We’re helping to solve your EFL teaching problems by answering your questions every two weeks. In this week’s blog, Stacey Hughes responds to Klaudija Pralija’s Facebook post. Kaludija’s problem is not only getting students to write more than just short messages, but also teaching them to use appropriate language and grammar in more formal writing. The challenge of text speak Klaudija outlined a common problem in many classrooms. Students who are used to texting short messages full of emoticons, jargon, abbreviations, acronyms, and other non-standard English can feel it is acceptable to use these same features in more formal writing. On the plus side, if students are texting in English, research conducted by the British Academy (2010) suggests that this may have a positive impact on their language development. It is also worth noting that social media discussions can be the starting point for later articles, reports or studies. For example, an idea brought up in a blog discussion or Twitter chat amongst EFL professionals could spark ideas that lead to a conference presentation further down the line. So students need to learn when it’s OK to use text language, and they need the flexibility to be able to switch between it and more standard or formal language. To work on this flexibility, ask students to match common ‘text-speak’ with more formal phrases, which could then be used in whatever writing task is coming up. So, for example, in a unit where students have to write a formal letter, students could match items as below: = I would be pleased/ delighted to…; I am happy to… !? = Could you please clarify… Thx = Thank you for… i wanna = I would like to… cu l8r = I look forward to seeing you later Alternatively, ask students to choose a recent text message and ‘translate’ it into standard/formal English. If their texts are not in English, they could even do some research to find out the English equivalents. Discuss when text speak is an appropriate form of writing to help students begin to have an awareness of different types of writing for different purposes and audiences. Another idea is to have a checklist that can be used for all student writing: I used full sentences I didn’t use abbreviations I didn’t use slang I used full forms rather than contractions I used standard spellings Writing in standard English Getting students to be motivated to write longer texts can be challenging, but it’s not impossible. The key is to get students invested in the task. Let’s imagine that you are on a unit in which students need to write a report with arguments for and against something. Start by brainstorming something that the students feel strongly about. This could be related to something happening in the school (putting in a new vending machine, creating a new club, etc), in the community (building a new supermarket), or in the wider world. Once you have decided on an issue (or issues if you want students to work in groups on different issues), ask students to use whatever social media channels they wish to discuss it. They can tweet about it, blog about it, Facebook chat about it, WhatsApp it - whatever they choose. With younger learners, issues of safety online should be addressed before this stage. Another alternative is to provide a chat wall where students can put up ‘tweets’ or messages using post-it notes. Chatting about issues via social media mirrors what happens in the real world and shows students how these channels can play a role in laying the foundation for other types of writing. The next step is to decide who to write to about this issue - the Headmaster? The Mayor? The President? This audience awareness will help students focus on using more standard English and more serious arguments. Discuss why a headmaster or government official might want arguments for and against something and not just a one-sided viewpoint (e.g. s/he wants a clear picture of both sides of an argument, etc.). Discuss why it needs to be in more formal language (e.g. to be taken seriously; the headmaster doesn’t understand text speak, etc.). Students then work to extract ideas from the chats and put them into more standard or formal language. They will need to evaluate the arguments to decide which can be used in their report. They will also need to decide which arguments are stronger and which they support. They may also wish to write recommendations. Finally, students write the report. If possible, allow students to write it on the computer so they can use the spell check and grammar check function built into word processors. Far from being a ‘cheat’, these tools force students to look carefully at what they have written in order to correct it (or not - computers make mistakes, too!). Typing out a report also makes it look and feel more ‘official’. Build in some peer review of the report, too. Again, this collaborative approach mirrors what happens in the real world and can lead to better work. Ideally, if appropriate, students can send the report to the intended audience. What better motivator than to know their work is actually being read! Invitation to share your ideas We are interested in hearing your ideas about getting students to write in standard English, so please comment on this post and take part in our live Facebook chat on Friday 8 November at 12pm GMT. Please keep your challenges coming. You can let us know by commenting on this post, on Twitter using the hashtag #EFLproblems, or on our Facebook page. Each blog will be followed by a live Facebook chat to discuss the challenge answered in the blog. Be sure to Like our Facebook page to be reminded about the upcoming live chats. Here are the topics for the next three blogs: 27 November, 2013: Motivating younger learners 04 December, 2013: Learning English beyond the exams 18 December, 2013: Written self-correction for younger learners Related articles Solving your difficulties as an EFL teacher - #EFLproblems (oupeltglobalblog.com) #EFLproblems - Cell phones in the adult classroom: interruption or resource? (oupeltglobalblog.com) Filed under: Grammar & Vocabulary, Professional Development, Skills Tagged: Formal English, Formal writing, Social Media, Social networking, Stacey Hughes, Standard English, Text speak, Writing skills

