Effects of Faculty Experiences as Students

Going back to school as a student is a reveling experience for faculty members. Many things can be learned to improve the academic experience and to embrace the needs of students once teachers come back to their classrooms. In her article When the Teacher Becomes the Student, Dr. Maryellen Weimer reacts to the finding of brave teachers who survived the challenge and told us about it.

eLearning Trends

eLearningArt.com survey 49 experts to find out the top trends in eLearning. The list yielded the following: Mobile, micro-learning, video, virtual reality, social learning, eLearning Decline, Gamification, Artificial Intelligence, and interactions as the  9 Top eLeraning Treds of 2017.

Academic Transformation

Community colleges are becoming digital innovators in education. The increase of online classes is calling for a new ways to deliver content, engage students and keep them motivated to successful achieve their educational goals. This guide created by EdSurge explains how Community colleges are embracing a new educational paradigm.

Apps

Every day there are new Apps that motivate students to do homework or dig a little bit deeper into the subject matter. In this article Gary Darling explains how to use Popplet to create mind-maps; Seesaw for the construction of digital portfolios; Explain Everything for interactive screencasting; and Notability, to create notes that integrate type, drawing, audio, and pictures. Read 4 Apps that Bring Daily Classroom Activities into the 21st Century. 

Video Lectures Best Practices

Everyone want instructional videos to have a long lasting life. Shweta Vyas in her article Extending the Shelf-Life of Your Instructional Videos: Six Common Pitfalls to Avoid describe simple errors that can impact the usability of videos.

Good Design

Creating Power Point cards is an art. It also requires good design to make effective eye-catching slides. Reducing the clutter is important for a presentation to have the impact we desire.

A few basic rules of graphic design can help you in the creation of slides, chart, or presentation boards. Read all about The Importance of White Space in E-Learning in this article.

Positive Psychology in the Classroom

Positive emotions are contagious, creating an inviting positive environment and context can help students enjoy and be more productive during class. These feeling can transcend outside the classroom.

Read all about it Toward a 'Positive U' written by Beverley Myatt, MA, and Lynne N. Kennette, PhD.

An Example Lesson

This is an excellent sample of a lesson created at Ted-Ed. This is How Playing and Instrument Benefits your Brain, created by Anita Collins, animation directed by Sharon Colman Graham, script edited by Alex Gendler.

About Public Domain in the USA

While other countries welcome copyright material into public domain on January first of every year, the laws in the United States make it really hard for any work produced after 1923 to become public domain.

In the article Public Domain Day 2017 by Duke Law School's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, we can read what is going on with public domain in the states.

Why Note-taking

The value of note-taking has to be more clear for students. Teachers can help students realize that taking better notes can help them improve learning. Maryellen Weimer, PhD has the insides for Tips for Developing Students' Note-taking Skills.

Essentials of a Good eLearning Course

Everyone has a different taste in how to make that online class more appealing, inviting, and effective. In this article Karla Gutierrez lists six eLearning must-haves.

Learning Styles

Categorizing learning styles.

Blended Learning Infographic

Driving and Investigative Questions

Problem base learning creates a new dimension in education. In this article Mike Gorman from 21st Century Educational Technology and Learning talks about the idea of "Driving and Investigative Questions" and how these concepts take part in real inquire and research. He also place the two actions, driving and investigating, among verbs in the higher order thinking area of Bloom's Taxonomy. According to Gorman, by facilitating PBL and inquiry students come together to create productive discussions, and converge ideas. Gorman also advises teacher how to create the "questions" and provides samples. Read the Part1:Facilitating Inquiry in the Classroom ... Driving and Investigative Questions".

Video in Education

The State of Video in Education from Kaltura.com

Ted Ed

You can create a lesson around any of the Ted-Ed original videos. You can also submit your content to Ted-Ed and request the help of an animator to bring your information alive. Visit Ted-Ed and explore the possibilities. 

Ted-Ed are licensed for distribution under CC BY – NC – ND 4.0 International

Give PP Slides vs. Asking students to Take Notes

Having good note-taking skills will help students with their listening skills, information processing, understanding, studying, and test taking. Teachers can help students take good notes by identifying key concepts, asking students to retrieve information from previous notes or to summarize information at the beginning of class, they can also ask students to refer to the notes from test questions that were missed by multiple people. Read Maryellen Weimer's article Tips for Developing Students' Note-taking Skills. 

Protecting Our Students Rights

In his article and accompanying video Sherry Zane, PhD give best practices to create an inclusive respectful environment in the classroom and online. Read all about it in Supporting Transgender Students in the Classroom.

Highly Desirable eLearning Elements

Karla Gutierrez from shiftlearning.com/blog talks about the most important areas in a eLearning course. She mentions intro, responsiveness, visual design, navigation, multiple learning channels and practice and feedback. Read all about it in The Six Must-Haves for Every eLearning Course. 

Responsive eLearning

Students are using multiple devices to access and interact with courses, therefore it is imperative that the devices rearrange, resize, and make the content react the way it suppose to. Responsive eLearning is being developed to facilitate the actions required to complete tasks without interruptions, lost of time, or disappointing malfunction. 

In her article "Why Responsive eLearning is Essential to Meet Modern Learner Needs", Karla Gutierrez discuses the characteristics and usability of Responsible eLearning, and strategies decisions to be made.