Today, I’m experimenting with video blogs. Click the arrow below to watch.
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Being a part-time student again has given me a renewed appreciation of the myriad demands on students including class, assignments, bureaucratic hurdles, work and trying to have a life. Have I been the guy who has either just skimmed or not done the readings before class? Guilty.
The amount of reading required and articles to keep track of has made me a convert to RefWorks, a web-based bibliography and reference manager. I saw the light after Continue reading A Convert to RefWorks – Scott Anderson
I’ve stood at the back of a lecture hall and seen the flickering laptop screens: email and Facebook and online poker. I recently heard of a student, braver or foolhardier than most, on Chatroulette during a class. How’d I hear? One of my own students tweeted it from a couple of rows behind him.
As I watched the number of laptops rise in my classroom this year, I made a mental note to keep an eye on their effect. I expected to give a speech, a few weeks into term, about shutting down the tech sometimes to improve our classroom interaction. That’s not what happened.
I didn’t start it. It took me a while to realize it was happening. Now I’m just trying not to get in the way. Continue reading Six Reasons I Like Laptops in the Classroom — Linda Carson
Student engagement, participation and attendance are all pieces of the same puzzle in my mind. A puzzle that becomes more complex as class size increases. I’d like to share a couple promising ideas using technology that I have seen recently and that I believe can be used to help solve this puzzle.
While having lunch with chemistry instructor and friend, Dara Gilbert, we got to talking about how much she enjoyed using the Tablet PC that Continue reading A few thoughts on classroom interaction – Mary Power
It is probably a couple of decades now that videoconferencing (VC) technologies have been commercially offered and used in universities across the globe. Earlier systems used normal telephone lines, and later came digital phone lines (ISDN). The ISDN type is still in use in some places, it is fairly expensive to use. First, you need a dedicated line which cost monthly to keep and then you pay by the hour of usage and you pay long distance if it is so. Things have changed a little. With widespread availability of IP networks, unlike ISDN, we now have everything is needed to make audio-video calls from anywhere, virtually at no cost to the user. Continue reading Pervasive Videoconferencing Technologies in Higher Education – Koorus Bookan
ARTstor is a great source for images you can use to illustrate ideas and concepts.
Many will attest to the richness of the ARTstor database. A costume design researcher remarks: “For costumes, the zoom feature lets you capture much more detail on the clothing than any book ever could” (e.g. Sarafan). Historians use ARTstor to locate primary source materials, such as this woodcut from 15th c. Germany. Continue reading Add Sparkle to your Presentations and Lectures – Christine Jewell
A few weeks ago, I gave a presentation on new educational technologies at Concordia University in Montreal. About 150 faculty members and graduate students turned out for the presentation, an impressive number considering that the presentation took place early on a Friday morning. The number of attendees attests, though, to a growing conviction at universities that new educational technologies can enhance three things:
With regard to the first of these, many new educational technologies — especially Web 2.0 ones such as Twitter, blogs, wikis, VoiceThread, and Google Wave, to name only a few Continue reading Enhancing Learning, Assessment, and Efficiency via New Educational Technologies – Mark Morton