When choosing a learning management system, there are several points you need to consider. Chris Pappas outlines the most important of these considerations for enterprise level LMS systems in his eLearningIndustry.com article "Eleven Tips For Choosing The Best Learning Management System." These points also apply to evaluating LMS applications for WordPress. The first point is to determine learning development objectives in advance. This involves knowing who your prospective students are and what they need from your courses. Once you know who you are serving you can better evaluate which LMS system will deliver the content your students need. For WordPress systems this can include choosing extra plug-ins, configurations, and other options. Next, consider the skill level of your learning and development team, including teachers, as they will be setting up the LMS and classrooms for your WordPress site. Look for simplicity and ease of use as well as functionality, creative control, and learning assessment capabilities. Your LMS will be a tool that many people will use, so varying levels of capability are preferable. The third point is to assess your current learning and development strategy, including scalability for the future. This is an opportunity to discard elements that do not work while incorporating the things that do, and look toward new elements you want to develop as you update and expand your course offerings. Fourth is the importance of getting feedback from students, teachers, and your learning and development staff. These are the people who will ultimately be using the LMS and shaping its environment, so they know best what they need to work with. Their insights will help you set up the best possible LMS for your applications. Number five is to assess technical considerations and limitations. Find out what level of support and integration you need before choosing a system so that lack of compatibility and scalability will not present barriers. Project on areas of expansion to prevent limitations to usability in the future. After all, WordPress is endlessly expandable, so any LMS you choose needs to have that same degree of flexibility. The next points include evaluating whether the LMS offers functions and features that are essential to delivering your content. It is also important to look into the background and experience of the vendors creating and presenting the LMS. It would be preferable to choose a system designed and built by developers with academic and knowledge-based backgrounds, who actively understand teaching and eLearning systems and processes. Know what kind of support you can expect to receive because you will need it at some point. Ask what kinds of support are offered and how you can access services, including phone support, a contact form, a moderated user forum, ongoing reporting and information, and also know if there are extra fees involved. Research the vendor’s history and track record, too. Adaptability and maintenance are also vital services, as well as simple systems for making backups. You do not want your classrooms to be unavailable, or your vital data to disappear if something goes wrong. Request a demonstration and preferably a trial so that you can see and experience the environment firsthand. This is the best way to find out if the LMS is compatible with how you want to present and what you need to accomplish. Make sure there is a warranty as well and what the terms for that are. Finally, make sure the system produces relevant data and analytics that can be tracked and is accessible and usable for reporting and assessment. This is another area where feedback is helpful, so you know what kind of data needs to be collected and how it will be used. Students need access to their personal data as well while maintaining security and privacy. Following these guidelines will help you choose the most effective learning management system for your users, your students, and your needs. An expandable platform like lifterLMS that addresses all of these eleven points is vital to helping your eLearning business grow. 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: Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of LMScast. I am Joshua Millage. I am on the road today, shooting from my home here in Indiana during the holiday season. That is not going to stop us from creating another podcast episode. Today we are going to do something a little different. I have been reading lots and lots of different articles from all over the web about eLearning and the LMS industry. I found an incredible article by Chris Pappas who is, I believe, the founder of eLearningIndustry.com. Today we are going to go over his post about the eleven tips for choosing the best learning management system and give our input on those eleven tips; seeing that his article speaks directly to what I think is the enterprise level LMS systems. We are more WordPress LMS guys. I think his points are really valuable and I would love for myself and Chris to talk over and give a WordPress angle. Chris, my first question to you man, is Chris Pappas says determine your learning development objectives in advance. What is your thoughts on that? First off, what is a learning objective? How should we determine those in advance? Chris: Well it seems like something that you would think that people really do figure out before they get started building a learning management system; but, that is not always the case. You may have an expert or a teacher who just jumps right in and gets going. Determining your learning and development objectives is really taking a step back, taking that 30,000 foot view; looking at your perspective student or learner and really getting clear on what that audience needs. Do they need a skill? Are they trying to get a job with the skill? Are they trying to develop in another way? Whatever that is, that is going to really frame in your best decision for choosing a learning management system. We have talked about this a lot in previous LMScast episodes just in general how important it is to know your audience. Once you know them, you will know the system that you need to deliver most efficiently and effectively your learning content. Joshua: I think what I read in the article what I really liked is that is exactly what he was saying. You need to know which system is going to help you achieve those learning objectives. I think when you are coming from the WordPress LMS side of things, whether you choose our plug-in lifterLMS or you are choosing LearnDash or something else, it helps inform what plug-in to choose first off. Then I think it also helps you think about how to configure it and how to set it up appropriately to achieve those learning objectives. I do, I think that is a great place to start. The second point he has is consider the skills of your learning and development team when evaluating an LMS. I am going to read a quote here because I think it is really informative. It says "Knowing the specific talents and skill sets of your learning and development team will enable you to choose a LMS that has the functionality and creative control you want and the use ability you need. If you choose an LMS that