With the increasing affordability of 3D printers, there are some great free online software options that offer 3D design and downloads. Tinkercad is extremely user friendly and you don’t need to know CAD – it comes with built in tutorials and shared resources. Sketchup Make has been around in some form since 1999, having been acquired by Google for a few years and now Trimble – free downloadable software that allows you to draw a 2D model and then push and…
Whilst random decorative images can add to the students’ cognitive load and are not recommended, relevant graphics have been shown to improve learner engagement with materials. Zygomatic produces several tools that are all incredibly simple to use, useful, free, and online: Typography Editor – Create your own designs with backgrounds (or upload your own), badges, borders, rulers, frames, corners, and other ornaments; add text in a variety of fonts with backdrops and shadows. For PC or mobile interface. Image can be…
Free music archive – click the song title to find more info about the license information for a given track.
For many reasons it is very useful to either caption your video or provide a written transcript of what is being said, expanding your audience by making the material much more accessible for students who may be hearing impaired, or watching the video with the sound turned down, when out and about on mobile devices where for whatever reason they don’t want to have earphones in. Captioning takes time and may not always be appropriate. For instance, it is not helpful for…
Online technology facilitates asynchronous and anonymous role play, should that be desirable in an educational context. Project Enrol – lists examples of the use of role play in education.
There are many resources to help with curriculum design and development, including the implementation of blended learning models. Many involve templates and supporting materials that are transferable to other environments. Learning Designer – this is very cool: an online tool, from the UCL Knowledge Lab in London, that allows you to visualise the relative proportions of learning activities that fall under six learning types identified by Diana Laurillard’s Conversational Framework: Read/Write/Listen (or Acquisition), Inquiry, Practice, Production, Discussion and Collaboration. You can…
Blended learning brings with it the opportunity to facilitate higher cognitive processes through the use of technology, allowing students to create digital objects. This requires writing new criteria and descriptors in the associate rubrics. Below are links to some exemplars. University of Wisconsin – A collection of rubrics for assessing portfolios, group work/cooperative learning, concept map, research process/ report, PowerPoint, oral presentation, web page, blog, wiki, and other social media projects.
All the learning theories on the Aussie Educator site – makes this blog article redundant really! :/ And if that’s all too texty, check out this fabulously comprehensive AND interactive image from Richard Millwood. 5E Instructional Model (5Es) – consists of the following phases: engagement, exploration, explanation, elaboration, and evaluation. Community of Inquiry – This model situates the educational experience within three essential elements – social, cognitive and teaching presence. It acknowledges that a group of learners sharing their perspectives brings each of them closer to consensus…
Group work can be the source of considerable angst for students if they perceive they are being let down by their teammates. SPARKPLUS – SPARKPLUS is a web-based self and peer assessment kit. It enables students to confidentially rate their own and their peers’ contributions to a team task or individual submissions and improve their judgment through benchmarking exercises. The WebPA project (a peer assessment tool developed at the Centre for Engineering and Design Education at Loughborough) attempts to address this inequity by…
There are bloomin’ hundreds of beautifully designed representations of Bloom’s ever useful taxonomy. Here are a few of my favourites. Blooms taxonomy teacher planning kit – teacher planning resource that provides a framework for generating Learning Objectives, tasks and questions linked directly to Blooms. TES (2015). Bloom’s Taxonomy Teacher Planning Kit by jam2804 – TES. Retrieved September 27, 2016, from https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/bloom-s-taxonomy-teacher-planning-kit-6141531. Iowa State University – Revised Blooms Taxonomy – 3D representation of learning objectives derived from the knowledge and cognitive process dimensions.