teaching technology to promote learning: Tools. Let's give them
In this decade of digital communication including texting, collaboration, social learning, presentations, wikis, rss feeds and blogs we must now make available to students and teachers tools that promote and enhance a style of teaching and learning that promote the development of skills. This style moves beyond the facts into explaining differences, seeing similarities, thinking creatively, working creatively with others, implementing innovations, reasoning effectively, making judgments and decisions, solving problems, communicating across cultural and country lines through collaboration with others. It includes hyperlinked writing, digital citizenship, publishing, commenting, sharing, networking and much more. We pay a lot of lip service to “teaching students to be life long learners.” Where we fail is not making a shift from content driven curriculum and learning, to process driven curriculum and learning.
Xerte - Open Source E-Learning Developer Tools
Welcome to The Xerte Project! The Xerte Project is an initiative to provide high quality free software to educators all over the world, and to build a global community of users and developers around our tools. The project began in 2004 at the University of Nottingham, when work began to create a Flash-based runtime engine that would help the in-house multimedia development team speed up the development of interactive learning materials, and provide a platform for re-using good solutions to common problems that developers were typically solving every time they began a new project. Accessibility, in particular, can be a difficult issue for content developers, and an early goal was to provide the very best support for high levels of native accessibility.
everything elearning.
Evaluating Media Characteristics: Using multimedia to achieve learning outcomes George Siemens Originally Presented at AMTEC 2002 with Stephen Yurkiw
Accessibility
Websites built with accessibility in mind are flexible in meeting different user needs, preferences and situations. Though these methods can increase usability for everyone who uses the Web they are often legally required to be implemented in a specific effort to prevent discrimination against people with disabilities. Starting points These are some readable introductions to accessibility that cover; what accessibility is, why it is important, as well as practical advice. Moodle-related accessibility coding guidelines Use CSS, but still use headings, strong and emphasis
5 Common Visual Design Mistakes
I was working with a student intern the other day. We reviewed his first attempt at a rapid elearning course. For this review, we focused on the course’s visual design. Overall, he did a great job, especially for someone just starting out. However, he made some mistakes that are common to many of the courses I see.
Accessibility Specification
These are DRAFT specifications that are being authored by a joint Open University (IET-OCI-VLE) working group. The document specifies improvements to the accessibility of the Moodle course management system for version 1.7. Please post comments in the RFC - Moodle Accessibility Specification forum discussion. (Also, see an earlier document in the forum discussion, RFC - Accessibility Proposal.)
A Taxonomy of Reflection: A Model for Critical Thinking
My approach to staff development (and teaching) borrows from the thinking of Donald Finkel who believed that teaching should be thought of as “providing experience, provoking reflection.” He goes on to write, … to reflectively experience is to make connections within the details of the work of the problem, to see it through the lens of abstraction or theory, to generate one’s own questions about it, to take more active and conscious control over understanding. ~ From Teaching With Your Mouth Shut Over the last few years I’ve led many teachers and administrators on classroom walkthroughs designed to foster a collegial conversation about teaching and learning.
Adobe Captivate LMS Compatibility Guide
If you're an Adobe Captivate e-learning developer, sooner or later you'll need to ensure your course content is compatible with one of 100 or more Learning Management Systems currently on the market (and growing all the time). This LMS Compatibility Guide is a mechanism for Adobe Captivate authors to share information about LMS products they've encountered, and the specific settings or modifications in either Captivate or the LMS that they found to work successfully. Follow the links at the bottom to a page dedicated to a specific LMS.
Create Custom Characters for Your E-Learning Scenarios
Has this happened to you? You’re building an elearning course on site safety and need a woman in a hard hat? Yet when you search your clip art, all you can find is the same people you’ve used in your previous courses.
Creating an Executive Summary
Word includes a special tool that creates automatic summaries of your documents for you. This tool is called AutoSummarize, appropriately enough. The summary can be any length you specify, and you can save it to a new document, add it to the beginning of your document, or simply highlighted it in place.
