Hey all! By now, all of my teacher friends are back to business in their classrooms. My content developers and instructional designer buddies are back to being knee deep in projects for the new year. I am working on some interesting online instructional projects this time along with preparing for an online mini-course. Here are some initial thoughts:
What I did during the holidays
During last year's holiday season, I was planning and tossing around a few topics for the blog. Around this time, I was tapped to facilitate an online forum in online teaching for the faculty at my school. My topic was "5 Elements of Successful Online Courses". You can download it HERE or by clicking on the link below.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7q3b9HePbnoOXl0X0JwVFphVk0/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7q3b9HePbnoOXl0X0JwVFphVk0/view?usp=sharing
Coming up with blog topics for this year
The week long conference was grand and I had great feedback from my faculty that I wanted to share. By the way, I think this information is valuable for teachers online AND instructional designers who develop course materials.
Their interests included:
* Various technologies for increasing student/content interaction.
* More ideas on using technology in online classes.
* The effective use of YouTube in the online classroom.
* Strengthening and making discussion boards more interesting.
* Item writing and item analysis
* More on deeper learning with video.
* Supplement work and support that ties between online and traditional learning.
* Using video animations and Powerpoint with audio.
* Specific online teaching tools and strategies.
* Utilization of the Google for Education Apps within Moodle.
Nice list, huh! Yeah, we are pretty up on it at my school. So, I have my misson for the year. To try and close the information gap between not knowing about these topics and learning more about them.
So, off I go to my writing desk! More to come...
