User:MSB/ITP-11-2012

Dear workshop participants! please feel free to add to my comments. If possible, register and sign your contribution using the squiggly sign in the wiki editor. See also the "wiki in plain English" video. And here is another excellent video with "53 things you can do with a Wiki in class".

Day One

 * (1.1) Agenda: the circled items are methods used during the workshop – as is the very separation of each day into theory and practice. Because computer practice tends to fragment a group, I found it preferable to confine lab work to the afternoons.--msb (talk) 20:53, 9 November 2012 (UTC)


 * (1.2) Participant expectations:  in hindsight I think we more or less dealt with all your initial expectations including the Moodle training that many of you requested.  With regard to the structuring of  e-teaching lessons we've only been able to scratch the surface. My overall suggestion was to begin with new teaching methods (including "e") very slowly by changing only one thing at a time and gathering experience (a device that I haven't taken myself at the expense of too much sleep).--msb (talk) 20:53, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

--msb (talk) 21:15, 9 November 2012 (UTC)
 * (1.3) Parking lot:  from top to bottom (not necessarily in the order introduced in class) –
 * I use dictation software for all my text processing needs (in fact I'm dictating this very protocol straight into the Wiki). I'm sure there are many providers. The software that I'm using and that I'm happy with is called Dragon (by nuance.com). There is a discount for educators and it's available for both PC and Mac.
 * Titanpad.com is one of many (free) providers of the etherpad software owned by Google. It's a simple notepad designed for synchronous online notetaking by multiple users.
 * prezi.com is a relatively new presentation software that can be used in or outside a browser. It's busy looking and favors images and clear story lines.
 * bit.ly is an online service to abbreviate, customize and bundle web addresses (URLs). It's not the only one but arguably the best!
 * wiziq.com is a provider of tele learning software (same thing as Adobe Connect which you saw in the workshop).
 * Repetition is key when teaching anything.
 * Topics, tools and methods are distinct concepts— especially in e-learning, tools and methods are often mixed up. Software for example, is a tool but can methodically be introduced and used in many different ways. Take the different uses of Moodle. When deciding which tool and method to use, one needs to keep in mind that there are different learning types (such as visual, auditory, kinesthetic etc.). One of the advantages of  media change for example is that you can potentially serve different learning types more easily (instead only your own which is what you might do instinctively).
 * Gravatar.com is one of many services that lets weblogs and similar sites display user-provided pictures from a central database. here for example is my own Gravatar.  A similar  service is called about.me.
 * We briefly discussed the possibility of using Facebook in teaching. Recently, one of our students has written an excellent article reflecting on the possibilities of using Facebook as a LMS (learning management system, like Moodle).
 * disqus.com it is a site from where you can manage all your comments, both comments you make on other sites as well as comments made on sites, blogs etc. that you own.
 * "Flipped classroom" (or "active plenum") stands for a method of teaching whereby the lecturer assumes more of a coaching position while the students work out their own problems. We tried this ourselves throughout the workshop (with fairly good results I would say). In Germany, Christian Spannagel  has developed this tool further (see here for more—in German).

Day Two
--msb (talk) 21:24, 9 November 2012 (UTC)
 * It doesn't make much sense to repeat everything that we already wrote on the white balls or the flip charts. Especially the whiteboard (2.6) contains a wealth of links that seem accurate to me. Perhaps you want to try some of these if you haven't found the time yet. Regarding the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) like Udemy, Udacity, Coursera etc., you will find a number of recent articles linked in Moodle. Regarding blogs, I suggested Wordpress.com as the most flexible of the freely available tools, but ( especially with a Gmail account) blogger (blogspot.com) is also all right, and tumblr.com is a stronghold of very young, visually oriented people. Our e-learning blog (elerner.de) and my personal blog (marcusspeh.com) are examples for WordPress blogs. Beispiel für ein Tumblr Blog von mir ist hier... Everything beyond this point must find out yourself, except that of course I'm more than happy to help.