The post Using E-Learning for Corporate Training appeared first on LMScast.

Source: www.edudemic.com Great article!! Definitely need to incorporate w/ teacher supervision. Show students how to use social media the right way!!! See on Scoop.it - InformationCommunication (ICT)

Gabby Pritchard, co-author of the forthcoming Kindergarten series, Show and Tell, offers some practical tips for encouraging your Kindergarten children to communicate in English. From the moment toddlers begin to discover the exciting world around them, they begin to acquire the language they need to express their curiosity and be understood by others. They very quickly learn to use simple questions to find answers. What? Where? When? How? and Why? become favorite words as they explore how their world works. So, how can we create a classroom environment that encourages young children to continue their exploration of the world through a new language? Here are some ideas. 1. Begin with questions Use posters, photographs, toys and real objects to stimulate children’s curiosity about a new topic. Let them feel the objects. Ask plenty of questions: What can you see? What’s this? What color is the…? How many…? Where is…? Use the same questions every time you introduce a new topic so the children become familiar with them. As they gain confidence, encourage the children to ask some questions of their own too. 2. Cooperative learning Organize children into small groups to carry out simple investigations and experiments, play language games, act out stories and complete craft activities. By working cooperatively, your children will find they need to talk about how to complete tasks, assign roles and solve problems. They will also develop their social skills, such as learning to share and turn taking. Always encourage children to use polite language when working alongside each other. Phrases such as: Let’s play with the… Please pass the… and You’re welcome are very useful phrases. They will help children develop respect for others and form positive relationships. Try teacher trainer Freia Layfield’s idea for a role-play activity that teaches children valuable life skills while getting them to talk in English. 3. Get more from stories Young children love to immerse themselves in the world of make-believe. Using stories in class provides a great basis for getting children to talk about motivation, consequences and feelings. Read aloud, or play audio recordings of, short, simple stories. Then ask questions to get the children to think carefully about the characters and events. The questions should encourage a deeper understanding of how and why things have happened. You can begin by asking simple questions, for example, Is the giant happy? Are the bears angry? Then move on to more probing questions: Why is Jack scared? Why are the bears angry? When the children have explored a story, encourage them to work in groups to act out the story using props. You may be surprised by how much more enthusiastic the children are, and how much more they put into their acted versions of the stories, once they have explored the meaning thoroughly. 4. Show and Tell A great way of rounding up a topic and reinforcing what children have learned is to set up group or class projects. These can include: topic-related craft activities hands-on tasks such as growing plants or preparing snacks recording activities such as making graphs of class preferences or talents bringing to class a favorite toy or book to talk about. Start ‘Show and Tell’ sessions by talking with the children about what they are going to produce, getting them to contribute ideas about how they will do this and the sorts of equipment they will need to complete the project. Get the children to work together to produce different parts of projects where possible. If they need to work individually on a project, prepare sets of materials for groups to share, to encourage them to observe others and discuss ways of working in order to produce the best results. Finally, have the children present their work to the class, to other classes, or even to their parents. This will help build confidence in their ability to express themselves and give them a real sense of achievement. For a simple way to introduce the idea of Show and Tell to your kindergarten class, visit the page on ‘Teaching 21st century skills with confidence’ for another video tip from Freia Layfield. It comes with a free worksheet that you can download from the Oxford Teachers’ Club (it’s quick and free to register). We’d like to hear from you Please do share your experiences of getting children talking in class - we would love to hear about them. You can use the comments box below this blog. Would you like more practical tips on developing communication and other 21st century skills with your Kindergarten children? Visit our site on Teaching 21st century skills with confidence for free video tips, activity ideas and teaching tools. Related articles Five Easy Ways in Which You Can Encourage Young Children to Think Critically (oupeltglobalblog.com) 5 Ways to Prepare Your Students for the 21st Century (oupeltglobalblog.com) Filed under: Pre-school Children, Skills Tagged: 21st Century skills, Children, Communication skills, Early Childhood, EFL, ELT, Gabby Pritchard, Kindergarten, Learning, Show and Tell, Speaking, Speaking in English

