TELS Webletter

John Merrow: Technology and the Future of Schooling

2009-11-03T11:39:00.000-08:00

We just love this fellow. He is always open to possibilities and very knowledgeable about the history of education and the economic, social, and political forces at work that are shaping the future of education. In this post he looks at three reasons to worry about the impact of technological advances in society and education. His posts on this blog are a good one to follow. In addition, Learning Matters is a great resource for information on teaching and learning.

Getting Better on Company Time

2009-11-02T07:43:00.000-08:00

Professional development comes in a lot of shapes and sizes. You can go to Florida and see great presentations or go to Chicago and participate is wonderful workshops. These days, there is another form for development and you don’t even have to leave your office. And that may or may not be such a good thing. Check out the original article and the interview in this short piece.

Changing Times and Changing Tools in Teacher Development

2009-11-02T07:42:00.000-08:00

The very phrase “teacher improvement” can lift the hackles on many an instructor. Our work here at TELS often involves assisting instructors to improve existing, or non-existing, skill sets. Fortunately for us, our instructors are most often more than happy to improve teaching skills. But not always, and the world of teacher education in pedagogy and technology integration has had some good air time over the past few years. From the good folks at Educational Leadership, here is a look at the changing times of teacher education.

Moving to Shorter Lectures and a Better Presentation

2009-11-02T07:40:00.000-08:00

Now that we have all mastered PowerPoint it is time to refine the presentation and the speaking. We have liked what Garr Reynolds was telling us from the start. In a nutshell, don’t put your lecture notes on the slides in bullet form. Create something more. Here are some tips.

Educated on the Internet?

2009-10-01T14:35:00.000-07:00

There is much discourse about online courses and the future of college. From the teacher’s perspective, it takes more time, we should be paid more, work whenever you want, and sometimes more interaction with students than in face to face classes. For students, flexibility, flexibility, and sometimes, cheaper. Where ever you are on the timeline of online learning and whatever your role, it is here and in all likelihood it will continue to grow. Here is a 30 minute NPR interview that looks at some of the challenges and benefits.

William Butler Yeats Library

2009-10-01T12:23:00.000-07:00

I have a nice collection of first editions. Mostly contemporary authors, but I do have some really wonderful older editions of my favorite authors. Many are my great-grandfathers. And I love libraries. Here is what online libraries can look like. To be able to visit some of these resources online is nothing short of a miracle to me. The handwritten pages, the images, the art in the books, and the carefully choreographed wander through this online library is nothing short of beautiful!

What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Your Office!

2009-10-01T12:12:00.000-07:00

Well, not yet, but it will. Educomm is a well known conference for higher education instructors using technology. In 2010 it will be in Las Vegas, maybe you can go? As with many conferences, the conference sessions are videotaped and often the slides and or handouts are available on the conference website. Here is a page with many of the Educomm conference sessions from years past.

“Report Showed Broad Faculty Dissatisfaction”

2009-09-01T10:23:00.000-07:00

This month Chronicle’s Community College Newsletter shared information collected by Sloan-C noting that there is broad faculty dissatisfaction with online training and support, among other things. Of course we here at TELS take exception to that. With the Summer and Winter Institutes, our online resources, and our offices manned eight hours a day with the sole purpose of helping faculty with instruction, we think we have done rather well. We do understand of course that we could do better. How we ask?

Skype in for Online Office Hours?

2009-09-01T10:21:00.000-07:00

For far away family members who have the technical prowess and connectivity gusto, there is nothing like Skype for a conversation. For online faculty, it presents the option to allow students to communicate face to face with them in real time. Now we are headed towards deeper synchronous online communications. Why you might ask. Click here. Want to learn more. Click here.

Do You Recall Teaching Your First Online Course?

2009-09-01T10:18:00.000-07:00

Well, has it improved? Look how far we have come in just a few years in our ability to deliver content online. From those old text based days to video and interactive simulations! Here is a blogger who ponders the same questions. For us here at YC, what did your first class look like? How does it look now?

Just When You Thought You Had PowerPoint Figured Out!

2009-08-25T09:19:00.000-07:00

Let’s face it, long sentences after bullet points and cheesy clip art in a presentation are boring and rarely helpful to students. Adding video, audio, and engaging images, as well as actively engaging the audience will produce better results. This wiki has some great links and this presentation (strangely appropriate audio) will get you going. Here is one for starters!

Power Point Kills - narrated

View more documents from Spiro Bolos.

The “Art” of the Discussion Board

2009-08-25T09:10:00.000-07:00

At some point we have all created a rubric or guidelines for the discussion board posts for our online classes. Thoughtful conversation is what we are after. This webpage has some great advise for students and teachers.

Are Free Online Webinars the Future of Training?

2009-08-25T09:09:00.000-07:00

Steve Hargadon has done some great work in the world of web 2.0. One of his most recent accomplishments was to get LearnCentral off and running. Check out some of the free webinars, either live or recorded, and perhaps think about giving one yourself!

Great Training Opportunities

2009-08-11T15:53:00.000-07:00

Take some time this month to visit our TELS offices or participate in a training or two. We have many offerings during August and September on a variety of topics. The link to all of the workshops is in the right sidebar of this blog.

