Quick Rubric Provides an Easy Way to Craft Rubrics

Here is a link to help with creating rubrics.

Quick Rubric Provides an Easy Way to Craft Rubrics

7 Tools for Adding Questions and Notes to Videos

For those of you who use videos in class or with your lessons, here are seven tools you might want to try to stimulate more engagement with your class while they watch the videos.

7 Tools for Adding Questions and Notes to Videos

Learning from PowerPoint: is it time for teachers to move on?

Michelle Denise Miller, Northern Arizona University

For a brief period in the history of teaching, using PowerPoint automatically qualified you as a tech-savvy professor – an innovator who wouldn’t settle for the usual combination of staticky black-and-white overhead films and hand-scrawled chalkboard notes.

Now, it’s hard to believe that PowerPoint was once considered innovative by anyone. Popular criticism includes everything from tongue-in-cheek comments about death by PowerPoint
to serious claims that it fundamentally degrades how we think and communicate.

But much of today’s college instruction isn’t in face-to-face classrooms, a setting in which PowerPoint was traditionally used. It’s in the burgeoning field of online learning.

So if more learning is moving online, does that mean that teaching with PowerPoint is becoming a thing of the past?

Surprisingly, the answer is no.

Passive learning through PowerPoint?

Even though there’s little research that directly addresses whether PowerPoint affects learning in college students, critics have questioned its value in educational settings.

Some ask whether PowerPoint might indirectly undermine the quality of teaching by reinforcing a passive learning approach.

We know that lecturing is less effective than alternative methods. It therefore makes sense for teachers in face-to-face classrooms to question how much of their class time ought to be spent on slideshows.

But the fact is “slideshows” remain a popular method for presenting content in today’s online courses.

Technically, these are often not PowerPoints, but decks generated using other types of specialized programs.

And they may differ from standard in-class PowerPoint presentations in important ways.

For example, taking advantage of the increased flexibility of the online environment, they give students more control over how quickly to go through the material and when to backtrack. They can also have more interactive features, such as quizzes, that ask students to apply material while they are learning it.

Even so, the basic – and flawed – idea is the same: put the material in front of students, and learning will happen.

What’s wrong with slideshows in online courses

As a psychologist specializing in teaching techniques and course design, when I talk to faculty about teaching effectively with technology, I sometimes tell them to follow the ABS principle: anything but slideshows.

I’m only half-kidding with that blanket statement.

There are alternatives to using only PowerPoint for instruction.
Derek Keats, CC BY

After all, we learn with the same brains in online environments as we do face-to-face; the principles of learning don’t change just because the medium changes. And today’s learning theorists agree: active involvement trumps passive viewing.

Students need to grapple with challenging problems, practice skills, discuss and defend viewpoints. But for this kind of active learning to happen, instructors need to ensure they do not rely too heavily on slides.

There are alternatives: simulations, problem-based learning, even educational games are all proven methods for drawing students in. They also transplant well into online learning.

Using slideshows the right way

So do slideshows have any place in a well-designed online course? Possibly.

They can be used strategically for things they are best at: giving students an overview of new material, or providing a refresher on concepts students will need for an upcoming activity.

Slides are also great for for integrating visual illustrations. This is important because visuals – diagrams, figures, photos and the like – have a powerful impact on learning.

Visual information is almost always more memorable than sound, text or other modalities.

This isn’t because of the now-debunked idea that some people are “visual learners,” but more likely stems from how the brain codes images. There are separate systems for representing verbal and visual information in the brain. When we save information in both places, it is easier to recall.

Teachers don’t have to stick with static images, either. Even basic animations can illuminate conceptual relationships – such as cause and effect, or the unfolding of a process over time – in ways that text can’t.

Furthermore, as University of California, Santa Barbara researcher Richard Mayer has discovered, visuals and the spoken word pair up in powerful ways, so that audio plus visuals produce better learning than either alone.

Research also tells teachers some things not to do with visuals. Instructors should avoid purely decorative graphics, as these can actually hamper learning.

They should also eschew reading text verbatim, instead using a conversational, natural speaking style for voiceovers and verbal explanations.

What this means in the larger context of online learning

In sum, slideshows can be a useful part of online instruction, when used for the right things and designed in the right way. But they shouldn’t be the main, or the only, method of instruction – any more than lectures should dominate face-to-face classes.

But it’s not just instructors who need to hear this message.

Publishing and educational technology companies, who provide many of the tools that educators rely on, can do more to develop products that push beyond familiar formulas and draw on the latest learning science.

We need tools that make it easy to create assignments that ask students to apply what they have learned, in scenarios that are as realistic and challenging as possible.

These learning tools also need to be adaptive, adjusting the material and pace to the individual learner. This kind of educational technology does exist, but far more can be done to expand the available options.

Teaching in the age of technology comes with its own set of opportunities as well as challenges. And online education presents educators and tech developers with a rare opportunity to fundamentally rethink what we do.

Will we use it to explore new avenues for learning, or will we fall back on the the same old techniques that don’t work well in face-to-face classrooms?



Michelle Denise Miller, Director, First Year Learning Initiative at University College and Professor of Psychological Sciences, Northern Arizona University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Laughing, Learning, and Leading: Ten Reasons Google Drawings Should Be on Your Clas...

Ten Reasons Google Drawings Should Be on Your Classroom Radar...:
Blogger - Chantell Manahan
Since learning more about Google Drawings at last year's EdTechTeam Indiana Summit featuring Google Apps for Education, I can't stop using them! Google Drawings are a fantastic, highly underutilized tool for classroom use. As I've experimented with them and found even more uses, here are my top ten reasons you should give Google Drawings a try!

Craft of Poetry: Couplet | Tech Learning

English teachers might be interested in this link. You can go to the home page of this site for additional information.