Online courses represent a highly efficient learning option, but you may be surprised to discover the ways that eLearning is green. Some statistics from eLearningIndustry.com indicate that eLearning requires 90% less energy than traditional on-site classroom education and CO2 emissions per student are reduced by 85%. This is an energy savings realized by fewer driving emissions, less use of paper, and the ability to learn at home. eLearning is also efficient with time as you can simply power up and start working wherever you are. It democratizes education by allowing higher pay and more benefits for online instructors. Plus, the Internet is available to everyone equally, and the scale and power of this medium is unprecedented. The implication is that you can create a global classroom and reach more people than ever before while establishing relationships and collaborations that were never possible before. There is an implied loss of human connection and presence, but that is being addressed in progressive ways through technologies like video chat and other experiential learning tools. The savings in time, money and resources are significant and undeniable. As eLearning becomes more prevalent there will be less need for actual real estate - fewer physical classrooms and less parking. There is also a significant savings in time, primarily less time spent in travel, which allows for more time spent actively learning. Instructors who become adept at building online courses can leverage audio, video, written content, visual media and other resources - even guest speakers — into a cohesive and dynamic learning experience. Plus, global interaction, sharing, and collaboration with other instructors in other places becomes immediate and rich at a much lower cost than ever before. Beyond academics, there is also the potential to deliver quality corporate training to employees and organizations via eLearning technologies. What has required large expenditures in travel, lodging, time away from the workplace, and other resources for entire departments in the past can be accomplished with far less time and money through online training built on integrated, expandable platforms like lifterLMS that you can customize to your organization’s specific needs. You can post comments, and also subscribe to our newsletter at LMScast.com for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMSCast. Thank you for joining us. joshua millage: Hello everyone, we’re back with another episode of LMScast, I’m Joshua Millage. I’m joined with Christopher Badgett. Today we’re talking about something that’s a little different, talking about the efficiency that E-learning brings to education. I think we’re going to talk about some things that most of you won’t think about either. Chris, what is one of the huge efficiency increases that you have with E-learning over traditional education? chris badgett: Absolutely. I want to start it off with a quote or more I should say statistic I found on a great website called Elearningindustry.com. They have a great article about the Top 10 E-learning stats for 2014. The stat is that E-learning is also eco-friendly. Recent studies conducted by Britain’s Open University have found that E-learning consumes 90% less energy than traditional courses. The amount of CO2 emissions per student is also reduced by 85%. I want to talk about efficiency in general but let’s kick it off with talking about the environmental impact of E-learning versus traditional education. joshua millage: That sounds great. This is, like I said, something that I hadn’t even considered until you mentioned this in our pre-chat is that, it does makes sense because we don’t have driving emissions, we don’t have a bunch of paper that we’re using, it’s basically just the Internet and you can stay at home. It’s an interesting advantage to E-learning that I don’t think a lot of people are considering or talking about when we are in such a crucial point in terms of climate change and what not, where we need to be considering ways to reduce emissions, this is easy. This is not even difficult. There are so many other efficiency advantages too in way of the way that it democratizes education allowing professors to get paid more. There’s just so many advantages. I think the green one though is one that I didn’t even consider and surprising because I live in Sta. Cruz. Things like that should prop up on my radar but that’s really cool. I think it’s really interesting. chris badgett: Absolutely. You and I had been working in the Internet world and Internet business for a long time. But over time it just continues to amaze me the scale and the possibilities of the Internet. Because really at the end of the day it’s not about the information that you can find on the Internet, it’s about the connections. Just the power of the Internet, my respect continues to deepen about this interesting phenomenon we call the Internet that nobody owns but everybody uses and all these things. When we look at the green aspect, E-learning is not necessarily 100% green. For example if you have a website that means you have web hosting which is a computer that had to be built that’s in a warehouse somewhere that requires power. But at the end of the day like you mentioned, there’s no real estate in the sense of like a classroom. There’s not 30 people or 100 people or 30,000 people coming in cars to this building. It’s also just very efficient with time. You can just open up your computer and start with your E-learning experience. It’s a really neat value-add for doing the E-learning route. It’s not that E-learning should 100% replace traditional education but the environmental impacts are important to consider. Also, the really positive side effect is just, when you take away that real estate of a classroom, and you can truly do your E-learning with a global audience, that is just amazing, that you can reach so many people. joshua millage: Yeah. We’ve experienced that, not so much in the E-learning space