contest, you’ll have to leave a comment by Wednesday, March 25. If you’d like to get some professional development online and see if online teaching is right for you, comment now for your chance to win.

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    Instructifeature: Taking the plunge into online teaching — your students

    Instructifeature: Taking the plunge into online teaching — your students

    March 18, 2009

    This is the first in a series of feature articles about online teaching. Keep checking Instructify every week for a new feature.

    If you’re considering taking your teaching skills into the online classroom, you may be wondering what to expect.  How is online learning different from face-to-face learning?  What does it demand of learners and teachers? How will I get to know my students, build a rapport with them, and communicate effectively?

    When I got started teaching online in 2001, online learning was not as widespread as it is now and there was very little research on effective teaching and learning strategies for the online environment.  Fortunately, today’s new online teachers can draw on the experiences of veteran educators, training programs like LEARN NC’s COLT program, and on a great deal of new research to help them acclimate to this new environment quickly and put best practices into action in their own online classrooms.  In this first of what I hope will be a series of Instructifeatures about online teaching, I’ll focus on the learners in your online course.

    One of the keys to successful teaching in any environment is the ability to tailor your instruction to the needs of the students in your course.  So who are the people who take online courses, and what special challenges do they face?

    Online learners come from all walks of life, as this article by Jennifer Williamson points out.  If you are teaching K-12 students, your students may be taking credit recovery courses, enrolling in advanced or specialized courses that are not available in their brick and mortar schools, homeschooling, or participating in alternative education programs.  If you are teaching professional development courses for adult learners, your students may tell you that they are interested in exploring a topic that isn’t offered in their school system’s professional development offerings or they may simply appreciate the flexibility and convenience of online learning.  Understanding students’ reasons for taking an online course can help you anticipate and meet their needs more effectively.

    Whatever their reasons for enrolling in an online course, online learners will need to be motivated, organized and independent.  Without the face-to-face contact and regular schedule of an in-person class, online learners must take the initiative to login regularly, complete assignments on time, and make connections with their instructor and other learners in the course.  Online learners also have to have a certain degree of tech-savvy so that they can navigate the course and use online tools successfully.

    There are a number of tools available for online learners to help them determine their own readiness for the challenges of online learning.  SORT, the Student Online Readiness Tool from the University of Georgia system, offers an online quiz with suggestions to help learners fill in any gaps in their preparations.  Building some sort of self-assessment of readiness for online learning into your course can help your students understand their level of preparedness, allowing them to plan ahead for a successful online learning experience and allowing the instructors to understand which students may need some additional support.

    Online education can help fill many needs for K-12 and adult learners, allowing them to explore otherwise-unavailable topics, learn in a flexible and convenient environment, and step outside the boundaries of the traditional classroom which may, for a variety of reasons, not fully meet their needs.  The online environment presents its own special challenges for students, but if instructors are aware of those challenges and can help students prepare to meet them, online learners and their teachers can look forward to a fantastic experience. In my next Instructifeature on online teaching, I’ll share some ideas for communicating effectively with the learners in your online courses! -KATHRYN WALBERT

    Dr. Kathryn Walbert has developed and taught several online courses in the fields of online teaching and U.S. history. She serves as a consultant on U.S. history, oral history, and academic skills to LEARN NC and other organizations throughout North Carolina. 

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    How to improve your online learning experience

    Continue your education with Academic Earth

    Continue your education with Academic Earth

    February 19, 2009

    aca.pngEveryone would agree that learning is important. If we didn’t, none of us would be doing what we do. But are we practicing what we preach to our students? Are we, as educators, continuing our education in the same way we urge our students to do every day? In the past, unless you were willing to shell out thousands and thousands of dollars for additional schooling, continuing education was tough to come by. Not anymore.

    Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education. In conjunction with top-level universities such as MIT and Princeton, Academic Earth brings the best content together in one place and creates an environment where that content is remarkably easy to use.

    There are thousands of lectures currently available from the world’s top scholars. You may already be familiar with the MIT Open Courseware project or the Open Yale courses, which make thousands and thousands of lectures and courses available online for free. Academic Earth includes these resources but has added lectures from Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton and Stanford.

    Currently, 17 subjects are represented ranging from Astronomy to Religion. All subjects include individual lectures, but many of them also offer entire courses. For example, if you’re interested in Computer Science, you can view all 32 lectures in Introduction to Computer Science I by David J. Malan at Harvard — for free. All of the videos at AE can be shared to a Facebook page, emailed, or embedded into a blog or wiki. Academic Earth also gives users the ability to create your own custom play list to make future visits a tad easier.

