Teaching with Technology

Heighten Learning through Digital Storytelling

Social media has revolutionized communication by allowing anyone to easily broadcast ideas and creations to a broad audience. Whereas creative expression through media was once owned by a select few movie studios, television networks, and radio stations, now thousands of people have YouTube channels that they use to broadcast homemade shows on anything from news to entertainment to peer advice, etc. Dozens of these people are making a full-time living from the advertising revenue from their homemade shows.

John Orlando, PhD January 21, 2014

Blended Learning: Integrating Online and Face-to-Face Courses

Blended learning entails more than simply replacing class time with online course elements or supplementing an online course with face-to-face meetings. To be successful, the online and face-to-face modes need to be integrated by taking into account the learning objectives and the affordances of each mode and deliberately linking what occurs in each mode.

Rob Kelly December 12, 2013

Why I Love Conferencing Online with My Traditional Classroom Students

A few weeks ago, I had to accompany my husband out of town for a week of medical tests. That meant my presence was required in two places at once: in my classroom and at the hospital. I didn’t want to cancel classes, so I decided to try something new. I arranged to meet with each of my students online for about 15 minutes to discuss the first draft of their first composition paper.

Liz Boltz Ranfeld December 9, 2013

Scanner Pro Turns iPad, iPad into Portable Scanner

I remember well the days when digitizing documents and photographs was a huge challenge. Scanners in the 1990s were not readily available, expensive, took up about the better part of one’s desk, cumbersome to use, and the output quality varied from scanner to scanner. My first desktop scanner, a high-end SCSI scanner, cost around $2000 in 1994!

Dave Yearwood, PhD November 21, 2013

The Difference Between Practice and Theory

Donald Eastman III, the president of Eckert College, wrote about the limits of online learning: “…what works for most students…is a small classroom…where a respected authority…is a spellbinding revealer of mysteries – not simply because he or she knows things we don’t, but because a gifted teacher reads the audience the way an actor reads the room…”

Edward Renner, PhD November 18, 2013

Improve Your PowerPoint Design with One Simple Rule

We’ve all heard the expressions “Death by PowerPoint” and “PowerPoint-induced coma.” I think we’d all agree that most of PowerPoints stink. Yet after sitting through presentation after presentation that bore us to tears, we turn around and subject our students and colleagues to the same torture that we find so excruciating. Why?

John Orlando, PhD November 11, 2013

How to Create Assessments for the Flipped Classroom

It seems like everyone is talking about the flipped classroom. But how do you use this new model to construct lessons and assessments that reinforce student learning?

Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti October 4, 2013

Simple Ways to Create Videos to Engage Your Students

Increasingly, educators are searching for video resources online by sifting through YouTube, searching on Google, and visiting various topical sites. However, what’s often required is quite specific and it can be hard to find exactly what you need.

Aidan Hornsby October 3, 2013

App Review: Voice Record Pro

The average person probably remembers more of what they see than what they hear. For example, you’re likely to readily remember a person’s face more easily than you would his name. However, according to molecular biologist John Medina, the key to more remembering what we see and hear is enhanced when repetition is involved. Don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating mass memorization of anything by anyone. Memorization is necessary in some cases, but given the easy access to all kinds of information, I see little reason for my students to commit large amounts of information to organic memory as opposed to knowing how and where to find it. What I am merely suggesting is that frequent re-exposure to snippets of content will likely aid understanding of what was presented or discussed. I have found that the podcast is one way to provide short bits of information for clarification purposes or as a way to provide expanded discussion of something that I covered in class. Here are two key guidelines to follow when developing a podcast:

Dave Yearwood, PhD September 27, 2013

The Benefits of Flipping Your Classroom

A small but growing number of faculty at major universities are experimenting with the inverted or flipped classroom. It’s an instructional model popularized by, among other influences, a Ted Talk by Khan Academy founder Salman Khan, which has received more than 2.5 million views. Institutions as varied as Duke University’s School of Medicine, Boston University’s College of Engineering, and the University of Washington School of Business have joined Clemson, Michigan State, the University of Texas, and many others in experimenting with changing from in-class lectures to video lectures and using class time to explore the challenging and more difficult aspects of course content.

Charles A. Hill August 26, 2013

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