but just in terms of selling lifterLMS. I’ve talked to people from all the way from Switzerland and Romania, to Australia to Peru, all over the place, that’s just something to support the E-learning industry. But at the same time, the impact that we’ve had, the relationships we’ve been able to form has been truly amazing. We’ve seen that too with clients that you’re worked with in Africa and all over the place. Their ability to reach across borders and make connections and change people’s lives literally on the other side of the globe. It’s pretty interesting. You think about, you take that back to the environment. You’re not flying a plane all the way across the globe to get there saving all of that money and also fuel cost, all the things that go along with that. It is truly an amazing thing that happens. I think like with technology too, the loss the you receive with E-learning will start to change. What I mean by loss is like, that human connection. Because since the pipes, the fiber optic cables all that is getting faster, it allows us to do things like this video chat. It’s going to allow for more experiential type of learning experiences that happen online. Same thing with engagement and being able to track how people are doing in courses and so forth, we’re not going to have so much of that in-person loss that we would have had in the past few years. It’s a great time I think to get online and to take advantage of some of these increases that are happening. chris badgett: Absolutely, absolutely. joshua millage: Yeah. Chris what’s another one that comes to mind when you’re thinking about E-learning efficiencies? chris badgett: We talked about the lack of a need for a commute which is absolutely huge. The lack of a need for real estate or a structure to house that classroom, which of course you might still have if you’re doing a blended learning situation where there is a lot of live interaction which we talked about in a previous episode. The other thing is just speed to market in terms of delivering your online course material. A teacher can be very efficient once they get comfortable with their computer and their technology. Whether they’re using video, their writing, creating audios or creating slideshows and thing like that, it can be very efficient. If you think about the traditional teacher which also ties into environmental impact, there’s like handouts that have to be copied. All this like curriculum overhead that has to happen. Whereas when you become really efficient as an E-learning professional, you’ve got all the tools at your fingertips. You have an idea, you can bring it into your classroom in a matter of moments or as long as it takes you to create that educational content. joshua millage: I like that. The other one I thought about is personnel. I think a lot of people who are building online courses and things, they don’t think about the efficiency increases in combining their teaching with other people’s teaching, creating like a literal online university which I think is really interesting. I watched my father go through the classic education system, university system. It’s like if you wanted another job, we’d have as a family, pack up and move our lives across the nation to take that job. He was, at one point, looking at moving from Indiana to Idaho to take a position. That’s because there wasn’t the talent needed in Idaho. They were importing that talent from elsewhere in the country. But with online education, you don’t have to do that. Those people can stay where they’re at. They can essentially import that talent or that expertise from all over the world. You’ve done that with organic life guru from a gardening standpoint. You said you had, I think you said Costa Rica and all over the place. People participating, creating courses, I think that’s a unique advantage. There’s so many benefits to that. Now the knowledge isn’t geo-located and trapped in one part of the globe but can really be brought to anyone. The distribution power is there and that really doesn’t cost much to distribute it. I think that’s another thing too. Even as I think the courses that I want to create, there’s a power in creating a bunch of different people teaching from different angles in that niche and creating almost like a university around it. Be really interesting. chris badgett: Like I was talking about, a deeper respect for the Internet and having it not be about the information but about the connections. You could even call it a web just like the world wide web. If you’re going to collaborate around the topic, and like you said, build an online university, you don’t have to get on a plane. You can pipe in a guest instructor on your course and have them teach a section on something where it’s so efficient, all that person has to do is say yes. Maybe you’re working out a financial profit-share arrangement with them or not, maybe they’re just a guest speaker. But they could come right into your classroom from their home office or wherever they are and deliver content, very efficiently as opposed to getting on the plane. joshua millage: Yeah. I think it’s a fantastic opportunity and one I hope people start to think about more because it just makes for more potent information, more powerful information when you have multiple perspectives and angles. Especially like just in terms of what we do, marketing. Like internet marketing on Australia, post to Europe, getting all of that information in one place would be really interesting to see the different approaches and what’s similar and what’s different. Because that perspective is what makes education so powerful. Challenging your one perspective and giving you