Links for Online Course Content Resources

Much front-end production time in creating a new course or converting a course to online will be spent planning and producing content.

In considering media for inclusion in your online course, consider Fleming's six-element typology of teaching tasks and objectives: 1) attention, 2) perception and recall, 3) organization and sequencing, 4) instruction and feedback, 5) learner participation, and 6) higher-order thinking and concept formation. The following media and modes are considered because they are common and familiar, and also because they constitute the tools most available to online teachers, trainers, and learners: 1) print and text, 2) still graphics and illustrations, 3) sound and music, 4) video and moving graphics, and 5) multimedia.

Over the next few postings, I plan to provide a variety of annotated links to resources on the web for instructors to use in developing their lessons. We’ll start with Science.

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CHEMISTRY COLLECTIVE is a collection of virtual labs, scenario-based learning activities, and concepts tests which can be incorporated into a variety of teaching approaches as pre-labs, alternatives to textbook homework, and in-class activities for individuals or teams. It is organized by a group of faculty and staff at Carnegie Mellon University for college and high school teachers who are interested in using, assessing, and/or creating engaging online activities for chemistry education.

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THE BIOLOGY PLACE (LabBench Activities) Site maintained by Pearson--series of interactive flash demonstrations

• Lab 1: Diffusion & Osmosis
• Lab 2: Enzyme Catalysis
• Lab 3: Mitosis & Meiosis
• Lab 4: Plant Pigments & Photosynthesis
• Lab 5: Cell Respiration
• Lab 6: Molecular Biology
• Lab 7: Genetics of Organisms
• Lab 8: Population Genetics
• Lab 9: Transpiration
• Lab 10: Circulatory Physiology
• Lab 11: Animal Behavior
• Lab 12: Dissolved Oxygen

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BIOINTERACTIVE VIRTUAL LABS: Maintained by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The Virtual Labs won top honors in the 2002 Pirelli INTERNETional Award competition.More than 1,200 multimedia entries competed for the Top Pirelli Prize, which recognizes the best multimedia products designed to use the Internet to educate about science and technology. The site a variety of video clips, animations, and virtual labs.

• The Transgenic Fly Virtual Lab
• The Bacterial Identification Lab
• The Cardiology Lab
• The Neurophysiology Lab
• The Immunology Lab

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Virtual Science: Experiments,"Hands-on", Laboratories (from MIT)

• Links to interactive science resources gathered by MIT

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VADLO: Biomedical and Life Sciences Search Engine: Vadlo was developed by two biology scientists who wish to make it easier to locate biology research related information on the web. Vadlo search engine caters to all branches of life sciences. VADLO allows users to search within five categories: Protocols, Online Tools, Seminars, Databases and Software. Feel free to copy the Cartoons for your personal use and PowerPoint presentations!

Learning World Affairs Through Digital Media | Edutopia

Global Kids uses media and technology to foster civic participation and global awareness. In its Online Leadership Program, students make games, create animated movies, and produce videos that explore global issues.

20 Hi-Tech Tools for Classroom Teachers

Today's blog represents a change from my usual blogging habit. Karen Schweitzer, the About.com Guide to Business School is Guest Poster. Karen also writes about accredited online colleges for OnlineCollege.org. I am especially happy with her selection since she introduces me to several sites I hadn't found before.

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There are lots of different ways to integrate technology in the classroom. You can start an online community, encourage students to blog, create your own slide shows, and use websites as part of your lesson plan. Here are 20 hi-tech tools that will help you do all of these things and more:

1. Bloglines - Bloglines is a free online service that makes it easy to track student blogs. You can place all of the blogs you follow on one web page and access them with your PC or mobile device.
2. Mikogo - This free screen sharing tool can be used in classrooms with multiple computers.
3. Mikogo can display whatever is on one computer screen on up to ten other screens.
4. Edomodo - Edomodo is a free private communication platform for students and teachers who want to share links, files, notes, and more. Edomodo can also be used to securely send assignments, test alerts, and other important information.
5. Campfire - Designed specifically for group messaging, Campfire makes it easy to stay in touch with students and parents. This web-based tool charges a modest fee for their service, but you can try it for free for 30 days.
6. Engrade - Engrade is an online classroom community for teachers who want to manage their classroom online. It can be used to send homework, assign grades, communicate with parents and students, and much more.
7. SchoolTool - This free suite of administrative tools is used by schools all over the world. It includes a gradebook, attendance calendar, customizable applications, and other features that would be useful to school teachers and support staff.
8. Bookgoo - Teachers who are tired of marking homework and tests with a pen can upload documents and mark them on a PC with Bookgoo. Documents can be highlighted, annotated, and shared with others online.
9. ClassMarker - ClassMarker is a free online quiz maker for teachers. Quizzes can be taken online, at home, or in the classroom. When the quiz is finished, ClassMarker grades it automatically.
10. Empressr - Empressr is a free multimedia tool that can be used to create presentations for the classroom. Empressr supports photos, video, music, audio, and text.
11. SlideShare - Students and teachers can create online slideshows with this free tool. SlideShare works with Word documents and PowerPoint.
12. TeacherLed IWB - TeacherLed offers a huge collection of classroom resources that can be used with an interactive whiteboard (IWB). Resources include activities for math, English, and geography.
13. Twrivia - Teachers who want to begin using Twitter in the high school classroom will love Twrivia. This free Twitter app offers a new trivia challenge each day.
14. Group Tweet - Group Tweet can be used to send private messages via Twitter--a great way to communicate with a select group of students, parents, or teachers.
15. Virtual Museum - The Smithsonian Museum offers this free guided tour to students who want to take a virtual field trip to the museum. Students can explore various exhibits using a map and navigational tools.
16. Newseum - Newseum is an interactive museum of news in Washington D.C. As a service to students and visitors, Newseum displays the front page of daily newspapers on their website--perfect for classrooms who are trying to learn about current events or news in various states/cities.
17. GeoEdu - GeoEdu is free software that includes an atlas and a built in game for students who want to learn more about geography. The atlas includes information on all of the countries in the world and the game features more than 100,000 questions about the atlas.
18. Footnote - Footnote combines social networking with historical documents to create a fun and unique learning experience. The site hosts millions of records and documents and provides a place for older students to share content and opinions on historical events.
19. Academic Skill Builders - This site is a great place to find standards-aligned educational games for students to play at home or in the classroom. All of the games are designed to teach basic math, language arts, vocabulary, and thinking skills.
20. Artopia - Artopia is a free, web-based arts community for middle school students. The site provides lesson plans for teachers, activities for students, and a place to upload student art for display.
21. SparkTop - This non-profit website is dedicated to providing ad-free educational content for kids. The site focuses on online games and activities for students who learn differently because of a learning disability (LD) or Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD).