Craft of Poetry: Couplet | Tech Learning

RefME Helps Students Create Bibliographies

Practical Ed Tech Tip of the Week – RefME Helps Students Create Bibliographies

TIP OF THE WEEK | SEPTEMBER 13, 2015 BY ADMIN | COMMENTS OFF ON PRACTICAL ED TECH TIP OF THE WEEK – REFME HELPS STUDENTS CREATE BIBLIOGRAPHIES

RefME is a nice service that students can use to create bibliographies. The service offers Android, iOS, and browser-based tools to help students save references, organize them into projects, and create bibliographies. In the video embedded below I provide an overview of how to use RefME’s browser-based tools.

It is worth noting that RefME and tools like it don’t always format citations perfectly. That said, I think they are still valuable because they help get students into the habit of citing their sources of information and keeping a record of the sources they use. Furthermore, if RefME or one of the other bibliography generators does make a mistake you can turn that into a teaching opportunity with your students. Point out the flaw to students and teach them how to correct it.

Here are this week’s most popular posts from FreeTech4Teachers.com:
1. Great Google Drive Add-ons for Teachers – A PDF Handout 
2. Have You Tried Voice Typing In Google Docs? – It’s Easy to Use
3. A Round-up of Recent Google Classroom & Drive Updates
4. A Guide to Blogging and Examples of Classroom Blogs
5. Ten Great Tools for Telling Stories With Pictures – A PDF Handout
6. An Easy Way to Create Video Blog Entries
7. How to Use the Google Drive Templates Gallery

The Scientific Reason Why Bullets Are Bad for Presentations

The Scientific Reason Why Bullets Are Bad for Presentations

By Leslie Belknap on August 31, 2015

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You’ve probably heard this advice before: Don’t use bullet points in your presentations. But do you know why presentation design experts are so adamantly opposed to the bullet point format?

Here’s the simple, but perhaps surprising, explanation to why bullet points are bad for presentations: Bullet points make information more difficult to remember, especially when the bullet point lists are accompanied with auditory information. This is not a conjecture; it is backed by credible research.

The Value of Visualizations

In 2014, the International Journal of Business Communication published the results from The Use of Visualization in the Communication of Business Strategies, a study designed to gather empirical evidence regarding whether the use of visualization is superior to text in the communication of business strategies. The results of that experiment confirmed that lists of text are ineffective for presentations. Slides withvisuals are undeniably more effective than slides with text.

Specifically, the study concluded:

Subjects who were exposed to a graphic representation of the strategy paid significantly more attention to, agreed more with, and better recalled the strategy than did subjects who saw a (textually identical) bulleted list version.

In other words, when your slides are comprised of lists of text, your audience will struggle to pay attention to your slides, they will find it difficult to agree with your message, and they will retain a less-than-ideal amount of the information.

The Limits of Working Memory

Digging deeper into the reason bullet points are bad, Dr. Chris Atherton, an award-winning lecturer in psychology and a user experience consultant for organizations such as Skype and the BBC, discovered that the limits of working memory are to blame for the failure of bullet points.

In this 2011 speech, Dr. Atherton details the results of her research:

At the beginning of her lesson, Dr. Atherton explains that when you accompany a lecture with bullet point slides, your audience will switch between reading and listening. This type of task switching is cognitively exhausting.

When presenters minimize the cognitive exertion required to absorb the information by avoiding long lists of text on their slides, audience members are able to use their remaining cognitive capabilities to actually process the information being presented. By actively processing the information instead of attempting to simultaneously read the slides as well as listen to the presenter, audience members are more likely to retain the meaning of the presentation.

Dr. Atherton recommends creating slides with minimal text to limit the extraneous load of your presentation. In addition, she also recommends using visuals to communicate complex concepts. Since the area of the human brain that processes visuals has a working memory capacity that is separate from the short-term memory limit of the linguistic and auditory processing areas of the brain, you expand the amount of information that audience members can process by utilizing visuals on your slides.

Putting This Research to Work

Both studies mentioned above suggest that meaningful visuals should be utilized in lieu of text-based explanations, when possible.

On that note, Dr. Atherton warns presenters not to use Death by Powerpoint clip art. This study, by Ronald A. Berk at The Johns Hopkins University, validates Dr. Atherton’s wariness of clip art with its conclusion that irrelevant pictures accompanying text and sound effects decrease learning.

If you cannot substitute visuals for your text, remove unnecessary words from your explanations to limit the reading you demand of your audience.

In addition, instead of listing multiple points on one slide using a bulleted list, give each point its own slide so your audience is not tempted to engage in mentally exhausting multitasking during your presentation.

Additional Resources:

How to Turn Your Bullet Points Into Visually-Engaging Elements

Slide Makeovers: Transforming PowerPoint Bullets Into Visual Learning

Before & After: 4 Slide Makeover Tips

Why Cognitive Load Theory Needs to be Applied to Every Presentation

Minimize The Extraneous Load of Your Presentations

About the Author

Leslie Belknap is the Marketing Director for Ethos3 as well as a board member for TEDxNashville. Say hi to Leslie on Twitter; she manages tweets for Ethos3.

Google Doc Collaboration Update

This Docs Update Adds So Much Clarity To Collaboration

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Have you ever shared out a Google Doc only to come back to it a few hours later and it looks completely different? Keeping up with which users made which changes to a shared document can be difficult. But knowing who was responsible for each edit is crucial for accountability.

Google recently solved this problem by adding a new option to the Google Docs interface specifically for viewing recent edits and the editors that made them. Simply click the “See New Changes” button next to where it says “Help” on the Doc navigation bar and view the whole edit history as well as who made the edits. It’s time you got the full picture when collaborating.