is simple and easy to use but doesn’t allow your learning and development team members to utilize their experience and know-how then you are missing out on an invaluable human perspective." I love that because I think one of the things that we fight in the WordPress LMS space is the WordPress membership plugins. People go well I want a membership plug-in. A lot of those membership plug-ins are simply just ability to create a login and protect some pages. There is no real nitty gritty assessment functionality and no real way to see if people are learning. The simplicity is there, but you are losing out on the insights into how your students are learning. I think that that is a really important point that he drives home that I think needs to be reiterated in our niche here and say yeah, think through that. Think through the capabilities of your team. That could be your teachers and things and make sure you consider those. What are your thoughts on that? You run an LMS with Organic Life Guru, that is more than one … you have a learning development team in a way. It is not just you teaching. Chris: Well, I would pull out something from your quote which was simple and easy to use. When you build a learning management system, there is a moment if you are new to it where you realize that this is not just another website. It is this whole other machine and tool with lots of moving parts and potentially multiple people involved in it. When you construct a machine that is of value and usefulness to people, it is going to be a tool for them too. If you were to think of yourself more as a publisher; and you are going to bring in teachers, or like administrator and you are going to bring in teachers to plug into the system. If it is not simple and easy to use, you are going to start getting a lot of push back. The teachers may not maximize their potential with the platform; because they are just confused with the technology. Simple and easy to use is so important and that is one of our key ethos at lifterLMS is we want a tool that anybody can pick up and get rolling with a learning management system built on top of WordPress and extend out whatever level and complexity they need to go to. Joshua: That is perfect. The next one is assess your current learning and development strategy. I think that is an interesting one. I think a lot of people kind of lump that into their needs. I think it is important to distinguish this is what I need and the strategy for me is more futuristic. This is where I am going. Chris: That is a good one because if you are going to change learning management systems or it is your first time going to an online learning management system, it is such a big opportunity to not just throw everything away that you have done before. Just leave the bad parts, take the good parts and then get some new parts that are even better that fulfill your learning objectives and meet the skills of your learning development team. It is such a big opportunity when you are changing or just starting with a new LMS. Joshua: I like this next one. It says get feedback from your learning and development staff. I think that is incredible. I think feedback is something that most of us do not even consider when we are building out a learning development system, or LMS system. Especially if you are someone who is an edupreneur or something and you already have a couple students. Maybe it is not that you are asking your internal people what you think, but you are asking your students what do you think. Feedback, 360 degree feedback is really important and I think will help set up the best system for your learning management system. Chris: Absolutely. That kind of feedback is critical to making sure that you make smart decisions in how you customize your LMS so that everybody is on the same page and supports it and you get buy-in. It is all about buy-in. Joshua: Absolutely. Then the next one is assess any technical considerations or limitations. You got to know where you are going if you need things like SCORM support or you need to integrate with it a MailChimp or an AWeber, or you need it to integrate with some other sort of platform. You want to make sure that those things are on the horizon for what system you are choosing. That is something that we have really considered in developing lifterLMS was what are the things that people need. What are the bare bone things people need and then as we have developed it out, what are the next things that people need based on their feedback. Chris: That is one of the beauties of WordPress is it is so extendable. You can snap in other plug-ins and you can extend and add functionality very quickly and easily. That is one of the beauties of that. Joshua: WordPress now is known for powering some of the internet’s largest publishing sites and so the framework itself is very scalable if you have a team behind it that knows what to do. I think there is a lot of opportunity for even the people that are looking at enterprise level LMS systems to come back to WordPress and look at it. I really think WordPress is going to outdo a lot of those systems soon. Especially things like what we are developing and the other people in the space are developing. Chris: It sure looks like it. Joshua: Maybe we are a little biased. Let’s see. Does the LMS offer the essential features and functions you really need? Again, I think that plays right into the next one. I do not think we really need to rap on that one because we can lump those two together. It is just taking the time. I think people, at least in my experience, they go out and they go plug-in crazy and they just buy a bunch of things. They are not taking the time to think through these questions. The next one is really interesting. Review the experience and background of LMS vendors. I think that is a huge one. Where have you come from? Who are you? What do you know about learning? I think that is what makes our team unique. Again, not to focus at all on us, but I have a background in academic publishing and knowledge management. You have a background in developing your own LMS and eLearning businesses and that sort of thing. That lends to the way that we are developing our plug-in. I am not sure the background of LearnDash or any of the other ones, but it would be interesting. It shows who the people are behind the scenes who actually are supporting and building the product. Chris: I think in the lifterLMS example, we are a team. There is you, there is me, there is Mark, there is Thomas with very different skill sets and life experience. Some other learning management systems come from a more top down one person’s product. There is not really that diversity that a team brings which that