multiple perspectives, so easy to to do in E-learning and I love that aspect of it. chris badgett: Absolutely. joshua millage: We’re coming down to the end of our LMScast episode today. What is the final thought here Chris? chris badgett: I just want to take it up a level and say if you’re beyond like a traditional teacher or an educational entrepreneur and you’re looking at E-learning more in terms of corporate training. If you think about a major Fortune 100, 1000, 10000 incorporation, perhaps you’re in charge of their E-learning. If you have to fly a bunch of staff for a global company to a location or various locations on different continents for ongoing training that’s required for the job or team building and what not, if you bring that online, it can be very efficient, very cost effective for the company and open up a lot of opportunities for corporate training, E-learning style at very efficient, much less cost there. I was reading a statistic like 25% of people leave their job because of the lack of opportunity for growth in continuing education, you can really attack that and do that in a very efficient way with E-learning. joshua millage: Yeah. I think that’s a great, great point to end on. This has been more of a high level outlook on some advantages of the E-learning industry. I think people can really take this and apply it to their own niche E-learning businesses or courses, whatever they’re up to. I’d love to hear from you. I knew Chris would too if you can go to LMScast.com, you can click on this episode and leave us a comment. We would love to engage with you there, get your thoughts on what we’re talking about. Maybe you could tell us some efficiency increases that you’ve seen that we haven’t discussed today. But we’re really excited to see this community grow. There’s a lot of people who are reaching out to us and that just makes what we’re doing here so much more fun. Check that out at LMScast.com. Until next time, we’ll see you soon.   The post Why E-Learning is Green (and how you can benefit) appeared first on LMScast.

Image courtesy of By Matt Reinbold via Wikimedia Commons Miranda Steel is a freelance ELT lexicographer and editor. She has worked as a Senior Editor for dictionaries for learners at OUP and has also worked for COBUILD. In this post, she looks at some of the weird and wonderful idioms in the English language. Idioms are commonly used in spoken and written English. They add colour and interest to what we are saying. But how often do we actually find idioms in their original and full form? Native English speakers are usually confident that their readers or listeners will recognize the idiom, so well-known phrases rarely need to be given in full. You may hear someone being warned not to count their chickens (don’t count your chickens before they are hatched) when they assume a future plan will be successful, or a friend may hint that her colleagues took advantage of the boss’s absence with when the cat’s away! (when the cat’s away, the mice will play). Some idioms can be shortened in other ways such as long story short (to cut a long story short). "Anyway, long story short, it turns out Drake isn’t really his father." Sometimes only a fragment of the original idiom remains. It is common to see restaurants offering early bird menus or prices (the early bird catches the worm). Someone may describe a terrible idea as a lead balloon (go down like a lead balloon). I recently heard someone talking about a baby and bathwater situation (don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater) when the whole of a plan was rejected because of a problem with only part of it. Another common way of changing an idiom is to reverse its meaning. For example if you don’t want to deal with a problem straight away, you may put it on the back burner, but if something needs immediate attention, you can put it on the front burner. In your home village you might be a big fish in a small pond but if you move to a large city you could end up a small fish in a very big pond. Many idioms are very versatile and can be changed in a variety of ways. A carrot and stick approach involves offering rewards and making threats to persuade someone to do something. However, you may come across examples like the following: "Why use a stick when a carrot will work better?" "Their approach is all stick and no carrot." "They are using every carrot and stick at their disposal." One of the most attractive aspects of idioms is their adaptability. It is often possible to substitute one of more of the words in them to adapt to a particular situation. When two people have opposite tastes, you can say one man’s meat is another man’s poison. But how about one man’s junk is another man’s treasure or one man’s madness is another man’s genius? The possibilities are endless. Substitutions can also be used to alter the meaning of an idiom. For example, a plain-talking person will call a spade a spade, but someone who is more frank than necessary may call a spade a shovel. On the other hand, someone who is reluctant to speak plainly may call a spade a gardening implement. So, why not have a go at adapting some idioms yourself? After all, when in Rome… Challenge: For extra bonus points, can you tell us which English idiom the image above refers to? For more idioms, check out the Oxford Idioms Dictionary for learners of English.Filed under: Dictionaries & Reference, Grammar & Vocabulary Tagged: English Language, Idioms, Linguistics, Miranda Steel, OALD, OALD8, Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, Oxford Idioms Dictionary for learners of English