    So the next time you’ve got the urge to learn a little about “The Fourier Transform and its applications” or “Convex Optimization,” Academic Earth is the place to go. - JERRY SWIATEK

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    Tune in to The Adventures of CyberBee

    February 13, 2009

    cyberbeeWith technology moving as fast as it does, it takes a great website like CyberBee to keep students and educators ahead of the curve. CyberBee has been around for 12 years, and sets a high standard when it comes to how to present information on the web about how students can USE the web.

    The site is divided into several areas of activities, each with plenty of video and downloadable documents to supplement them. You can get curriculum ideas in such areas as Language Arts, Social Studies, and even for science fair projects. Explore further and you’ll find plenty of research tools, too.

    CyberBee uses resources available on the web to help students learn how to explore and find information online. This is exactly the type of site that will get them prepared for college research as well as build homework and study skills. It’s also a good compendium for teachers to get insight on how to use the web for teaching, and as the site is run by teachers, you know the information you’re getting is legit. There is a lot to explore here, so go see what all the “buzz” is about over at CyberBee. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

    CyberBee

    Monday by the Numbers

    February 2, 2009

    NumbersWell, it looks like Ol’ Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, so that means six more weeks of winter. Not to worry, though, as here’s a list of lists to keep you warm.

    5 Steps to Becoming a Teacher - The Apple delivers this list of five things you need to do in order to get on the road toward becoming a teacher. Since most of you reading this are already teachers, feel free to pass these tips on to your friends and family members who want to know what it takes. Each step is further broken down into more detailed categories, such as “Characteristics teachers need” under the first and possibly most important step, “Decide if teaching is right for you.”

    5 Online Tools to Help You Cite Your Research Papers - We’ve mentioned EasyBib before, but The Students’ Blog brings four more citation tools to help your students breeze through the often headache-inducing process of creating a research paper bibliography.

    Top 100 Tools for Learning 2008 -I know, I know, it’s 2009, but that doesn’t mean this list is totally irrelevant. With 100 tools on the list, there’s bound to be some things you’ve seen or possibly used before, like Firefox and Skype, but there are plenty of new toys to play with, too. This list comes to us from across the pond at C4LPT (Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies).

    69 Free or Open Source Tools For Students - We don’t believe in having to pay for software, especially when it comes to tools that are useful for educators. That’s why lists like this one from “This is the OC (Online College)” are so useful. Again, you’ll probably see some old favorites here, but the list is divided by categories like “Learning & Brainstorming,” so you can discover new open source software no matter what your students need. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

    Photo credit: curly_exp(l)osure on Flickr

    School Rack: Free websites for teachers

    January 16, 2009

    SchoolRackSo, it’s time to get your own website. You could do it the old fashioned way and build it from scratch, but then you’d have to know HTML, CSS or some such. Or, you could do it the Web 2.0 way and start a blog on Blogspot, Tumblr, or WordPress. Easy enough, but then you’re going to get a lot of what you don’t necessarily need, and not a lot of what you do. What’s a teacher to do? Well, you can start by checking out SchoolRack, a content platform designed to help teachers create their very own websites easily for no cost. (There’s an upgrade you can get for a low monthly cost, but you probably won’t ever need to bother with it.)

    With the free version, you can create a site that will allow your students and their parents to keep up with what you’re doing. You can choose from a variety of themes as well as customize the content to meet the needs of your classroom. You can even host files in case a student needs to download a homework assignment. The design of the site template isn’t the prettiest thing in the world, but you can customize colors enough that you can show off your web-savviness without compromising a good, fun theme for young students.

    Other features include a photos option, a calendar, and mailing lists. SchoolRack seems like a great place to start if you need a website to help stay connected with your students. Also, you’ll be a part of a network of searchable teachers in your area, so those looking to relocate to your area can find out all the details about a great teacher such as yourself. Here’s a sample page to give you an idea of what to expect. (Please try to ignore the Comic Sans. I know. I know.) -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

    SchoolRack

    Win money and recognition in the 2008 Digital Media and Learning Competition

    October 1, 2008

    Digital Media and Learning CompetitionHASTAC is looking for the sharpest needles on the digital farm, and when they find them, they’ll award them anywhere from $5,000 to $250,000. You’re an Instructify reader; surely you could be one of those talented needles — especially if you’ve got a great Web 2.0 project or idea.