goes into the product. Joshua: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. It makes for a much more robust product. What support services are offered by the LMS? I think that really is a good question to see where, what support you need. For us it is everything from go do it yourself and we will support on a yearly basis all the way up to if you need custom development help, we will be there. I think with anything it is what type of support is behind the product and how far is that support going to take you. Chris: Absolutely. Support is critical. I think we are a little fanatical about support in the sense that we have the support forum, you have our e-mails, you have a contact form. We have a bi-weekly webinar right now with our customers where we offer mastermind presentations and live question and answers. People just love it. They need it. People need to be supported when they are building a learning management system. When you choose it, you should definitely investigate what the company is offering in terms of support. Joshua: Absolutely. I would agree with that. Adaptability and maintenance are key to ensure the future success of your LMS. Again, it goes right back in to the support. I think that the thing about the way that we look at it. It is a onetime fee then it is a yearly service fee. That is so we can continue to adapt our plug in to the way that the WordPress core is being developed. I think it is really important to know that and know how we approach adaptability and maintenance. It is cost effective. We are not charging that much money for that. When you get into the upper echelon of LMS’s I am sure it is a little different. You want to make sure you know those numbers so that you know the cost of buying it now and implementing it now and in the future. Anything to add Chris? You have seen … we have both seen systems that get locked down because the people have not considered what the support and maintenance will be in the future. Chris: Well, I would say in the WordPress ecosystem, maintenance and updates, it is a mixed bag. One it is nice that you can just click one button and update a WordPress and plug-ins and stuff. The other thing is sometimes things break. That is why what you need to do is have a backup system in place so that you can run a backup, which you should do regularly anyways to protect all your data. Then you can do the quick update. As long as you did not go plug-in crazy you are going to be … like get fifty plug ins going that are going to start conflicting with each other if one of them does not update and that sort of thing. You will be fine. We update lifterLMS. We have these small, incremental updates that are happening all the time and these bigger feature releases that happen. I think the community, they ask us about that. When is the next update? What is your update schedule? What is the product roadmap? How do I extend it this way if we want to get into adaptability? I think really exploring that and looking not only at the present of the LMS and what they say they are doing in the future, but look where they have come from in the past and then you can really see the rate of change and adaptability the company has presented. Joshua: That is good feedback. Give me one second Chris, I am boiling some eggs and I just realized they are going to be really boiled if I do not go shut it off. I am just going to keep the recording running and I can snap it back in. Chris: Okay. Joshua: Sorry. Chris: It is all right. Joshua: Sorry. Chris: It is all good. Joshua: It is like I looked down and it has been twenty minutes and I am like oh boy. That is not good. That is not good. All right. Chris: I think you are on ten. Joshua: Yeah. Let me go back and look at that. Cool and number ten is ask for a trial or demonstration. I can see how this would be really, really important in the larger enterprise LMS systems. That makes a lot of sense you want to get a walkthrough of how it is going to work. In the WordPress LMS space, I think it is less of an issue because you usually, like us, we have a 30-day money back guarantee. You can actually download it and utilize it and work it into your system and if it does not work get your money back. I do think it is important to try before you buy and that sort of thing. Chris: Absolutely. It is like a car. It is a complicated machine. Because of that, you take it for a test drive. If it is something more simple like a dry erase board or something, you just buy it. You do not need to take out the markers and write on there before you buy it. You know what it is going to do. With complexity, you should always be able to test. Joshua: I think that people should be able to, the important thing is you do not want to put all this time and effort in setting up your LMS and then know that it was not going to work. It is really important to do that. Eleven is consider the data tracking capabilities of the LMS. I think that is huge because the data, I think we are at the very beginning of a huge trend in the eLearning and LMS industry. I think that having data associated with your student and being able to take that data with them is going to be so very important now and in the future. I think that understanding how data is stored and understanding the availability and the analytics behind the LMS is crucial. I am really interested to see what is going to happen to with things like Tin Can and SCROM support and more of a personal usage standpoint. Will I be able to have a open source profile where all that data can be attached to me and I can take that from LMS to LMS? I do not know the sky is the limit. The point of the matter is it is definitely interesting to ask that question and see what type of support is around that point there. Chris: Absolutely. That is something that we are working on at lifterLMS right now is really developing out the analytics capabilities within the learning management system and listening to the user base and the audience in terms of what types of data they are most interested in. How they want to use it? How they want to sort it and manipulate it and that sort of thing? Then there is the whole thing you are talking about with an LRS, a learning record store. If that is important to you, that is an important part in choosing your LMS and making sure it meets the data requirements that you need. Joshua: Yeah. Absolutely. Cool, well I hope that this helps and I hope we can get Chris Pappas on the line here to give us some feedback on this and we would love to have him on LMScast for maybe an interview or something like that. Until next week, we will see you soon. The post Tips For Choosing The Best Learning Management System appeared first on LMScast.

