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Little-guide-to-screencasting.pdf (application/pdf Object) How Online Learning Companies Bought America's Schools. This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. If the national movement to “reform” public education through vouchers, charters and privatization has a laboratory, it is Florida. It was one of the first states to undertake a program of “virtual schools”—charters operated online, with teachers instructing students over the Internet—as well as one of the first to use vouchers to channel taxpayer money to charter schools run by for-profits. About the Author Lee Fang Lee Fang is a reporting fellow with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

He covers money in politics,... Also by the Author They're using the Ukraine crisis to push for expedited approval of US natural gas exports. News reports and politicians lauding US gas exports as “best for Crimea” don’t disclose the US gas companies pushing the line, or their Russian connections. If Levesque’s blunt advice sounds like that of a veteran lobbyist, that’s because she is one. Adding a Synchronous Component to Online Courses. November 14, 2011 By: Linda Macaulay, EdD and La Tonya Dyer in Teaching with Technology Interactive, synchronous web conferencing software such as WebEx, Blackboard Collaborate and even Skype are innovative tools that can be implemented by faculty teaching both hybrid and fully online courses. When faculty at Towson University began using WebEx to incorporate a synchronous component to their courses, they discovered that interactive web conferencing (IWC) delivers many benefits.

In this article, we outline some of the benefits we found and share tips for getting started with interactive web conferencing in your classes. Interactive web conferencing increases accessibility. Interactive web conferencing increases student-to-student and student-to-teacher interaction. Interactive web conferencing promotes active learning. Do you want to get started with interactive web conferencing?

Getting Started Practice using IWC prior to meeting with your class. Classroom Management Dr. Recent Trackbacks. Clayton Christensen on disruption in online education. Let’s have a little exercise. Walk me through this school you’d create. What do the classrooms look like? What are the class sizes? What are the hours? It’s open 24 hours a day. Different kids arrive at different times. Earlier this year we discussed how the Internet is revolutionizing education and featured several companies and organizations that are disrupting the online education space including Open Yale, Open Culture, Khan Academy, Academic Earth, P2PU, Skillshare, Scitable and Skype in the Classroom.

In October, Knewton, an education technology startup, raised $33 million in its 4th round of funding to roll out its adaptive online learning platform. According to the 2010 Sloan Survey of Online Learning, approximately 5.6 million students took at least one web-based class during the fall 2009 semester, which marked a 21% growth from the previous year. But with its tremendous growth, online education has brought up much debate between deans, provosts and faculty. “I absolutely do.

Blended Learning on the Rise, Report Says - Digital Education. Learning in Networks of Knowledge | Applications for a paradigm shift in online learning --- Matthew Allen, ALTC Teaching Fellow. 10 Tools for Increasing Engagement in Online Courses. Over the last few years I've done a lot of work developing writing and redeveloping online courses and course materials. In the initial rush to get learning online many organisations got themselves a Moodle platform and then attached a whole load of PDFs and .docs, added some forums and the odd video clip and called it an online course.

It's no surprise then that drop out rates for online learning courses have been so high. The advent of Web 2.0 though, brought a whole bunch of new tools that course designers could take advantage of to make content more social, interactive and engaging. Here are some of the tools I've been using recently to embed a bit more interactivity into the courses I work on. Storify - Storify is a great tool for collecting together a mixture of web based resources and references into a web based widget that you can then structure into a digital research paper. Tricider is a great tool for crowd sourcing opinion. Related links: Best Nik Peachey. The Online-College Crapshoot. The MsAxthelm Daily. Teaching Students How to do Online Research. 7/1/2003 By: Rosemary Shaw When I first started teaching technology, I focused more on the technical side, having my students learn how to insert pictures, how to add sounds, and, in general, how to do all the fancy buttons and bells.

It was the least satisfying experience in my entire teaching career. I also found out that the students weren't happy either. They had made some amazing hypermedia projects, including Web pages, but the results lacked substance. Surprisingly, the students instinctively knew that without the substance to back up the project and without the heart there really is no project. The next year, I went to my principal and said, "I want to redesign my class. Since then, no matter what project I have planned, I first teach research skills. First, I make my students learn the list of the six steps to online research. Questioning Planning Gathering Sorting & Sifting Synthesizing Evaluating I talk about each step and what it means. Questioning Planning Gathering Evaluating.

Kindergarteners at the keyboard. By Jill Barshay LOS ANGELES — First-grader Lena Barrett clicks through a series of icons and logs onto a laptop under the fluorescent lights of her classroom. Before long, a cartoon version of a game-show announcer appears. “It’s time to show what you know by finding words,” the announcer says. “In this game, you will click on words that mean the same thing as the word the narrator says. Click on the word that means the same thing as ‘marvelous.’ ” Lena, dressed in her school’s burgundy-plaid uniform, clicks on “wonderful,” and the announcer doesn’t waste time with praise. Photo by tcoffey Six-year-old Lena was among 116 kindergartners last year who participated in an experiment at her school with a teaching method called “blended learning,” where students learn from computers as well as teachers.

Computer instruction in kindergarten classrooms can be controversial. In addition, some education experts are wary of putting kindergarteners in front of computers. Still, there were problems.