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10 Commandments for Good Writing from Stephen King ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

10 Commandments for Good Writing from Stephen King ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

What is Aging?

How to use commas
http://www.videojug.com/film/how-to-use-comhttp://www.videojug.com/film/how-to-use-commasmas

commas

Joyce's great ideas

Here is Joyce's update from the Ed Tech meeting yesterday (Nov. 22, 2013)

Hi Everyone,

I went to an Ed Tech meeting yesterday and there were some points that were brought up that I wanted to share with you:

1.       We are in the final stages of confirming the use of CANVAS, which is the new LMS that was selected to replace ANGEL.  They are just going through some risk analysis, but are planning on implementing CANVAS hopefully for September 2014.
2.       There are 50 licenses available for the use of Smart Response – an interactive response system designed for students using mobile devices.  The students can respond to planned and on-the-go questions from any internet-enabled device.  If you’re interested….contact Andy Benoit.  There are a lot of licenses that are available.
3.       Open Badges – a website where you can ‘earn’ badges by proving and documenting your skills.  Apparently, there are a number of technology based companies that are using this as a supplement to the traditional resume.  Something to consider if you want students to have an ‘incentive’.  Check out the link:
http://openbadges.org/
4.       Cloud email – This is a project that is being tested for the replacement of our current email system.  It’s exactly what it sounds like:  a cloud based email account.  If all goes according to plan, this could also be implemented in September 2014.
5.       There is no talk of updating the Office 2010 to Office 2013 or 360 anytime soon.

Joyce

A Cool Graphic Featuring Punctuation Social Personalities ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

A Cool Graphic Featuring Punctuation Social Personalities ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

Panama Destination Wedding: Tanya & Adam

Panama Destination Wedding: Tanya & Adam

Enjoy these magnificent pictures!

2013 Future of Education Summit - Joe Lambert

The Last Five Years

Once again I am reminded of the wisdom found in Barbara Mezeske's article "The Last Five Years", published in The Teaching Professor, Newsletter 4878, Magna Publications:
In summary, she suggested that we older faculty keep the following three points in mind: Here's her three points, along with my comments.

1. "Embrace new technologies." 

• Don't be embarrassed about being a newbie.  Eventually you will catch on, just as you did with new projects earlier in your career. Once you are retired, you will have time to truly realize the benefits these new technologies can offer you. So take some time to acclimatize yourself now!

2  "Find the energy to go out at the top of your game". 

• You don't want to be the teacher everyone remembers as being in the game too long.   You've invested a great deal of time and energy into developing your reputation as a good instructor; don't fall into the temptation to settle for the ordinary. Do what you need to revitalize yourself.  Tackle a new course, or a new approach to an existing course.  Observe other faculty. Compare notes. Find a new passion that will carry you through to the homestretch.  You are worth the energy, and so are your students.

3. "Begin now to have a new life".   

• There is life after college. All too soon you will leave the comfortable college environment and will have to face the new world head on.  Freedom 55 is a huge turning point.  Most likely you will be, or soon will be, an empty nester. You will no longer be a busy parent, hustling kids from one event to another while balancing the demands of marking, preparing, and teaching.  And once you have time to breath, you may realize that you are not the same person you were 10 or 20 years ago.  So, start re-discovering yourself now.  Take a class, join a club, make a new friend, start your bucket list, or do whatever it takes to start your journey to finding a new you.    And, despite what budget managers and young administrators fresh out of grad school may be hinting, you are NOT just a budget liability.  You have a lifetime of experience to share; you just need to find a new outlet for your many talents.  Out there somewhere is a business or community organization looking for someone just like you to share insights and talents.  Start making connections now.  Remember, once you are retired, you can call the shots.  The time and energy you are willing to commit will be  your choice!  
• 
  

Bloom’s Taxonomy: The 21st Century Version ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

Bloom’s Taxonomy: The 21st Century Version ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

Power up your PowerPoint

Here's a great article from Faculty Focus. It reinforces all that I believe to be important about designing PowerPoint.

