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.