If you are attending the Sloan-C/MERLOT International Symposium for Emerging Technologies in Online Learning in Las Vegas in April, please visit me at the opening reception on Tuesday, April 9th from 5:30-7:00 in the Planet Hollywood Mezzanine.I will be hosting a book signing for Best Practices for Teaching with Emerging Technologies.  Paperback copies of my book will also be available for sale (check, cash, and PayPal only) at a 15% discount off the retail cover price for this special event.  Since its publication in August of 2012, the book has been warmly received by a broad faculty audience (click here for Amazon reviews) and has been adopted by faculty at CSU Channel Islands as a resource in their Blended Learning Planning Program. If you are a member of an institution that has adopted the book recently, please let me know!

Next week, innovative online educators will comingle with some of the hottest entrepreneurial minds in educational technology to foster an additional bridge between the world of business and formalized education.  Fostering more formative feedback loops between these frequently silo'd sectors of society is becoming more and more critical as technology continues to present compelling solutions to old teaching and learning problems and paint exciting visions for the future.  Ensuring today's entrepreneurs are in dialogue with today's educators is critical to the success of teaching and learning.  And that is the objective of the Launch Pad, the brand new program included in next week's Sloan-C/MERLOT ET4Online Conference in Las Vegas, which I have had the honor of chairing this year.Eight outstanding startups have been selected to participate in this year's inaugural Launch Pad. They are listed below.  A representative group of the participants will participate in a plenary panel at the conference on Thursday, moderated by EdSurge's Tony Wan.  If you are attending the conference, please be sure to come by the Launch Pad, explore the creative genius of these products, converse with the creators themselves, share your feedback about their products, and attend the plenary on Thursday morning which will commence immediately following a stimulating presentation by James Byers, co-founder of Wikispaces! BuzzMath: a mathematical mission that leads middle school students to proficiency through supported practice. The student-centered and user-inspired design makes BuzzMath practical and motivational for students and teachers.Ginkgotree: puts the power of curriculum curation back in the hands of the faculty who teach it, to lower students’ costs and improve their learning outcomes. The platform allows instructors to assemble online curricula from any resource, complete with automated copyright clearance and digital content sourcing.HireArt: HireArt is a new type of jobs marketplace that uses online challenge-based interviews to vet job applicants. HireArt screens and sources candidates through work samples and video interviews that simulate what a candidate would do at the real job.  The Predictive Analytics Reporting Framework: a multi-institutional data-mining project, managed by WCET. It brings together 2 year, 4 year, public, proprietary, traditional, and progressive institutions to collaborate on identifying points of student loss and to find effective practices that improve student retention in U.S. higher education. scrible: a tool that lives in your browser that allows a user to seamlessly annotate and comment directly on webpages and save, share and manage them with others. Scrible makes online information usable and manageable. Skyepack: a content-focused educational software environment that is designed to facilitate the delivery of learn-anywhere mobile content as an alternative to texts, course packs, and class handouts. Skyepack enables instructors to easily build mobile-ready learning content from a variety of media and resources, delivering video, audio, documents, self-assessments, and HTML5 applications.STEMscopes: a K-12 comprehensive online science curriculum housed in Rice University's Center for Digital Learning and Scholarship. STEMscopes provides hands-on inquiry activities, assessments, problem-based-learning, intervention tools, acceleration materials, and teacher support resources. Our program is 100% aligned to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) and meets the rigor and depth of both the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR™) and high school End-of-Course (EOC) assessments.ValuePulse: Social learning platform that harnesses the power of social media to provides one-click access to a credible, curated news library to fuel discussions in a course.  Empowers students to achieve learning objectives by engaging current industry news as opposed to textbooks and understand how to effectively apply social media to their professional lives.

Today I had the pleasure of presenting with David Wicks (@dwicksspu) and Jason Rhode (@jrhode) at the Sloan-C/MERLOT ET4Online Conference in Las Vegas.  Here is a copy of our slides if you're interested in taking a look.

Had to share this beautiful infographic by Mia MacMeekin that was in this post on Edudemic.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I have! (Click to enlarge image.)