Adapting PowerPoint Lectures for Online Delivery: Best Practices

By: Emily A. Moore in Online Education

If you use PowerPoint lectures in your face-to-face classes, you can use those same lectures as jumping-off points for creating narrated animations for your online students to watch. That’s the good news.
However, chances are you’ll need to make extensive changes — both to your existing PowerPoint slides, and to how you deliver them. Typically, this means scripting the lecture before narrating and recording it so that all information presented online is:

• As concise as possible
• Organized logically (no skipping around)
• Relevant to the important concepts you’re trying to convey (as opposed to spending equal time on minor points or details)
• Rich with stories, personal examples, and/or examples that clarify and amplify the important concepts
• Primarily visual (very little text presented on any screen)
• Broken down into separate 2-7 minute recordings, each based around a single concept

Unfortunately, there’s no quick and easy way to adapt face-to-face lectures for effective online presentation. Simply recording yourself narrating your PowerPoints as you would in a face-to-face classroom is ineffective because the online environment differs from the classroom in several ways:

• The time and attention students are willing to spend watching a screen is much less than the time and attention they’re willing to spend watching a live human being lecturing.
• The online environment is poor at conveying information in text form (but excels at conveying information visually).
• Online students can’t ask questions in real-time—and you won’t be able to see when they’re “getting it” so that you can diverge from your standard lecture and supplement their understanding. Therefore, your presentation has to be extremely clear and explicit.
• Online students are typically much less tolerant of extraneous or confusing information presented in a recorded lecture than they are of an in-person lecture.
• Students will be accessing lecture recordings differently—and for different reasons—than they “access” face-to-face lectures. Face-to-face students come to class, listen to lecture, and leave. Online students may use lecture recordings for previewing material, as their main source of course content, or for review. They may access recordings never, once, or multiple times for any of all of these reasons.

All of this means that you’ll need to rethink the way your existing lectures are organized, what information they contain, and how that information is conveyed.
Below are best practices for converting a PowerPoint presentation for online delivery:

• Break long lectures into five minute (or so) chunks. Studies show that online students won’t sit through hour-long lectures—so don’t create them. Instead, create a handful of smaller lecture “chunks,” each of which defines and elaborates a main concept. Chunking lectures in this way also makes it possible for online students to customize their learning by reviewing—and re-reviewing—only those concepts they’re having trouble grasping.
• Write a script for each concept. Speaking off-the-cuff may work in a classroom, but it doesn’t online. Scripting forces you to organize the presentation of your material—to make sure you don’t leave anything out or throw in anything extra. It also gives you time to think about the most effective approach to convey material in the highly visual online environment. If you decide not to write a script beforehand, be prepared to spend the same amount of time you would have spent on the script in the recording studio instead, recording and re-recording your lecture chunks (in effect, scripting your recordings during the recording process instead of beforehand.) There really is no way around the scripting step in the production of effective content optimized for online delivery; it’s “pay me now or pay me later.”
• Rework your PowerPoint slides to act as a storyboard for your script. Your PowerPoint slides should contain mostly visuals; you’ll need to reduce text to a few words per screen at most. Animations (recorded PowerPoints) are good at conveying visual information; they aren’t good at conveying text information. Any text that appears on the screen should be the “take aways” or critical notes you would expect students to take, not simply explanations or nice-to-have details.
• Time any text or images that appear on your PowerPoint slides to display at the same time that you, the narrator, speak the text or discuss the image. Studies show that presenting text causes students to try to read it—which means they’re missing whatever the narrator happens to be saying at the same time. Learning theory also suggests that displaying images and talking about them later isn’t as effective as introducing the images at the very time you begin speaking about them.

For some PowerPoint design examples, both good and bad, go here »

Emily A. Moore, M.Ed., is an instructional designer in the online learning office at Texas State Technical College – Harlingen Campus.

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