Category
The posts in this category cover various subjects related to education that students of all ages might find informative and useful.
With the fast and always expanding internet, we need to take into consideration a new type of a community: the digital community. The digital community is as safe as each of us make it. That’s why teachers, students, and anyone who uses the internet should know the CPR approach to being a good digital citizen.
Pokemon Go is an AR game that made millions of people to go outside and interact while playing the game. The number of active players and the engagement rates are astounding. What if teachers use it in their instruction? Can Pokemon Go be part of the classroom?
Children should know how to write by hand — more than their names — as well as how to type. There’s no reason to support one activity in the detriment of another. A lot of students take notes with pen and paper, and use their laptops / computers to turn in their assignments and take tests. It can be done. Both writing and typing are channeling the same core skills: the formation and communication of thought.
MOOCs created a storm in higher education , but they still didn’t prove themselves. SPOCs, on the other hand, are closer to the objectives of higher education institutions. They are not a replacement of teachers; SPOCs are teachers’ sidekicks. Also, they pave the way for future more successful MOOCs.
With so many distractions around, it’s easy for students to procrastinate and put their courses on the back burner. While the following tips to create engaging courses may not always win the war against procrastination, they can certainly win a battle or two for the teacher/instructional designer.
Working students have their hands full balancing work, school, and their personal lives. The last thing they need is to be held back by compulsory attendance and other inflexible rules some universities still apply. E-learning comes as a breath of fresh air, as it allows busy students to build their careers without neglecting their education. Find out how exactly e-learning can benefit working students.
While the concept of personalized learning is a rather old one — teachers have sought to craft instruction to meet individual student needs for generations — the explosion of “smart” technology has only recently begun to make its presence felt in classrooms. Technology and BYOD play an important role in the development of personalized learning. Thanks to all the technological advances, creating the environment for customized learning experiences doesn’t seem like an effort of gargantuan proportions (as it was in the past) but rather a manageable task.
Learning has evolved to a point where augmented reality (AR) is a possibility. It’s evolved to a point where the environment adapts to learners needs and as I like to say it the learning process is as interactive and as immersive as ever.
The internet can be addicting. People would do a quick search on an interesting topic, read on and find themselves reading more and more topics totally different from the topic which piqued their interest. It’s like playing a video game and most of us can relate to that. Once we start playing the first few stages of the game, we are progressing and finally finish the story of the game. It’s addictive. Now put that in the perspective of learning – reading and studying topics which get deeper and deeper, until it becomes addictive.
MOOCs have been considered for a very long time a great way of learning, because they are useful, diverse, surrounded by communities and mostly free. However, lately MOOCs have faced several challenges and criticisms such as its heavy reliance on user-generated content which creates a rather chaotic learning environment, and the mere fact that digital literacy is almost always a prerequisite if someone is going to take an open online course. But are they really dead? Let’s discuss the yes and the no.
