Thanks to Torria Bond, Brad Belbas, David Detwiler, and Michael Kieley for joining Sadie Anderson, of VoiceThread, and me in today's Teaching with VoiceThread Hangout on Air! We covered lots of ground including ideas for encouraging faculty adoption of VoiceThread, how to moderate comments in a VoiceThread, a practical example for teaching Spanish with VoiceThread, and clarifying the steps and benefits involved with using the Groups feature in VoiceThread. The archive of the Hangout is below and may be viewed on YouTube at this link: http://youtu.be/hhie_PVh8VgJoin us for the next Teaching with VoiceThread Hangout scheduled for Friday, November 9th at 1pm PDT/4pm EDT.  To learn how, please visit the Hangout page of my blog.View archives of past VoiceThread webinars here!

Blending Business Learning with VoiceThread Monday, November 5th, 12pm PDT/ 3pm EDTThis webinar, hosted by Michelle Pacansky-Brock, will feature the teaching innovations of Kathy Bohley Professor of Marketing and International Business at the University of Indianapolis, School of Business.The presenter, Dr. Kathy Bohley, has successfully utilized Voicethread in her undergraduate and graduate business courses, as well as conducted training for the faculty and students on "best practices" of Voicethread.  During this webinar, participants will learn how Dr. Bohley is utilizing VoiceThread to engage and motivate students, while reducing "classroom seat time".  Examples from various business courses will highlight usage of Voicethread for ice-breaker assignments, mini-lectures, group work, FAQ’s, and substantive feedback.  By the end of the webinar, participants should have a better understanding of how they can implement Voicethread into their course to improve student learning.Register for this webinar here. Online Office Hour: Hangout with Michelle and the VoiceThread TeamJoin Michelle on Friday, November 9th at 1pm PST/ 4pm EST for her online office hour in a Google+ Hangout On Air.  This interactive environment provides seats for up to 10 people to engage in a video conversation and accommodates an unlimited number of online viewers.  To learn how to participate, visit the Hangout page of Michelle’s blog.

Webinar: Learning Out Loud from VoiceThread on VimeoAbove is the archive of a webinar I recently presented for VoiceThread.  In the webinar I shared results of a semester-long teaching experiment that resulted in increasing the percentage of voluntary student voice or video comments from 25% to 75%.  I also share student feedback results that demonstrate how learning out loud in an online class improved the students' perception of how well they understood of the material, improved their verbal skills, kept them motivated, and made them feel more connected to their peers and instructor.View a list of all VoiceThread webinar archives here.

This week, I sat down in a Hangout with Deborah Lemon to learn about how she uses a private Facebook group to teach spanish fully online and in a blended format.  I must say, I was impressed and inspired!  I've found myself thinking long and hard about some of the examples she shared in the Hangout.  Deborah's point, to me, is that Facebook allows for her to seamlessly and fluidly interact with her students but also, and perhaps more importantly, the students can spontaneously stream their lives and experiences through their feed updates, functioning as authentic assessments. As Deborah explained to me, this type of fluid connection to students is essential when teaching a foreign language.  For example, (you'll see this in the video) Deborah showed a video of a student who set up her smartphone phone and recorded herself interacting with customers at her place of employment -- using the spanish skills she had just learned in class.  Deborah likens the video clips that the students share in the Facebook microblog feed to an ePortfolio.  Nearly all college students are on Facebook already so having them shift to a private FB group to share their spanish skills with their phones makes a lot more sense than requiring them to get to a computer and log into Blackboard or Moodle.To me, I had always been a bit stand offish about microblogging because it's so fragmented but Deborah demonstrated how the Facebook Group function provides a simple way to sort the contributions made by each student.  This gives a comprehensive view of the students' activities in one place.  Deborah covers a lot of other important topics including dealing with reluctant Facebook users (which is very rare, she says) and archiving content.I find myself thinking about how using social technologies push us, as teachers, into new and unexpected territory.  We might start using a social technology for one particular reason but what blossoms from there is the exciting and unimaginable part -- that's the piece that we need to be cultivating and that's the piece that will not happen in traditional course management systems. Finally, Deborah invites you all to join her Facebook Group "Using Groups for Teaching." In this group, you'll find lots of tips and resources for learning about how to teach with Facebook, as well as the chance to interact with other like-minded educators.  To check it out, go to Facebook.com, sign in, search for "Using Groups for Teaching" using the search box at the top, and click "Join group."Enjoy the video!