There are lots of definitions for the term "blended learning" - it means something different to each educator and user. But there are two very basic ways to understand what it actually is: For eLearning it is a cohesive mix of multimedia, quizzes, and student interaction in an online environment similar to Google Hangouts. For traditional in-person instruction it is the addition of online resources, student community, and many of the elements used in eLearning, into the physical classroom for more variety in presentations. Individual students learn in different ways and may have preferences for audio, visual, or kinesthetic processes. The point of blended learning is to approach learning through several methods so that people can actively engage and learn in the ways that work best for them. For online learning that translates into creating a supportive digital environment with appropriate elements, events and content that make the subject matter and key points accessible to each individual student, one way or another. There are much better approaches to teaching than having students follow a step-by-step list or memorize isolated facts by rote. True learning occurs when students are active and involved in the process. This is why the variety of blended learning is so effective. Maintaining a human connection is helpful by establishing a digital culture for student discussion and sharing by incorporating a Skype or webinar-type life-event format for at least some course meetings, or even having occasional in-person classroom time, or collective events wherever that may be an option. An integrated platform like LifterLMS expands upon these capabilities by offering built-in access to existing resources like Google Hangouts, WordPress and InfusionSoft, as well as events, scheduling and memberships. It is important as a course creator to know the tools and resources that are available to you with a Learning Management System like LifterLMS so you can begin to visualize how your expanded learning architecture can look. In fact, we would love to see you post your ideas in the comments below for ways you can use blended learning in your courses. You can post comments, and also subscribe to our newsletter at LMSCast.com for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us. joshua millage: Hello, everyone. We’re back with another episode of LMScast. I’m Joshua Millage. I’m joined today with Christopher Badgett. Before we jump into today’s episode, I wanted to tell you that you can always find show notes and other awesome things at LMScast.com. Also, if you haven’t already, I would encourage you to go there and sign up on our email newsletter, so that you can be notified when we have cool events as well as when new episodes come available. Today, is all about blended learning. I want to kick it off by going to our subject matter expert here, Chris. Asking you, Chris, "What is blended learning? What’s the term mean?" It’s a new term to me. The follow up question to that is, "How does that apply to online education?" chris badgett: Absolutely. Well, I think blended learning is one of those terms that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I’m still learning too of all the different aspects of that. When we get into the e-learning or online education space, there’s a lot of buzz words like "blended learning" or "flipped classroom", "instructional design" and all of these things. Everybody has their own definition. For the purposes here, I like to look at blended learning in terms of some educational content and ways of teaching and learning on-line outside of just passively dumping videos, text, and audio in front of people without engagement and stuff like that. How to blend the learning styles and the mediums and the learning opportunities beyond just passive top down education. joshua millage: An example could be a Google Hangout. Would that fit into the line of what you consider blended learning? chris badgett: Absolutely. I think events are a huge part of blended learning or blending what’s possible in an online education format. That could be an online event like with a Google Hangout or it could be an in-person event that happens daily, monthly, once a year, once every four years, whatever it is, that is a part of that learning journey for that course or that program. Online and offline events can a really important part of education. joshua millage: Yeah. I agree. It’s interesting when you switch it up because the human connection can be automated to some degree but it doesn’t replace the fact that when you can get someone on a Webinar or even a Skype chat like this, it does help create an even deeper human connection. In an online class setting, I don’t think there’s anything that can truly replace that. So, it’s real important. You mention different types of blended learning. At a high level, what are the different types or categories of blended learning? chris badgett: Josh? joshua millage: I’m back. chris badgett: I don’t know if that was mine or yours. joshua millage: Just jump right into where we were with the different types of blended learning. chris badgett: OK. There’s a lot of types of learning that can be blended together for online education. That could be multimedia. That could be the type of quizzes or assignments that you give your students. It could involve social interaction between students and with the teacher or just among students themselves. Basically, when you’re trying to teach something and somebody is trying to learn something, there are so many different ways to get to the end result besides just telling somebody what to do, step-by-step, and going through a rote memorization process. When I look at lifterLMS as an online learning solution for people