Digital Tools for Educators

Which tool grabs your fancy?

And so we come to the end of a very fast-paced learning program in which we were introduced to a myriad array of digital tools by which to engage students, hold their interest and keep them moving forward.

Educators today have to learn what motivates students and adopt a few tricks to almost con them into the process of learning. For example we are using the social media tools they play with every day to force feed some academics into them. No, I’m not as skeptical as I sound. In the past, teachers taught and students got it… or they didn’t. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing, but today I feel that sometimes, the harder we try some students try not at all.
But sites like these articles like Chris Dedes planning for neomillennial learning styles, keep us going and helps us understand what’s at stake.

But the majority of students to whom I’ve introduced a little of what I’ve been learning these past eight weeks appeared to like it and I will be using more of them next semester. That’s the thing about it: if you don’t keep using them, you forget how to make it work for you. So I have to keep practicing which I intend to do over the summer. 

In the long run, I know that I will use only a few of the tools all the time. Prezi, (prezi.com) for instance is like a flashy Power Point. I’ve never been a fan of Power Point, but it has its uses. Jing is cool, but again I may not use it as often. I have revived my Twitter account and have been tweeting quite a bit. I will definitely be using it in my journalism classes.
I know I will be using more of surveymonkey with which I’m familiar for both formative and summative assessments.
For keeping communication going there is Skype which can help keep students feel a little less isolated. It can also be used for synchronous group projects. To engage students in critical thinking, questions can posted to a discussion board such as the Moodle forums and students can post their responses.
The video and podcasting tools will help in my journalism classes when they may have to create a public service announcement for instance, or produce a report which can be played back to the class. This is the link to my diigo library.
Then there are all those other tools and links that my classmates have introduced to us and I plan to try out as many as I can.

Thanks to Norm for his patience when my computer was messed up, and my classmates for their digital camaraderie.      

 

MOOCS AND ONLINE CHEATING

This week we looked at Moocs: mass open online courses and what they mean for the future of education. 

I have been reading about Moocs for the past couple of years and at school, colleagues will send around articles pertaining to them. I have found that most of the profs on campus despise them and also see the day when jobs will be threatened because adjuncts are a dime a dozen and will easily replace them.

But there’s more to Moocs than just jobs and mass teaching. The New York Times article by Tom Friedman talks about Michael Sandel, who teaches the famous Socratic, 1,000-student “Justice” course at Harvard as the first humanities offering on the M.I.T.-Harvard edX online learning platform. The old bricks and mortar method of delivering education is changing and we also better get used to it. 

http://nyti.ms/1m8oUJ5

“When outstanding becomes so easily available, average is over.”

Tom Friedman, referring to the massive array of online choices out there for students who need not rely only on what their schools offer.

This week we also dived into various methods by which students cheat and how to counteract online cheating. They include:

http://www.respondus.com/

Respondus is a lockdown browser that locks down the testing environment within online courses so that students are unable to print, copy or access other websites and applications.

Tegrity Remote Proctoring:  Ensuring Academic Integrity in Distance Education with Online Proctoring You could even get this app on your cell phone!

CREATING CONTENT

 

This week was all about creating content using audio and/or video

It was exciting to try out all the different digital tools out there, but also frustrating when you can’t get it to do what you want.

I tried Jing, Wikiversity, Audacity, and a host of others which I knew instantly I wouldn’t want to explore. The best part though was seeing what my classmates had created and learning from their respective experiences. There were some really professional-looking content that was created.

I ended up using Prezi which I appears to be version of a fancy Power Point, but based on others’ experiences, not my classmates, perhaps I haven’t explored it enough to see its full potential. So my plan is to re-do my original project, add sound and embed video and make it more like the actual Twitter assignment I gave my students.