Archive of #whatisschool chat - 05.02.15 - Thursday 6pm US EST (Fri 9am AEST, 12pm NZT) - discussing the issues and triumphs in teaching! Follow http://www.mrkempnz.com & http://candylandcaper.blogspot.com for updates Source: storify.com See on Scoop.it - InformationCommunication (ICT)

Sean Dowling, an Educational Technology Coordinator, looks at how teachers can add value to the student writing process by using blog posts in writing tasks. There is no doubt that writing to a wider audience motivates the writer and results in work of higher quality being produced. However, it is rare that student writing goes beyond the teacher. It may be opened up for peer review, but this usually involves no more than one or two of the writer’s classmates. One way to create a wider audience is to post student work on blogs. In a previous post, I discussed how the comment area of a class blog post or page could be used by students to post their work. In this post, I will discuss how students can use their individual blogs to publish their work, thereby making it available to a wider audience. However, it’s important to realize that students shouldn’t just publish to blogs without their work going through traditional drafting/feedback processes; students may be reluctant to post work on blogs without feedback from their teachers and poorly crafted work may also lead to students being ridiculed by their peers. In addition, when grading online texts such as blog posts, it’s important to design grading rubrics that take into account the multimedia features that traditional texts don’t allow. To illustrate the process, let’s look at an online lesson I used with my students (see Figure 1). [Note: While the lesson below describes a fully online course, I also use a similar methodology with face-to-face classes.] Figure 1: Overview of online lesson The topic, protecting the environment, was presented in the form of web-based reading and listening activities, with both practice and graded quizzes (activities 1-4). In activity 5, students were required to write about protecting the environment, personalizing it by giving their opinions. Before starting the writing, students were given some tips about the language in focus (see Figure 2). Students were also given some more writing tips with the instructions for the first draft (see Figure 3). Figure 2: Tips about language in focus Figure 3: First draft with writing tips Figure 4: Second draft It’s important to note that despite the lesson being done in fully online mode, it followed a traditional process writing methodology. The rubrics for the task reflect this: Figure 5: Rubrics for writing task Following this process ensured two things: first, both student and teacher could focus on the actual text, thereby ensuring that it was both grammatically and thematically correct; second, and perhaps as a consequence of the first stage, the resultant text was something that the student could be proud of and want to show to a wider audience. The next stage, students posting the text to their individual blogs, was where value is added to the writing process. The rubrics for this task are as follows: Figure 6: Rubrics for blog task In this task, two major components were graded: the first was the aesthetics of the blog, i.e. did it contain graphics and was it formatted correctly; the second was the social interaction side of using blogs. It was not just sufficient to post. Students must also comment on at least two of their classmates’ blog posts. To ensure that they have actually read the posts, the quality of their comments is also graded. Figures 7 and 8 below show an example of a blog post and comments. While two of the comments were just short acknowledgments, the other two do show that the readers did more than just superficially interact with the text. Figure 7: A blog post Figure 8: Comments on the post Not only has the above process ensured that students have been able to correctly use the language focus in the text, the second stage of the process also ensures that students learn how to publish and interact with online texts, a key 21st Century skill. In addition, by adding a social interaction component to the writing task, student texts are now becoming a valuable learning resource for the class. Rather than having to search for paper- or web-based texts, which may be at an inappropriate level for EFL students, these student-generated texts are pitched at the "just-right" level for their peers.Filed under: Adults / Young Adults, Professional Development, Skills Tagged: 21st Century skills, Blogs, EdTech, Methodology, Online lesson, Peer review, Q Skills for Success, Reason to Write, Rubric, Sean Dowling, Writing process, Writing skills

Knowing how to increase engagement in your online course is key to designing a successful eLearning environment. In her blog post, "9 Tips To Improve Online Learners’ Engagement," Sharon Thomson lists some of the primary barriers to effective eLearning and elements of online course design that can address these issues. Perhaps the greatest enemy to learning in both traditional and online environments is distraction. Part of your task as an online course designer is to avoid distractions in your learning environment, so learning to recognize those issues is important. Strive to keep your visuals clean and on point. There should be no unnecessary text, images, or audio in the learning environment, and elements that do exist need to be cohesive and visually consistent. Visual clutter is confusing and makes your content inaccessible - the opposite of what you want to achieve. Any element that does not apply directly to the content you are presenting should not be there. Choosing basic fonts that are easy on the eye is one way to help students stay focused on what they are reading. Serif fonts, like Times New Roman, are fine for headlines, but sans-serif fonts, such as Helvetica, are best for content. The wrong font can be as difficult for students to read as bad handwriting. Keep your fonts clean and easy to read for good comprehension. Colors can also present difficulties, especially if they are used with fonts. Black or gray text is generally best, with subdued colors - or no colors - in the background and margins. Black text on a white background is always a good place to start, with careful use of gray text, especially if you also have color images or video on the page. Images and video can be extremely effective tools for presenting and clarifying concepts, but if those elements are not directly