Education Commons^™

Getting Past Powerpoint, James Hayes-Bohanan, Eric Lepage

EdTech Day

For an entire generation, integrating technology into the classroom has very often meant using PowerPoint to enhance—and even to organize—lectures. More advanced integration of technology often means teaching students to prepare their own PowerPoint presentations.

Dr. James Hayes-Bohanan became acquainted with PowerPoint when working as an in-house software trainer as the application was first coming to market. As a new professor in the ensuing years, he used many of PowerPoint’s bells and whistles—sometimes literally—in his own teaching and helped both middle-school and college students to use the software.

It is from this deep involvement with PowerPoint that he eventually came …

Elearning Live, Diane Forand, Andrew Hinote

EdTech Day

BigBlueButton is an open source web conferencing system similar to DimDim, Elluminate, and Wimba. This solution runs on Mac, Unix, or PC computers, and is very simple and quick to install and configure. Faculty have found to be the simplest interface for web collaboration. Come take a look at how we are using it at Bristol Community College to supplement and support eLearning and face-to-face courses.

Ditch Your Lms Discussion Board And Make The Move To Facebook Groups, Eric Lepage

EdTech Day

This past semester I taught an undergraduate Communications course on social media, and we spent a week holding our online course discussions in a Facebook Group site, rather than in our course Learning Management System (Moodle). The Facebook discussions worked so well that my students asked if we could abandon the Online Discussion Board tool and use Facebook Groups for the remainder of the semester. I will share with you the pros and cons of using Facebook for your online course discussions.

Increase Student Participation With Poll Everywhere, Susan Eliason

EdTech Day

Do your students text-message in class? An article inspired me to use their passion to text as a teaching tool and to increase in-class participation. Poll Everywhere allows you to pose a question to students via an embedded PowerPoint poll. Students can then respond to the poll via SMS text, Twitter, or the web. Your polls can be multiple choice based or open-ended questions to create conversations. The service is free for up to 30 responses per poll question. The polls have engaged students in conversation and participation in the learning activity and it created a novel learning experience.

Teaching Note - Then And Now: Canadian And American Students Discover Each Other, Andrew C. Holman

Bridgewater Review

No abstract provided.

Mco Track: Online Teaching And Learning Best Practices From Mco Cod Award Winners, Dona Cady, Anne Hird, Michelle Manganaro, Susan Todd, Lori Weir

EdTech Day

Massachusetts Colleges Online created the Courses of Distinction (COD) Awards to recognize faculty whose course designs best exemplify online education’s potential to enhance teaching and learning. Recent COD Award winners share their course sites and best practices in online teaching and learning.

Social Networks As Tools For Learning In Higher Ed, Aimee Mcalpine

EdTech Day

Social networks are ubiquitous in students’ (and many faculty members) non-academic lives. Facebook, My Space, LinkedIn, and Twitter have increasingly become part of our vernacular. The potential of social networks to connect and engage people with one another through various web-based mediums for free and with relative ease provides fertile ground for thinking about how these tools can enhance student learning in academic environments. This session will explore the possibilities and challenges of social using social networks with students for the purpose of academic learning. The presenters experience delivering a graduate course via a custom social network will be shared …

Mco Track: The Human Side Of Online Learning: 7 Critical Components Of Course Design And Implementation, Michelle Manganaro

EdTech Day

Participants will examine seven critical components that are necessary for qualitative and successful learner outcomes, and a teaching and learning model for online classrooms that blends structure, redundancy, and opens learning opportunities both ‘onscreen and off.’ Sample online classrooms will be shown as part of the session, including Blackboard and OLS. Presenter will share personal online teaching outcomes from the past five years, (the positive and not so positive), and demonstrate evidence of best practices via components of the online teaching and learning model.

Mco Track: Using An Institution Wide Template In Lmss To Promote Best Practices In The Use Of Online Course Spaces, Aimee Mcalpine

EdTech Day

In early 2009, a primary goal of the Massasoit Online Learning Team became the promotion of the use of Quality Matters™ standards in the development of online spaces. As a means of supporting all Faculty in their pursuit of using a LMS to support F2F classes, teach hybrid courses, or teach fully online courses, templates were developed. Use of a template is optional and various training models have been implemented to support and promote the use of templates. This session will include:

• information about the development and implementation of the template;
• examination of the two templates currently in use; and …

Keynote: Teaching Outside The “Box”, Alexandra Pickett

EdTech Day

Web 2.0 has brought about a grassroots revolution resulting in a global democratization of access to tools, information, experts, content, and education, and in many ways has begun to change how education is delivered, conducted, and defined. I believe it is my obligation as a responsible netizen and educator in this moment to participate, to evaluate, to document, and to expose and engage students and faculty to and in this process. This presentation will endeavor to challenge and inspire you to think outside your box to consider possibilities for your own instruction. I will demonstrate my “box” and how I …

Enhance Your Blackboard Sites With Dynamic Course-Related Web News, Audio, And Video Content, Reid Kimball

EdTech Day

Rather than send students scouring across the web for important news and audio/video content, bring the Web to you! Learn how RSS News Feeds in your Blackboard sites can provide your students with instant access to the latest news from the NY Times, scholarly journals, the Boston Globe Business section, and any other course-related news site without you having to lift a finger.

Also, in this hands-on workshop, discover how to easily embed live audio and video from sources like YouTube and TEDTalks right into your Blackboard course sites so that they never have to leave the cozy confines of …

Blackboard Course Design – Don’T Be Boxed In By Blackboard, Eric Lepage

EdTech Day

Announcements, Syllabus, Faculty, Course Documents, Assignments, Communication, External Links, Tools – do I really need all this stuff? In this hands-on workshop, learn how to remove features you don’t need, add quicklinks to features you use regularly (like Discussion Board and Student Grades), and completely transform your Blackboard site into something that doesn’t look, well, so much like Blackboard anymore. Your students will greatly appreciate the efficiency, intuitiveness, and creativity of your newly designed Blackboard sites.

Getting Started With Moodle, Reid Kimball

EdTech Day

Moodle is an alternative course management option for faculty who are looking for a tool that better supports engaged student learning. Moodle is a “free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities” (Moodle.org). In this hands-on workshop, learn how to post handouts (syllabi, PowerPoint slideshows, etc.) and multimedia content, hold asynchronous and synchronous discussions via the Discussion Forums and Virtual Chat tools, post student grades via the Online Gradebook, organize group space for collaborative projects with the Moodle wiki, receive assignments from students via digital submission, and more.

Related Links: …

Faculty Profile: Shannon Donovan's Online Course, William C. Levin

Bridgewater Review

No abstract provided.