5 Trends in Education to Keep Watching in 2015

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Happy New Year, Everyone !!!  With my first post of the new year, I feel compelled to share with you the trends in education that I am watching.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to write about the trends in education that I was seeing that have affected me as a teacher, content developer and educational consultant.

So to that end, here are five trends that I list below in any order of importance. My trends list is by far not meant to be a complete list but just a “tip of the iceberg” of the trends that I’m keeping my eye on as they affect my teaching and practice.

Please note that the impact of the trends I list are based on my own observations, opinions and experiences.

Creating an Instructor Toolbox in your LMS

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When teaching with technology, teachers have to act as subject matter experts, instructional designers and course developers all rolled into one person. Specifically, we not only have to know our subject, but we have to be able to effectively impart that subject to our students by creating a series of engaging and interesting course activities. While there are a variety of tools available out there to do this, the main tools for creating successful courses are the Internet and your school’s online learning management system or LMS.

At my current school, my online courses are developed in the Moodle LMS. Over the years, I’ve worked in many LMS environments and have found the need to create what I call an “instructor toolbox” in my courses.

8 Ways to Create Engaging Discussion Forums (Poster)

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In the series, Creating Engaging Discussion Forums (Part 1 of 2),  I talked about the different types of discussion formats in Moodle and 8 ways to create engaging discussion forums for your students.

For your convenience, here is a 8.5" x 11” poster to download as a PDF file. I would suggest putting this poster in a sheet protector. You could use this on a bulletin board or in a binder for easy reference when creating discussion forums for your courses. 

Click to download

Content Developers: Don’t Forget About Meta Search Engines

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 http://pixabay.com/en/google-www-online-search-search-485611/

As online content creators, we often use search engines to look for citations, information from articles, public domain images and general background material for the content we create. While we all use the most popular search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing, we should not forget about the meta search engines.