relevant to the material you are covering, they can instead be confusing and distracting. Resist the temptation to over-embellish, or to insert elements that you think are interesting and fun but do not really support the basic concepts you are introducing. And make sure the elements you do use are high-quality. Bryan Harris’ marketing blog called Video Fruit is a fine example of relevant use of imagery to support the subject matter he is presenting. Navigation through the learning environment is also vital. Make sure tools like buttons, menus, and links are functional and easy to find and use from page to page and section to section. Moving around in the learning environment should be simple and intuitive. Consider that individual students have different learning styles and accommodate their ability to locate the resources they need when they need them, even if those resources are out of sequence. Learning styles also dictate that images, video, and charts and graphs are helpful to some students, but unnecessary or even disruptive to others. Make supportive visual and audible resources available but peripheral. Support materials are designed to clarify concepts and strengthen your delivery, so use them for that specific purpose. You can also blur or remove segments of visuals that do not add to your area of focus, or may even distract from the point you want to make. When you have a good deal of text content for students to read, it will be easier for them to stay focused and involved if you break up that content with careful use of structural elements. Bolded headings and subtle formatting, bulleted lists, short paragraphs, and other visual elements make information more immediately understandable. Using a service like ProofHub for feedback on your course design can help you target areas that need improvement. Without careful curation of your content and design elements, your pages can look like a randomly assembled scrapbook. Assure that you are achieving and maintaining student engagement by making the most of eLearning design and technology with a learning management system like lifterLMS that makes clean, effective online course design and resource integration accessible. 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. Today, we’re talking about Tips for Improving Online Learners’ Engagement. This is actually a blog post that I found by Sharon Thomson. Sharon is a writer in eLearning LMS space. She has a lot of great articles out there. You can find a lot of her stuff at elearningindustry.com. If you go to lmscast.com/engagement, I will put a link to her direct article that we’re going over today in today’s episode. Chris, why don’t you start it off? Let’s go through some of these bullets and let’s give our feedback on them, get some perspective. Chris Badgett: Sure. The first one is removing excess images, text, and graphics. In my mind, the space you hold for somebody to learn, you think about a traditional classroom when you’re growing up, the teacher is always trying to remove distraction whether that’s chatty friends, cell phones, beeping and texting. Joshua Millage: Yeah. Chris Badgett: Close the window if somebody is being crazy outside. Just removing distraction is an important part of learning. On a website, that’s extra images, texts, and graphics. I think, graphics especially and images, if they don’t hold direct educational value, they shouldn’t be there. Joshua Millage: Yeah, I think so too. I mean, it’s all about focus. I mean, in terms of design, even just visual design, white space is important so make sure that the eye is attracted to the various areas of the site that you want it to be attracted to. With learning, that would be the content that’s necessary to be learned. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Joshua Millage: Let’s not try and remove people’s focus from that to something that doesn’t matter of lower priority. Chris Badgett: A great thing that just popped in my head is when you think about the traditional whiteboard or chalkboard or whatever, you don’t walk into the classroom and it’s completely full and there’s images on it. You start learning, you take it one concept at a time and then at the end it’s full. That’s how we learn. Joshua Millage: Right, right. The next one too is choosing the right fonts. That’s something that I don’t think anyone takes any time to think about, at all. I’ve always been told that the best way to do it is have a sans-serif font for headlines and section headers and that sort of thing and have a serif font for the body for readability. I don’t know. Chris Badgett: I think, it’s flipped. Joshua Millage: Is it flipped? Chris Badgett: Yeah. The serif is the little foot on the characters and, I think, the sans-serif, without the foot in the body makes it the most readable. Joshua Millage: Got it. Chris Badgett: Sans is a really popular body content font today as well as Helvetica was a little bit ago and things like that because they don’t have any distractions. It’s just the letter. Joshua Millage: Just the letter, yeah. I mean, taking the time to figure out what font you’re going to use and then making sure that it’s not distracting like papyrus font is really, really important. Chris Badgett: Yeah, and if you’re anchored it into the past like traditional education, I’m sure everybody at some point had a teacher with really sloppy handwriting, it’s really distracting and interrupts the learning experience when you can’t read or at least easily read what’s on the board. Joshua Millage: Right, yeah. The next one is choose the right colors. I think that this is a pretty easy one. I mean, you don’t want to have colors that, A, are hard to read and, B, distracting like neon greens and things. I mean, it sounds basic but it’s things that people don’t consider when they’re putting their content in. Call me old-fashioned, but black and white works pretty good. Chris Badgett: I always try to steer a little bit of the conversation towards grey. There are so many shades of grey between black and white. They can do amazing things just by playing with spectrum of grey and especially if you’re going to be using images and video which are going to have color on them. You don’t want the text to be competing with the images. When the video is playing, you don’t want this flashy, colorful thing over here too. Joshua Millage: Right, exactly. No, that’s exactly true. Yup. Choose high quality and relevant images. I always hated it when I was in school and the professor thought it was fun