    The aforesaid HASTAC (pronounced just like the proverbial bale of dried grass) is actually the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, an initiative funded by the deep-pocketed MacArthur Foundation. The 2008 Digital Media and Learning Competition is giving out two separate kinds of awards: one to teams of people on “larger-scale projects” and the other to individual “innovators aged 18-25.” In both cases, the DML Competition wants to encourage “Participatory Learning,” which from their description doesn’t sound much different from social networking: “Participatory Learning includes the many ways that learners (of any age) use new technologies to participate in virtual communities where they share ideas, comment upon one another’s projects, and plan, design, advance, implement, or simply discuss their goals and ideas together.”

    Examples of winning projects from 2007 include “FollowTheMoney.org”, which helps civics students (and all of us) understand certain legislative activities; the “Black Cloud” Environmental Studies game played by high school students from Los Angeles and Cairo; and “Always With You”, a mobile-phone network that enables micro-funding to young African social activists.

    The deadline for this year’s competition is October 15, 2008, so start honing your application-filling-out skills now. –AMANDA FRENCH

    2008 Digital Media and Learning Competition

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    Tuesday by the numbers

    September 16, 2008

    lotto.jpgIf you were jonesing for a list of lists to better your edification skills yesterday, I apologize. Nonetheless, Instructify is happy to present Tuesday by the Numbers, the day-late version of its sister column, Monday by the Numbers.

    100 Free Online Ivy League Courses You Should Take Just for Fun - I know it says “for fun,” but come on, the real reason to take any class is to get some sort of betterment or education, right? Whatever your motive, Eduk8 delivers this great list of online course offerings from places like Johns Hopkins and MIT. The courses themselves range in subject from Child Development and Psychology to Foreign Culture, and the list is chock full of such unique offerings as The Anthropology of Computing and Hip Hop.

    100 Awesome, Free Web Tools for Elementary Teachers - It can be tough sometimes to filter out the things on the web that are truly valuable, especially when it comes to things that are useful in teaching children. Here’s a list from SmartTeaching.org that will help you be a better researcher and educator to the youngins. With 100 here, you’ll find something you didn’t know for sure.

    101 Ideas for a Great Start - Though the school year has technically already begun, it isn’t too late to start things out right by setting yourself and your students up for success. Iowa State offers these tips in establishing some great methods for students and teachers to start things off on the right foot. The list is set up in categories such as ‘creating a welcoming atmosphere’ and ‘encourage active learning.’

    7 tips to top sleep, 3 tips for staying awake - Though it should just be as easy as ‘get to bed earlier, wake up later,’ sleeping is not always as easy a task as it seems to accomplish. The University Blog gives us these tips to help you zonk out at night, and pep up during the day. Stop yawning and read these now. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

    Photo credit:  zen on flickr

    How to improve your online learning experience

    August 13, 2008

    Taking college courses online or distance learning has been growing in popularity over the last few years. It is an experience that allows students much more flexibility than traditional learning on campus. A student in Boston can take a course in California which opens up the options available to students all over the world. However, this system is not without its own issues. Here are a few tips to consider that will help you improve your online learning experience:

    1. Communication is crucial. Since you won’t be attending a traditional class where you can see the faces of your classmates and professor you need to open up the lines of communication through email right away. Introduce yourself to your instructor and let him or her know your educational background and explain why you’re taking their course. Get to know a few classmates in emails as well. It makes your educational experience that much smoother when you can bounce questions and concerns off your fellow classmates.

    2. Class participation equals success. Participating in discussion forums is the equivalent to raising your hand in class and throwing your two cents in. Instructors will measure students’ grades in large part on how much they add to the class through these discussion boards. Make sure your voice is being heard.

    3. Establish a routine. While your class will probably not have a regular meeting time, your work will be due once a week on an established day at the beginning of the semester. This means you’ll have to call on strict discipline to avoid having your work pile up all week. Rushing through your work at the last minute will result in poor performance. -HEATHER JOHNSON

    This post was contributed by Heather Johnson, who writes on the subject of teacher certification. She invites your feedback at heatherjohnson2323 at gmail dot com.

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    Instructifeature: Using Online Tools for Student Research

    Instructifeature: How to Stimulate Class Discussion Using Discussion Forums

    Photo credit: minifig on flickr