I've been doing a great deal of reflecting and discussing lately about some of the "ah ha" moments I've had in my Google Hangouts these past few months (my next on is this afternoon, by the way -- see my Hangouts Page for details!).  This morning a read a great, brief post on the Chronicle written by Robert Talbert titled "The social element of learning about effective teaching strategies" and it seems to fold many of my own realizations into a nice summary.Building off ideas from Theron Hitchman's Circles and Tangents blog and citing research from Henderson, et al., he notes that, "Publishing about effective teaching strategies in journals is somewhat effective in getting others to become aware of and adopt those strategies, but not as effective as going to to workshops, and that's not as effective as one-on-one interaction with a person who uses such methods."  And this is precisely why the social era is disrupting our traditional "workshop based" model of faculty development, in a good way. Today, faculty members can develop their own Personal Learning Networks on Twitter and/or Google+ and join Hangouts on Google+ to share teaching practices.  A Hangout is a group conversation between up to ten people from anywhere in the world and when you start a Hangout as a Hangout "On Air" (which is optional) it is streamed live to the web so an unlimited number of people can view it and it is also automatically archived to your YouTube channel.  Check out the Google+ for Universities page to learn more about getting started.I teach an online faculty development class called "Building Online Community with Social Media, " and in that class I observe faculty (mostly who teach online or who are preparing to teach online at community colleges in California) share problems, challenges, and reflect on opportunities.  What I have learned is that faculty are struggling to solve many of the same huge problems, often in complete isolation or with small groups at their local institutions, rather than opening outward and leveraging the robust community of which we are a part. As faculty, we must recognize that we are all lifetime learners understanding how to design and facilitate effective, meaningful, relevant learning environments for our students.  That's not an easy task in an ever-changing technological society with financially strapped faculty development budgets. In the social era, no longer do part-timers (who teach most of the college classes in the U.S. today) need to feel marginalized from institutional teaching communities.  No longer are faculty restricted by our physical campus boundaries to learn only from those who teach on our campus.  In today's digital, mobile society, each of us may construct our own teaching community and learn together. The social era is changing the landscape of many elements of our society and faculty development is certainly on the list.  As most of us who work at public institutions sit back and watch our faculty development budgets be slashed and our technology and pedagogy support staff vanish, these are crucial ideas to ponder and discuss. Thoughts, ideas, reactions are welcome, as always!

Today I had a really exhilarating "Teaching with VoiceThread Hangout" with Brad Belbas, Suzanne Friedman, Deborah Lemon, Jaime Vandergrift, and Amanda Volz.  Great ideas and tips were shared!  Deborah Lemon shared her screen and showcased a fabulous and practical application of VoiceThread in which her Spanish students create their own VoiceThreads that include brief webcam recordings of themselves demonstrating their Spanish speaking skills.  Their peers leave comments using their own webcams (a required component of the assignment) and the student (creator) joins in by commenting back.  The result is an asynchronous video dialogue in Spanish.  We had a great, reflective discussion about the importance of creativity as a skill in the 21st century, the value of VoiceThread as a digital ePortfolio tool in higher education and I had a chance to demo how to use Identities and the Move feature to facilitate an effective conversation with feedback in VoiceThread.Join me next month!I hope you enjoy the archive!  If you'd like to join in on our next "Teaching with VoiceThread Hangout" scheduled for 10am PST / 1pm EST, please go to my Google+ page and add me to your Circles.  The live stream of each Hangout is always embedded on the Hangouts page of my blog if you'd just like to watch.