I Stumbled Upon FindSounds

This post actually pulls in two new tools I have found recently. The first is a browser plug-in called Stumble Upon. This plug-in works with both Firefox and IE. StumbleUpon helps me discover and share great websites. As I click Stumble! in my toolbar, I get websites matched to my personal preferences. I set up my preferences to focus more on the topics I am dealing with educationally and with my job as Instructional Designer. I've found sites I probably would never get to with a generic Google search.

One of those sites is FindSounds. One of the projects I'm working on is an i3D Visual Learning Object for a collaboration between a community college biology instructor and a high school biology teacher. We are working on creating a visualization of an animal and plant cell. One idea to help students remember each component of the cell was to attach a sound that would be representative (sort of like Fantasia for the cell). For example, the user would hear a strong bass drum sound when he/she rolled over or clicked on the nucleus. FindSounds finds sounds on the web. There is a partial list of examples searches or I can type in a word and search that way. I can't wait to play.

Create Your Own Avatar with Evolver

I created this version of me using Evolver. Not a bad likeness if I do say so. If I had had a front-on pic of me without my glasses, they could have cloned my face. I was able to pick out both face and body type. The clothing selection was extremely limited though. This is a screenshot, but I can transport the avatar into games, virtual worlds--or turn my avatar into a 3D model for Maya or 3dStudio Max.

Softchalk

SoftChalk creates software for teaching. They specialize in developing software that is intuituve and easy to use, yet allows instructors to create powerful, sophisticated and professional-looking content for e-learning classrooms in K–12, Higher Education, and corporate training.

With SoftChalk LessonBuilder you can....

• Create interactive web pages for your e-learning course with SoftChalk LessonBuilder. It's easy, quick, and your lessons will look like a professional designer created them.
• Engage your students with lessons that include pop-up text annotations, self-assessment quizzes, and interactive learning games.
• Package your lessons for delivery via CD-ROM, Intranet, Internet, or integrate with your LMS (Learning Management System).

If you can use a word-processing program, you can use LessonBuilder. Designed for teachers and content-experts who don't have time to learn complex software, LessonBuilder is simple, yet powerful, with only the features you need to create exciting, interactive, content for your online course.

“The release of SoftChalk V5 offers a solution for institutions that want to maximize their investment in eLearning, create an environment of shared ideas and information, and lower their costs,” said Sue Evans, CEO of SoftChalk. “The new features of V5 that really speak to these issues are the ability to embed widgets into a lesson and the digital repository search and eCourseBuilder tools.”

Highlights of the new features included in SoftChalk V5:

• With the digital repository, users have the ability to perform keyword searches across multiple media repositories at a time, including media from open sources (YouTube, Flicker), fee-based premium services (Intelecom), or library repositories available through the organization itself.

• The embedding of widgets offers the option of including Web 2.0 features. Blogs, polls, surveys, widgets, wikis, and videos can now easily be inserted to create dynamic lessons.

• The eCourseBuilder tool combines multiple lessons into larger eCourse modules with automatic calculation and tracking of score information between and within lessons.

Other features and enhancements within the new release include an option that will allow lessons to directly publish to Blackboard, as well as a new photo album activity, quiz group function, table of contents, and accessibility options.

FireFox Collections and FireShot

The Cool Cat Teacher Blog recently discussed new feature to FireFox: Firefox Add-on Collections. Anyone can create a new collection and share it with your friends. To create your own collection you must register on Firefox’s site; after that, creating a collection is quite easy: choose a name, and pick which add-ons you want to be in your collection. You can browse other collections in the Collection Directory, and you’re also able to filter them by popularity, or you can browse through the Editor’s picks. FireFox published a video overview on their blog.

All this is a lead-in to the fact that I browsed Cool Cat Teacher's collections and found a new add-on that I installed: FireShot. Ever need to take a screen shot of your browser window only to find that you can't get everything you want in one shot. Well, Fireshot to the rescue. Fireshot is a browser add-on (currently works in IE and FireFox) that goes beyond the functionality of Print Screen. In addition to having the option of taking a screen shot of the entire web page or just a section of it, this plugin also provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify captures and insert text and graphical annotations.

Screenshots can be saved to disk (PNG, GIF, JPEG, BMP), printed (NEW), copied to clipboard, e-mailed and sent to external editor for further processing. A free image hosting web-server is also provided. Here's a short demo on how to capture and annotate a page.

FireShot is absolutely FREE! FireShot has NO TIME LIMITS and you are free to send it to your friends, distribute it at your blog, web site or include it into packages.

Download FireShot for Firefox!

Download FireShot for Internet Explorer!