to be kitschy and throwing some ridiculous comic or something. I don’t know. It’s just that it didn’t really fit with where we were going. Just felt almost like he needed to take a break, like just keep people in it. There’s a marketing blog that I follow called Video Fruit, and Bryan Harris does a lot of different images to support his content. Those images are always relevant. They’re never taking you out of the content. He’s making a point, there’s an image. Maybe it’s a graphic or something to drive home the point. The point is it’s all pushing the same idea and, I think that that’s really, really important. Chris Badgett: Absolutely. I think, one of the things that people do sometimes especially if they’re not really graphically or visually design inclined is you’ll hear people say and in the web design world, if I hear somebody say the word "clip art", for me, that’s a serious red flag. You don’t want to have clip art show up in your educational content. It needs to be high quality stuff that supports the learner. Joshua Millage: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Wow, I didn’t even read the next two but easy navigation of online learning material. That is good because, I think, that’s the thing. It’s like you want to make sure when it’s time to take a quiz that that button or whatever is easily accessible when it’s time to progress to the next lesson or section or whatever, that’s also easily found. That’s actually one of my biggest bones to pick with. The old-school blackboard and some of the old-school learning management systems that have … I’ve just basically been around for the last 5 to 10 years. They’re hard to navigate, man. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Joshua Millage: You get through one lesson, you’re like, "What do I do next?" I think, there’s a huge opportunity for usability in the learning management space. I think, it’s important for people to keep that in mind. You’re online so there’s an infinite amount of distractions and they’re all a click away. Don’t give anyone a reason to get distracted. Just make it easy for them to get through your content. Chris Badgett: Absolutely. We talked about in our earlier episode about learning styles, some people learn better by jumping around or starting at the end and working backwards. If your course is set up, that’s okay as an option. I mean, people need to easily see what they’ve already completed or not or where they left off. All these things are a really important part of navigation and user experience. Joshua Millage: Yeah, absolutely. I think, the next one goes with what I was talking about earlier. It’s number 6, supporting complex information with graphics and charts. Absolutely. I mean, that goes back to learning styles. Some people are visual, audio, kinesthetic. You want to make sure you’re giving them the ability to learn the way that they learn and to do that, adding graphs and charts to help make a visual representation of the content that’s being talked about is so crucial. Chris Badgett: Yeah, I think, that’s a philosophical thing. In sales or teaching or whatever, it’s like, "Show, don’t tell." I mean, of course, you can tell and teach the concept and things like that but when you show a chart based on the data that supports your argument, your teaching, and your concept, delivery just gets a lot stronger. Joshua Millage: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. The next one, blurring background in the images. Interesting. Interesting. What’s your thoughts on that? Chris Badgett: I think, it just comes down to focus, again, so that if you are going to bring an image into the learning material or in the conversation, whatever is in the background of that image, if it’s not relevant, blur it out. I mean, don’t cut out the person’s head or whatever it is you’re displaying in the image but if you blur the background, you retained that focus on only the important part in the image. Joshua Millage: Yeah. Yeah, I like that. It all comes back to focus, for sure. Using heading, bullet points, and proper structuring. Man, this is a huge one for me. I can’t stand it when I get involved in some sort of education. It’s just the brick of text that’s all the same font size and there’s no formatting at all. Your eye fatigues, man, and you can’t even get through it. You’re just like, "I don’t even want to read anymore. This is horrible." Take the time to put headings, bullet points, sections. It makes a world of difference and it’s not hard. Chris Badgett: Absolutely. I think, as time goes on and generations and attention spans are getting smaller, it’s really important to do that because people have the skill because of the Internet and humans didn’t used to be like this where they can just scan stuff. We can scan webpages and things, glean information really quickly without reading the entire thing. Joshua Millage: Right. Chris Badgett: That’s not how it used to be like you had to read the whole book. You couldn’t really scan a book but we’re developing as a global culture the ability to really scan. In order to do that, people need headings and bullet points mixed in with the paragraphs and things like that. Joshua Millage: Yeah, absolutely. I love that. Use proofing tools. I mean, I think that would be something fairly simple like spell checking and that sort of thing but using tools to make sure that everything is set up correctly. Chris Badgett: Yeah. I think, it’s just distracting in the learning environment when you keep coming across consistent errors like a lack of a space, no periods, spelling errors. It can distract the student. Joshua Millage: Yeah. Let me just breeze over what she said in the section here. Yeah. She’s talking about a service called ProofHub, that’s interesting, where eLearning designers can quickly and conveniently get eLearning design feedback from distantly located tutors. That’s interesting. She’s actually not talking about spelling or anything like that but she’s talking about getting feedback on the way that a course is designed through the service and so the design of your course. That’s really cool. I think, that that’s important. Yeah, I mean, when you get feedback on your course or the way that you’ve designed your course prior to launching or prior to putting it into a curriculum, that’s huge. That’s a really good feedback. I’m glad I read that one. Number 10, consistency and cohesiveness in learning materials. That is big time. Again, you don’t want to have all these different fonts, all these different