We had a great summer and we hope you did too. As the semester starts don't forget to open your Blackboard courses, welcome your students, and have at least the syllabus available in Blackboard. Don't forget the 57 Second Tips located on the right of the blog!

If you have some ideas for content we can share with the Yavapai Community of instructors, send us an email and we'll post the content at the start of each month.

A New YC Offering!

2009-08-11T08:33:00.000-07:00

Over the summer the TELS folks offered a new course titled The Fundamentals of Educational Technology. The focus of the course was on web 2.0 tools and the uses they have in the academic arena. Though Blackboard was used,the class blog has links to student work and related courses work. Take a look! Pretty remarkable for eight weeks of fun.

Better Teaching Advice

2009-08-11T08:30:00.001-07:00

As good as it sounds to make courses harder, that might not always mean more is learned by the students. The "ecology" of a classroom is made up of factors that inform the strategies a teacher employs in the classroom. Lots of trendy words applied to the "depth vs. breadth" discussions over the years and while lectures and passive learning environments continue to dominate the college classroom, there are alternatives. Spending more time identifying specific techniques that work with the current students and teaching students to learn how to learn. David Glenn offers some advice in this Chronicle article.

Free Online Web 2.0 Courses

2009-07-04T10:56:00.000-07:00

Az TEA, the Arizona Technology in Education Alliance has put a couple Web 2.0 courses online. They are free and self paced. One is Exploring Web 2.0, the other is Web 2.0: an online course for teachers. Both are targeted towards the K12 teacher, they are very useful to all instructors. They are delivered using Moodle, so for our instructors seeing and using another LMS interface would be a good exercise.

A New Look for Online Discussions?

2009-07-04T10:32:00.000-07:00

I wonder If in the future our online discussions will look more like the conversation below. Maybe using video and audio, less textual in nature. Would it improve the conversation? Distract from it?

What will Google Wave look like and will it combine all of our interactive needs into one screen? How would the experience be different from our current Blackboard or other LMS experience? Some of these commonly used products like Seesmic offer us a glimpse of what parts of it may look like. Or not. Perhaps for Seesmic, the time has already past.

Below is Howard Rheingold and a few others thoughts about our online identities.

Is There Really Anything New?

2009-07-04T10:20:00.000-07:00

Defining and deciding on just what the "new" skills/qualities of the teacher/learners are in this new computer age is and has been a topic of great discussion. Can you imagine, right now, just what they are. Not just the words, but whole sentences defining what is important for teachers to possess and students to be learning these days. Is it any different that it was ten years ago? Twenty years ago? Has the workplace changed in a way that we need to educate students in a different way? The role of the textbook, the role of the learner and teacher, have they changed? I found this discussion recently and it made me try to explain all of it to myself. Below is a presentation from Chris Lehmann on the "new" learner and the new teacher.

NECC 2009 - Progressive Pedagogy and 21st Century Tools

View more documents from Chris Lehmann.

Yavapai College Represented at Sloan-C

2009-06-16T14:24:00.000-07:00

Our very own Ruth is off this month to present at The Sloan-C International Symposium on Emerging Technology Applications for Online Learning in San Francisco! Way to go!

Her presentation focuses on the various web 2.0 products teachers can use to enhance their courses. Below is a video she created for the presentation. Take a look.

Us Now

2009-06-16T14:08:00.000-07:00

This video, directed by Ivo Gormley, is hijacked from a recent blog post by Steve Hargadon.

Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo.

More Howard Rheingold

2009-06-16T13:52:00.000-07:00

We have had Howard Rheingold here before. Most recently, Howard gave the keynote at the Maricopa Community Colleges technology and Learning conference in May in which a couple of us attended in Second Life. He has been a pioneer in the world of social media and in this video from Amsterdam, Howard reflects on the seven years since the publishing of “Smart Mobs.”

Web 2.0 and Learning Environments

2009-05-01T09:28:00.000-07:00

The following quote comes from this recently released UK report. Page 16 of the report looks at trends of web 2.0. Other sections, like “Challenges to the pedagogical role and professional development of teachers and other enablers of learning” have some relevant forecasts for instructors.

"In schools, effective teaching consists of stimulating pupils to engage in conversations about the concepts being taught within the context of collaborating towards a shared goal (Mercer and Littleton, 2007) as stipulated in the National Curriculum. Consequently, the social networking enabled by Web 2.0 technologies, in which children converse online and make and remediate online content in their personal lives (Candy, 2006), offers a powerful new dimension to effective teaching."

How do we use these web 2.0 technologies in our classes?

Edutainment, or “Improving Our Ability to Deliver Content”

2009-05-01T09:25:00.000-07:00

As the Summer Institute approaches, we are all gearing up to present information to others, much like teachers do in classes. Alan Levine got us going with this blog post, and with a link from that post we found some great resources about presenting information. So we leave you with a thought to comment on. Is presenting advice to an audience, presenting an opinion to an audience, or presenting a product to an audience the same as presenting “content” to learners? And how do we improve our ability to present as instructors?

What Do We Do at TELS?

2009-05-01T09:23:00.000-07:00

We added a new Highlights of TELS page to our Yavapai College page. We tried to put a few of the valuable things we do for instructors here at the college. Please take a moment to look at the page and share a comment or two with us. We’d like to hear what we can do for you. Click on “comment” below and tells us what you think.