I just learned this today and thought there would be other VoiceThread users who would appreciate knowing. If you are a Mac user who also uses VoiceThread, you should be aware that the most recent version of Google Chrome (23.0.1271.64) has disabled the ability to record audio with with flash based applications (like VoiceThread).  If you've noticed your voice or webcam comment sounding robotic or not working at all, this is likely the culprit.  Switch to Firefox or Safari until the issue is resolved. There is no known issue with recording into flash when using Chrome on a PC that I'm aware of.

As a member of the 2013 steering committee, I invite you to submit a proposal for the 6th Annual Emerging Technologies for Online Learning International Symposium, to be held April 9-11, 2013 at The Planet Hollywood Resort in Las Vegas, NV. The Emerging Technologies for Online Learning International Symposium, a joint Symposium of Sloan Consortium and MERLOT, is designed to bring together individuals interested in the review and evaluation of online teaching and learning technologies.Proposals for presentations must be submitted by December 10, 2012 at:http://sloanconsortium.org/conference/2013/et4online/call-for-presentations.The ET4Online Symposium offers you an opportunity to study best practices, understand applications, discover new technologies, and connect to others who share a love for and belief in the promise of educational technology. In 2012 the symposium developed a new mission statement designed to emphasize the innovation and invention that is the focus of the conference: A conference devoted to the emerging and innovative uses of technology designed to improve teaching and learning online. Symposium tracks highlight and demonstrate research, application and effective practices and noteworthy technological tools in the following areas:• Learning Spaces and Communities• Open and Accessible Learning• Evidence-based Learning• Faculty and Student Development• Innovative Media and ToolsFollow the conference on Twitter @et4online.Free Webinar -- Gain Tips for Writing a Successful Proposal Faculty, students, instructional designers, instructional technologists and academic administrators are encouraged to submit proposals which are engaging, informative and interactive. These sessions can be targeted to all attendees or beginners, intermediates, or experts.If you are interested in submitting a proposal for this conference, plan to join us for our FREE webinar "Five Tips on How to Submit a Successful Conference Proposal". The goal of this webinar is to assist you in submitting a successful abstract to the Call for Presentations.The webinar is scheduled for:November 29, 2012 - 12:00pm PST/3:00pm ESTFor today’s educator, selection as a conference presenter is often required in order to attend a conference. For every online learning conference, educators submit and conference committees evaluate hundreds of proposals in order to create a robust program for conference attendees. The number of proposals accepted for a conference depends on program size, topics covered and quality of abstracts submitted. Join this free webinar to learn from experts on the Sloan Consortium and MERLOT Conference Team what they are looking for in proposal submissions. Topics covered will include the importance of topic selection, what reviewers look for in a proposal submission, and tips from track chairs on how final selections are made. Please login or register to sign up for this webinar.

Teaching with VoiceThread Hangout on AirFriday, December 7th at 10am PST/ 1pm ESTJoin me, Michelle Pacansky-Brock, and a member of the VoiceThread team on Friday, December 7th at 10am PST/ 1pm EST in a Google+ Hangout On Air.  This event will be recorded and streamed live.What's a Hangout?  It's an online video conversation that seats up to 10 people with unlimited capacity for online viewers.  Click here to view the archives of a past VoiceThread Hangouts.Who's welcome?  Anyone who has questions about teaching with VoiceThread, has ideas to share, examples of VoiceThreads they'd like show, and/or issues or problems they would like help with.  The Hangouts bring together educators from diverse disciplines and levels to talk about how VoiceThread is being used in education.To learn how to "join" or "view" the live Hangout (your two options for participation), visit the Hangout page of my blog.*This Hangout on Air is sponsored by VoiceThread.

If you are currently teaching online at a college or university, I please consider participating in this important survey which is focused on collecting data about faculty working conditions in the online environment. Survey of Online Working Conditions For the Coalition on Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL X) and the OnLine Teaching Working Group, UALE, this survey is for anyone who is teaching on line in colleges or universities. We are trying to collect a range of working conditions -- how much people get paid, how many hours they work, whether they have union representation, how many students they have in a class, etc. When we have collected enough responses to get a sense of what's out there, we will categorize the examples as "good," "bad" and "ugly," in an attempt to set some kind of standard of what decent working conditions for on line teachers might look like. Click here to take the survey.