I would like to invite you to engage in my most recent blog post at the Faculty eCommons, a free online social learning ecosystem for faculty across the globe to learn, collaborate and share research about effective online teaching and learning, brought to you by Academic Partnerships.My post is titled "How to Gamify Your Class with VoiceThread Mobile" and explores a specific pedagogical approach for integrating the VoiceThread Mobile app into your students' learning.  The best part, however, is the VoiceThread shared within the post that invites you to listen to some very creative teaching ideas shared by educators about how you could use the app to gamify your class.  Don't forget to share your own idea after you're done listening! I am hooked on this great conversation! Click here to go to the post, How to Gamify Your Class with VoiceThread Mobile.  Free Webinar: VoiceThread Mobile Also, you are invited to join me for a free webinar, VoiceThread Mobile: Multisensory Learning On-The-Go on May 9th at 12pm PDT/3pm EDT. Register on the Faculty eCommons.

Here is a new review of my book, Best Practices for Teaching with Emerging Technologies, by Kelly Walsh (@EmergingEdTech) author of EmergingEdTech.com & CIO at The College of Westchester. Click here to read Kelly's review of Best Practices for Teaching with Emerging Technologies by Michelle Pacansky-Brock. Thanks for the review, Kelly!  I appreciate how you've integrated the video summary too -- great integration of Universal Design for Learning principles! :)

 Want to learn more about how teaching with VoiceThread mobile supports your students’ learning? Join me for a free interactive webinar, VoiceThread for Mobile, Multisensory Learning On-The-Go:May 9th at 12:00pm PDT/2:00 CDT/3:00pm EDTRegister on the Faculty eCommonsI will share how the VoiceThread Mobile app (available for iPhones and iPads only, Android support is in development) has increased my students' access to voice and video participation and why this is important in online learning.  A demo of the VoiceThread Mobile App will also be included.  The webinar will engage Twitter as a backchannel and provide participants an opportunity to ask questions.I hope you can join me!

Next week marks the start of my "Learn with Michelle" event series, brought to you by Academic Partnerships.  I'll be hosting a series of Google+ Hangouts that will showcase conversations with higher ed leaders who are using emerging technologies to transition the college paradigm from teaching to learning.GLEAN: A Campus-Supported Suit of Emerging Tools for Students & Faculty Google+ Event:  https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/cto7utn86mvh4b982sdvk20n3fkOn Wednesday, May 15th at 11:30am Pacific/ 2:30pm Eastern, I will meet with Susan Gautsch and Dr. Charla Griffy-Brown of Pepperdine University's Graziadio School of Business in a Hangout on Air to explore how and why they have developed GLEAN, a collection of emerging technologies that are provided to students and faculty to use for content creation and collaboration.  What opportunities come from placing campus supported emerging tools into the hands of students and faculty? What are the challenges? The Hangout on Air will be streamed live through the Google Event.  This is a public event. Anyone is welcome to view the live conversation and post questions to the event's comments field.  The questions will be moderated during the conversation.  If you miss the live event, the video archive will be made available shortly thereafter on the Faculty eCommons.  To receive updates about future Learn with Michelle events, subscribe to the Faculty eCommons Newsletter.If you have a practice using emerging technologies from your campus that you'd like to share in a Google+ Hangout on Air with Michelle, please submit your proposal here: http://facultyecommons.org/hangout-with-michelle-from-teaching-to-learning-series/

Ready to learn more about what Twitter is or how it can be used to improve your students' social presence in your online class?  Join me for a free 30-minute webinar this Friday, June 7th at 9am Pacific/11am Central/12pm Eastern. Increasing student-student interaction in an online class makes learning more social, interactive, and relevant.  While there are many ways to foster interaction within a learning management system, today’s social media tools provide new ways to engage students from anywhere at any time with mobile devices.  This 30-minute webinar will examine how social media opens new opportunities for reflection and inquiry and present options to get started with using Twitter in your class to increase participation.Click here to register! Yes, it will be archived and viewable on the Faculty eCommons.http://facultyecommons.org/professional-development-registration-formTo receive news of future Learn with Michelle events, follow the Faculty eCommons on Twitter @APCommons or sign up for the newsletter at www.facultyecommons.org.

The 30-minute video archive, "bag" of resources, and presentation slides from my Learn with Michelle webinar, Twitter for Increasing Student-Student Interactions are available at:http://facultyecommons.org/twitter-for-increasing-student-to-student-interactions/By the end of this webinar, you will be able to: Consider an online learning case study suggesting the efficacy of Twitter in improving student-student interactions.Identify how and why hashtags are helpful when teaching with Twitter.Identify suggested guidelines for integrating Twitter in online courses.Evaluate a collection of useful tools for teaching with Twitter.