Distance Learning, mLearning, Digital Education, Technology

As the old saying goes “Every day’s a learning day’.  Social Media including Twitter seems to be always changing things. Whilst introducing new features in the main can be useful, they sometimes pass you by.  For me it was saving a draft of a Tweet. How did I miss that?! This post highlights some tips that I hope you will find useful. For keyboard shortcut fans there are a list of commands towards the end of the post.

The heritage sector has a wealth of knowledge to share with the world. It plays a vital role in enabling people of all ages to learn about and understand the UK’s fascinating and complex history. Whether visiting sites and monuments, exploring stories and exhibitions, or participating in events and activities, your visitors already experience a wealth of education opportunities. 

Online learning resources and activities can help to bring heritage to a wider audience than ever before, in new and innovative ways. 

Online learning can include: 

free digital courses that anyone can join, sometimes called Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCS 

structured activities aimed at groups of learners such as schoolchildren 

community learning and engagement, which might involve collaborative practice or ‘crowdsourcing’ resources

self-paced online learning materials

virtual tours and exhibitions

blogging and social media activities, including digital storytelling and quizzes

Online learning provides opportunities to make heritage education accessible to people from all walks of life.

You don’t need specialist expertise and expensive applications to create effective learning experiences.

With online teaching and learning becoming the norm for so many teachers and students during the COVID-19 climate, it is important to be aware of what makes an engaging, creative and effective web-based teaching and learning experience.

Like any good presentation tool Google Slides has lots of little features that often go overlooked even by students who have used it for a long time. I was reminded of this today while helping students in one of my classes put some finishing touches on presentations that they're going to give later this week. On that note, here are five helpful Google Slides features that you might be overlooking.

When we say that our lifestyle has changed, it tends to point towards various trends and things that have brought that difference.

According to this research, by January 2019, there have been 3.4 billion active social media users around the world. Even young children, who are barely beginning to speak, want a piece of it while they are eating - they won’t open their mouth unless their favorite song is played on YouTube!

Creative Commons Search is an excellent tool students can use to search for CC licensed images to use in their works. What this tool actually does is that it provides you access to a number of search engines that provide CC licensed content including Flickr, Pixabay, Google Images, Wikimedia Commons, and many more

In early 2015 I started to make an effort to publish more tutorial videos on my YouTube channel. Since then I've created more than 1,000 tutorial videos. Included in those is a playlist of 331 tutorials about the Google tools that teachers and students use most.

If you're one of the many people who doesn't like the new Twitter interface, I'm one of them, you don't have to use it in order to still enjoy connecting with others through Twitter. First, you can do what I did and switch to using Tweet Deck to view new Tweets, replies, mentions, and to post your own new Tweets. Tweet Deck lets you see Tweets separated into columns of mentions, hashtags, and lists that you've created in Twitter.

Google Keep is one of the best free note taking tools out there. It provides a wide variety of features that allow you to easily create and share notes and lists. And for mobile users, they have the added feature to create audio notes. Just a few days ago, Google announced the integration of Keep into Google Docs. 

As many educators are either on their summer break or about to enter it, I know many are looking for great books to read.  This is great, but as we hope for our students, consumption should not be the only focus, but creation as well.  If you are looking to read, how will you connect the information you consume and dig deeper?

For this, blogging is a great tool not only to synthesize your learning but to also catalog it into a type of library.  Going through the process of writing “The Innovator’s Mindset” and finishing my second book, my blog was invaluable in finding great information from others that I had placed into my blog that I could reshare in a book.

Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with approximately 300 faculty who have developed and taught their first online course. One of the concerns I frequently hear from instructors considering teaching online is that they will lose the interaction and sense of community they have with their students when they teach face-to-face. That doesn’t have to be the case; many online instructors successfully create a sense of community in their courses. There are a variety of definitions of community. Most include wording or phrases such as “having something in common,” “feelings of being connected,” “shared goals or aspirations,” and “regular interaction.” This article will explore seven strategies faculty can use to promote and increase community in the online environment.

Awesome Table is a good add-on to use on Google Sheets to easily create educational apps that can help you convert the data from your spreadsheets into lively visuals. Awesome Table supports various types of visualisations including tables, cards, Google maps, charts, gant charts, org charts, geocharts, and slideshows.

Breakout Rooms is one of the most popular features of Zoom. A similar feature is now available in Microsoft Teams. Just like in Zoom you can assign your students to a specific breakout room or have them randomly assigned to a room..

The Hyperdoc website and check out the templates and already-created hyperdocs available for teachers. Lisa Highfill, Kelly Hilton, and Sarah Landis are the authors of The Hyperdoc Handbook and have created a website full of free resources for teachers.

Instructional designers can help with many different course-based problems and challenges, including helping you figure out where and how to start with your course design. When a course is new or needs a little design love, knowing where to start can be difficult. By starting with your main goals and then moving to assessments and content, it is easier for your course to stay in alignment with your goals than working from topics and assessments to objectives. Starting is as easy as asking yourself one simple question.

GIFs rule the internet. Here's how to hit a perfect loop every time.

An engaging learning experience in which students are fully immersed in the content is driven by six variables, according to new research.

The State of Engagement 2019 report, from edtech SaaS provider GoGuardian, features insight from hundreds of students, teachers, school leaders, and IT administrators to identify the specific factors contibuting to an engaging learning experience.

My boyfriend and I have a shared Google calendar so we can keep track of each other’s various events and commitments, as well as things like concerts and parties we plan to attend together. It’s a great system for us, but this week we ended up with something a little odd on that calendar: “You Have Won iPhone X s from AppleStore.”

The event was added from my boyfriend’s Gmail account; however, he says he never saw an email for the “event” in the first place. It’s also on our calendar five different times.

Alt text is text that you can add to images and videos to describe what they are and or what they contain. Adding alt text can make your materials that you post online more accessible to more visitors.

Today we created for you this handy infographic featuring some important tips to help you (teachers, educators and students) effectively use Google Images. More specifically, you will get to learn how to use a reverse image search to search for similar images on the web. You will also learn how to use Google Image advanced setting to apply narrow down your image search and filter search results.

Profile Publisher is an excellent interactive tool from ReadWriteThink we are re-featuring here in EdTech and mLearning for the second time. Students can use it to create mock or fake social media networking profiles. It is similar to other popular tool called Fakebook. 

In response to yesterday's post about moving files from one Google account to another, this morning I woke up to three emails from readers wondering about moving out of a Google (G Suite) environment and into a Microsoft environment. Fortunately, Google Takeout makes it relatively easy to move the contents of your Google Drive into Microsoft OneDrive.