Nina Levine's List: E-learning

• Having an area of strength is a good thing. Developing other areas of skill/ability is also a positive development. It's not useful to view or accept weaknesses, or areas in which we are not strong or grounded as obstacles or roadblocks to achievement. - Nina Levine on 2010-02-10
• • It seems to me that increasingly there will be more multimedia resources available to include in online instruction. As lectures are captured, as video, podcasts and vodcasts become commonplace in academic and scholastic environments, then it will be possible and desirable to broaden the content format choices, thus reaching diverse learners. - Nina Levine on 2010-02-10
• Shared interest and experience is "opportunity knocking" for reflective practice. When peers can cross the artificial boundaries that may exist to allow colleagues to see our vulnerabilities, we open ourselves to the wonders of learning with friends. It's value added. - Nina Levine on 2010-02-10
• • Ideally learners are always teachers and teachers are learners. Being open to the possibility that such is and should be the case is essential for this to be operational. I must learn about the learners as I teach to be relevant. That's what great about teaching the same content/skills to multiple groups within a relatively short period of time. Each iteration can benefit from the lessons learned from teaching the previous lessons. Teachers must be active listeners and observers so that lessons are dynamically generated - Nina Levine on 2010-02-10

• there needs to be a specific outcome or skill-based focus. The instructor and/or course designer must come to know and understand the students and their needs. Finally, the instructor needs to pay close attention to his or her role as the one who guides the way while providing the necessary structure for a student to be successful.
• focus that centers on what a student is to learn.
• An effective course must focus on these varying gifts and enable students to tap into the wealth of their gifts.
• Assignments should be structured to allow a student to design the path of learning that they will follow
• The facilitator should provide direction and ask open-ended questions to empower the student to go deeper into the area of study. This will give the students an intrinsic ownership of their learning.
• Clear communication between an instructor and his/her students can defuse potentially frustrating situations before they escalate
• nothing but collaborative projects may not always empower a student towards success. While team-building skills are very necessary outside of the online "classroom," they are not the only skills needing to be developed. Thus, an online class should not solely rely on such assignments.

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• Social networking websites offer their users an online community to share and explore common interests and activities. They typically provide a variety of ways for users to interact: through chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file-sharing, blogging, forums, discussion groups, and applications

  

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• According to Danah Boyd, leading authority on social networking at U.C. Berkeley, the true definition of a "social network site" is that it contains profiles, semi-persistent public commentary on the profile, and a traversable publicly articulated social network displayed in relation to the profile

• use them—at their teachers’ discretion—to connect to the school’s wireless network to do their work.
• he reality that most students have phones or other mobile devices that could allow them to give real-time feedback to a lecture on a text-message back channel, take pictures during a science field trip, or answer teacher prompts with online polling.
• the growing demand for K-12 students to be comfortable learning online, and the shrinking technology budgets of districts coping with the aftermath of the Great Recession, allowing students to use their own mobile devices is making more sense to more people
• The cost of having some cellphones you can provide, at least in school during school time, is small compared to supplying laptops or supplying broadband in people’s homes,
• Loaner mobile devices for students cost about $500, and would not need a data plan to connect to the school’s open network. Netbooks would have a cost similar to mobile phones’, but would have to be distributed to a greater portion of the student body.
• abuse of cellphones during class time—whether for cheating, accessing inappropriate material, or sending improper text messages—is a behavioral problem, not a technology problem.
• Not only does it enable teachers to have the final say on in-class use, but it also enables them through language that is only three sentences long, implying that any other issues not covered explicitly fall under the district’s general code of conduct.
• a successful cellphone policy should help educate students about proper conduct with a device that is nearly universal in the work world.
• we need to do as schools is to teach our kids to be responsible users,
• gaining that trust appears to be a crucial step.
• The learning potential of the devices, he says, won’t be realized without continuing professional development, as well as in-class trial and error.
• The ability to access the Internet through a device whose cost is a fraction of that of a laptop, he says, potentially gives students rich and poor the “unprecedented” ability to answer their own questions. Moreover, he argues, trusting a student to use a cellphone properly creates more-responsible students.
• reservations about putting teachers in positions where they could become entangled, for instance, in a case of in-class sexting or cheating.

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• Discussions’ feature only applies to new documents you create, but I am sure they will be rolling the feature out for archived documents soo
• look up in the right hand corner for ‘Discussions’ (near the sharing options).
• discussion options are available to anyone who is shared into the document using the sharing options
• users adding comments, and then other contributors replying to their comments
• Each comment now has a timestamp and profile picture as well as reply options. The creator of the document has some options as to how the discussion’s ‘alerts’ can be managed as well. Specifically, you can be notified via email that someone has commented, someone repied to your comments, your threads, or when you are mentioned in a reply by anyone in the group. Additionally, you can turn off notifications completely if you need that option
• discussions flow smoothly by adding ownership and edit rights to individual comments
• you can delete them, or you can ‘resolve’ a discussion that would collapse the thread and archive it -- if for any reason it needs to be retrieved later

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