with WordPress, I start thinking about other powerful tools that are readily available like the Google Hangout where we’re currently building out integrations with Google so that you can bring in that Hangout experience or that schedule or that calendar of events and integrate that easily into your learning management system. The same would be true for an event that’s within your course or your membership. You may have all this online training and then, once a year, there’s some big event somewhere in the world where all these people come together around this topic or this skill set to further their learning experience and become even stronger within that learning community. joshua millage: I like that. You’re actually talking about everyone flying somewhere, meeting up, getting in person, and having an event that way. That’s cool. chris badgett: Absolutely. joshua millage: That’s really something we want to do too with lifterLMS. We’re talking about Lifter Live, which the details will come out some time early next year. We’re going to get everyone in a room, hopefully out there in Montana, and build courses together. Talk about how we can do better online education, really. From a business standpoint, marketing standpoint, course design. We’re going to have speakers come in. It’s going to be a lot of fun. That is our own way of building out what we believe is blended learning in the architectural infrastructure side of the LMS space. I think we even have people who help others learn how to quilt and having a quilting conference or Infusionsoft where I have a long track record of creating content and meeting people and working. They do ICON every year, which I think is arguably one of the best events of the entire year, even if you didn’t own Infusionsoft. That creates a lot of cool blended learning because all the content they send out a year, they have sessions there. It really solidifies things because you get to ask all the questions that you had all year in one setting and get them all taken out. It’s really fun. chris badgett: If I may give like another example that’s less extreme in the sense of one big event a year … joshua millage: Yeah. chris badgett: For some people, blended learning just means it’s a daily thing where you have your class time. If you’re a traditional teacher, teaching in a more traditional, in-person way, at whatever level or traditional or nontraditional course. If you’re physically teaching a roomful of students, you may have that "life event" every day or five days a week or whatever. Then, you’re blending in the online supplemental materials and assignments and community and things that you can do in the online space. That’s another way to look at blended learning just as part of the day-to-day of your learning program. joshua millage: Yeah. I think it’s important. Everyone learns differently. Audio, visual, kinesthetic … They all should be taken into account. I think the kinesthetic people benefit a lot from the blended learning and the interaction. That motion really helps them pay attention. I can say that because I’m one of them. I have to stay … That’s why I stand up and I’m on a stand-up desk right now moving around because it’s just how I am. This is awesome, Chris. It’s an episode where I think people should start to create ideas around what this could look like for them. I would really be excited to hear in the comments on LMScast.com on the comments below this post, if people could share different ways that they’re going to utilize blended learning in their courses. Maybe we can showcase them in a later episode. I think there’s so many unique ways to do this. It would be great to showcase what other people are doing and really distribute that information to others to inspire and help us all create better online education. chris badgett: Absolutely. Just at the high macro level, another thing I wanted to bring up, is just the social part of learning. If you’re using lifterLMS, for example, if you have a course of a lesson and the teachers and the students start commenting, you’re creating what’s known as digital culture. Then, the live event, like the ICON Infusionsoft event you mentioned, that’s a cultural get-together around this product Infusionsoft but it’s in-person. It’s like bumping shoulders with people. It’s not like non-digital culture. That’s just like live culture like a sub-group of that culture. I think it’s really important when you approach your WordPress Learning Management System and your e-learning platform, is to get outside the thinking of the either/or mentality. I teach in real life or in person. I’m an online educator. Digital culture is my thing. The most powerful things for the future, that I see, have to do with combining and merging those two to be rubbing shoulders and rubbing pixels together at the same time to really flush out that learning experience in both mediums. joshua millage: Yeah. Well, we’re creating the tools to do it and the community will help us get there. It’s a different world. We’re on the cusp of this dramatic change that’s going to happen. Our kids are not going to learn the same way we did. We need to be ready for that. Cool. Well, let’s cap this episode off and keep it short and to the point for everyone so they can get out there and start creating bigger and badder courses. We’d love to hear from you. Go to our website, LMScast.com. Leave us a comment. Make sure to sign up with your email so we can notify you of some of the cool things that are coming down the pipeline. Hope you’re having a great day. We’ll talk to you next week. The post Why Blended Learning is Important for your LMS business. appeared first on LMScast.

