These are tough times for higher education. Like many schools we are starting to see our numbers of new students walking through our door drop. Not only is there much more competition for students as we all participate in the zero sum game of building more amenities, but price point is really beginning to become the determining factor as students make choices. Tough times indeed. Things need to change. Most folks know this, and even our faculty know this, but…
Ten Educational Technology tools and ideas that I will be focusing on for this coming school year to enhance teaching and learning. Not in any real order but all just good tools and ideas. Note, this is really my personal list, and while I hope some of the ideas and links inspire to you search for more, I am always happy to get feedback and more ideas. Breakout EDU – These are fun and engaging for kids of all ages….
Eight years ago I was doing classroom design, AV around campus, Teaching and running our Moodle LMS. As Moodle began to take off around campus, I realized two things. Number one, Moodle could do some amazing things, and secondly, I did not have the time or the expertise to really help our faculty do what they wanted. So, like most other Instructional Designers, I began to seek out help. I found a company who would be willing to come in…
I am in the final stages of getting my Master’s in Educational Technology (MET) from Boise State. While I have been in this program for over a year now and have had some random postings up here on my site, I am hoping that this current class (EDTECH 537 – blogging in the classroom) will finally give me the push I need to start blogging on semi-regular basis. So, over the next seven weeks for sure (and hopefully much longer)…
First off, I had this desire to go to ISTE, but like many schools that we all work in, PD funds are hard to come by. I was going to do ISTE on the cheap. I just happened to have some airline tickets from stepping off an oversold flight a while back. This got me to San Antonio. I hit up AirBnB and got a sweet little room at a semi-nearby home for $60 a night. Then I reached out…
So, I have just returned from my second ISTE conference. I was much better prepared for this one than the first ISTE conference that I attended in 2013 which, by happenstance was at the same location (San Antonio, Texas) as this last one. In 2013 I was selected to present a poster on wireless technology in classroom. Now, being into wireless technology, working in an IT department and having some graphic design background, I thought I had this nailed. I…
So far so good. I did enjoy this class and looking back on it I learned quite a bit. Much of it seems like just common sense, but when framed with actual research based learning principles, it becomes much more tangible moving forward. All of the actual technology that we used for content creation I had previously used with the lone exception of Adobe Spark. Two things stand out for me. I enjoyed the Clark and Mayer book and reading…
Screencasting is something that I believe strongly in. The ability to take a project and make a less than 8 min video on exactly how to do something, I think is a great learning tool. These days if I really want to learn anything, a quick youtube video is my goto. The tough part of this assignment was to come up with something to do a screencast on that has some sort of activity or followup that the students can do as well. I…
Create a digital story was the goal for this assignment, seemed simple enough, but wow, that was a lot tougher that I thought. I started out in iMovie, and spent a good 6 hours going over photos adding in some video, extracting audio, changing length times and still had not recorded my audio. Hmmm… I thought, is this the best idea or should I look to something else. In comes Adobe Spark. Let me start by saying that I have…
First, I would like to state that after this lesson, I have this Coherence Principle down! Not only have I read (and re-read) the chapter in the Clark and Mayer book but I have researched this principle all over the internet and spent much more time than I expected on answering the questions associated with this assignment. In a nutshell the Coherence Principle states that in order to maximize learning we need make sure that all of the media in…