This post was originally published on June 5, 2012. What would you do if you discovered your child’s middle school teacher was tweeting about drinking to excess and having inappropriate online banter with students? Source: www.graphite.org See on Scoop.it - InformationCommunication (ICT)

Image courtesy of valentinastorti via Flickr Kenna Bourke, co-author of the forthcoming Young Learners series, Oxford Discover, explores the benefits of using discussion posters with young children to aid learning, cognitive skills, and vocabulary development. Sometime around the age of one to one and a half, I made an incredible discovery: speech! No longer was I just a helpless, gurgling baby making faces at my parents. Oh, no! I could now ask questions. How cool! And not only could I ask questions, and get answers, but this new found skill gave me one Very Special Power: the ability to drive my parents crazy. I’m reliably informed that many conversations went something like this: Me: What’s that? Mum: It’s a table. Me: Hmm. What’s that? Dad: It’s a banana, but I think you know that. Me: (grinning) What’s that? Mum: You know perfectly well what it is. Me: WHAT’S THAT? Dad: It’s an elephant’s foot. Me: (laughing uncontrollably) No, it’s not! It’s a book! Sound familiar? I don’t think I can have been the only kid to use the ‘extreme interrogation technique’ for the sole purpose of testing my parents’ patience. It’s in the nature of children to ask questions - lots and lots of questions. That’s how we build basic vocabulary as children: we see something, we wonder what its name is, we point, we ask a question, and BANG! We get an answer. Then we store the image and answer, and the next time we see the object, we know what it is. Excellent. The curiosity of a child is perhaps the best teaching tool we have. So how do we harness this natural thirst for knowledge? Well, one way is through the power of the poster. These days we almost take posters for granted. Are they pretty decorative items that make our classrooms look bright and cheery? Yes, but … now it’s the adult’s turn to ask the question, ‘What’s that?’ Here are three things that posters are invaluable for: Triggering critical thinking Like me, you may have had an animal alphabet when you were a child. A is for antelope; G is for giraffe; Z is for zebra; X is a problem (!); and that helped you remember the letters of the alphabet. But posters don’t have to be limited to single word associations - they can help students connect concepts. Oxford Discover Discussion Poster Think of a colour chart, for example. We can either put splodges of colour on a poster and print the words red, blue, yellow, and so on under the splodges, or we can use posters to go well beyond vocabulary acquisition by presenting a series of interlinked concepts, as in the poster to the right (click to download). In presenting concepts visually, we enable children to think more deeply and meaningfully about a topic. With a poster like this one, you could put students into pairs and ask them to give examples from their own experience and knowledge: where have they seen colours in nature? Have they ever made a colour? Is colour a good thing? What colourful animals can they name? Why might some animals be colourful? They then share their ideas with another pair. Boosting memory We know that the cognitive process is enhanced by images. Just as with real physical objects, like books, tables, and bananas, images enable learners to recognize and recall, making it easier for them to internalize meaning and store that meaning in their memory banks. To this day, I clearly remember a poster in my history teacher’s classroom. It was a satirical image of a famous politician with a boiled egg instead of a head. And to this day, because of that image, I could tell you all about him. A striking image stays imprinted on the memory. It acts as the foundation for a pattern of thoughts and memories - a story if you like - in much the same way that a few bars of music can conjure up memories many years later. Using any good poster, try giving students a minute to remember as much as they can. Then hide the poster or ask students to stand with their backs to it. What do they remember? Why do they remember that? What associations did they make with the image? Creating equality Posters have the power to make all students equal. Images free up the imagination and give everyone a voice. As a teacher, you can ask students to say what they see in the poster and there’s no wrong answer. Every answer is equally valid and everyone, from the loudest to the quietest, gets a chance to voice an opinion and react to what he or she sees. It’s very hard not to have some sort of reaction to a visual image (you may like what you see, or you may dislike it; it may provoke a thought or remind you of something) and this means that discussion happens naturally and effortlessly. Child A looking at a poster may see a boy and a girl, but Child B, looking at the same image, may see a family or friends. With any image or poster you like, try asking students to brainstorm thoughts, words, feelings, or memories. One child may see a picture of a cloud, while another may see … an elephant’s foot. And who’s to say a cloud can’t be an elephant’s foot? My parents would say it can be! Would you like more practical tips on developing communication and other 21st century skills with your children? Visit our site on Teaching 21st century skills with confidence for free video tips, activity ideas and teaching tools.Filed under: Grammar & Vocabulary, Skills, Young Learners Tagged: Children, Cognitive Skills, Critical thinking, Discussion posters, Early Childhood, Equality, Kenna Bourke, Memory, Oxford Discover, Vocabulary, Young Learners

A WordPress LMS is a powerful tool, and we want to help you get the most from your LMS system this year with LMScast and lifterLMS. To start off the new year, we wanted to talk about a roadmap for where we want to take the LMScast podcast this year. And we’d love to get your input! There are some key areas we’d really like to focus on with the podcast this year. One thing we’d like to do in 2015 is to interview more thought leaders who are knowledgeable about WordPress learning management systems, learning and education, and the entrepreneurship involved with running an eLearning LMS business. If you know someone you’d like to introduce us to or someone in particular you’d like us to find and interview, let us know in the comments below. Since the eLearning audience is very broad, we’d also like to do shows on some specialized industry topics so that we can get into the details some of you are working with in your LMS. An example might be to discuss LRS and SCORM. We might have a show about what you can do in the LMS space with engagements, since that is one of our key differentiators with the lifterLMS plugin. We’ve been doing a lot of research on course design and various types of courses, so we could also talk about what format produces the best results for students and teachers. Let us know what special topics you’d like us to cover. We’d love to have input from each of you listening to the podcast and watching our YouTube videos and those of you who’ve found us on LMScast.com. We’d love to hunt down the answers to your questions! There’s a lot of money that can be made with a learning management system, and this is a great time to get started on building your online course. This February we’ll be doing another VIP release of our lifterLMS plugin, and then a few months later we’ll be releasing lifterLMS for the long-term. We’re passionate about building a community of education entrepreneurs. We have forums for lifterLMS users, and that is another great place to have conversations not only with us, but also with other eLearning entrepreneurs. And we’ve started a private Facebook group called LMScast Confidential that you can join here: Click to Join Facebook Group Please leave a comment below to let us know what you’d like us to talk about on the show. We’re excited to have you along with us this year! The post New Year’s LMS - Grow Your LMS Business in 2015 appeared first on LMScast.

Student in my 7th grade ICT class are blogging about Internet Safety & Digital Citizenship! The following story via storify is a collection of my students blog reflections. We have been utilizing Kidsblog.org for this unit. Check them out!!! [View the story "Internet Safety: Post #2″ on Storify]    [View the story "Internet Safety: Post #2″ on Storify] [View the story "Internet Safety: Post #2″ on Storify]   [View the story "Internet Safety: Post #2″ on Storify]