colors. Just make it easy to read, easy to get through. I think, it’s going to really help people out. Chris Badgett: Yeah, if it’s consistency and everything, you could just grab all this material from all over the web to put together and make your learning. You’ve done the first step of curation but you haven’t really done the second step which is making it a little more consistent. Otherwise, it’s like a scrapbook or a collage. Whereas, once you have all the best material around your topic, you can really curate it and create a system that people can go through and get used to and get comfortable so that they can achieve the desired learning objective. Joshua Millage: Great. Absolutely. I think, this is a great starting point for engagement. We’ve talked a lot about engagement using technology in previous episodes and I’m sure in episodes to come. Any closing thoughts, Chris, on engagement? Chris Badgett: Yeah. I would say engagement is just one of those big things. In the eLearning WordPress, LMS space is evolving a lot right now and we’re really focusing in on that engagement piece which can be done with technology. We have these achievements in gamification and automated e-mails, just things that can be set up. What we were talking about in this podcast is more about the visual and the experience is so important to engage. When you marry those two together, when you get the technology tools with the design and whether that’s the website or the instructional design like we mentioned in the last point, you’re building a really … That’s the big opportunity for online education. Joshua Millage: Absolutely. I think, it’s the cutting edge right here is how do we set up automated and personal engagement to make the online classroom much more like the in-person classrooms. Chris Badgett: Or, even better. Joshua Millage: Or, even better. Or, even better, yup. Absolutely. All right. Sharon, if you’re out there, thank you for writing this article. It’s been fun to talk over it and give our feedback from being WordPress LMS guys. Hopefully, you can leave us a comment and give us your thoughts and maybe even have you on the show. Anyone who is out there, you can find this article at LMScast.com/increase-engagement/. All right. We’ll see you next week. The post Tips for Improving Online Learners’ Engagement appeared first on LMScast.

The following are my 8th grade ICT students Digital Citizenship Comic Strips they created via Pixton and then posted on their blogs! The objective was to create a comic strip depicting some form of digital citizenship with a safe/realistic resolution at the end.

Sean Dowling, an Educational Technology Coordinator, talks about his experience of introducing tablets into the classroom. Sean will be hosting a webinar on the topic of making the most of e-books for academic skills on 14th and 19th November. Over the last five years, the Higher Colleges of Technology (HCT) in the United Arab Emirates have systematically introduced laptops into the teaching and learning environment. Now, all students are expected to have a laptop in class. In addition, last year, the use of iPads was introduced in the university preparatory programme. With all students having some form of computing device, it made sense to change from using paper-based books to e-books. So after trialing e-books last semester, this semester saw a full implementation of e-books across the system. All 19,000 students are using only e-books. In total, almost 150,000 e-books have been bought this semester. I believe that this has been the biggest rollout of e-books anywhere in the world. As an educational technology coordinator at HCT, I have been responsible for making this e-book initiative go as smoothly as possible. With the e-books being delivered over eight different vendor platforms, and with so many titles involved, this has been quite a struggle at times. So why put up with the struggle? What are the real benefits of using e-books? Moving to a paperless learning environment is certainly one. And seeing my eleven-year-old daughter heaving an overloaded bag to school every day, it would definitely make sense to have all textbooks in digital format stored on lightweight, portable computing devices. After all, most students now need to use some form of computing device for their schoolwork. But, somewhat surprisingly, we have had a large number of students complain about their e-books. Surely this tech-savvy generation of students would prefer e-books; but, no, they want it on paper! I think the reason for this lies behind the quality of current e-books. They are difficult to read and even harder to annotate, particularly on less mobile computing devices. However, there are some e-book platforms that are very exciting and interactive. Without doubt, the Oxford Learner’s Bookshelf is one of these and is at the cutting edge of e-book technology; feedback from both instructors and students has been very positive. This video shows some of the great features: Having been using and evaluating e-books for almost a year now, Oxford University Press have asked me to run two webinars on making the most of e-books for academic skills. In the webinar, I will start with a general discussion on e-books, outlining the reasons for using them and how they can enhance students’ learning. As part of this lead-in discussion, Puentedura’s (2006) SAMR model [Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition] will be introduced to show how technology in general, and e-books in particular, can be introduced into the teaching and learning environment to enhance students’ learning. Then, based on the SAMR model, you will be shown specific examples of how to use academic skills coursebooks from the Oxford Learner’s Bookshelf with your students, including Q: Skills for Success, Effective Academic Writing and Inside Reading. However, despite these e-books providing students and instructors with an exciting learning experience, there is still room to do more, especially at the modification and redefinition stages of the SAMR model. In the final part of the webinar, I will make suggestions of how to not only improve the actual learning activities in the e-books, but also look at ways in which the content can be used as a springboard into more constructivist, collaborative activities. Please join me for the webinars on either 14th or 19th November. References Puentedura, R. (2006). Transformatiom, Technology, and Education. Presentation given August 18, 2006 as part of the Strengthening Your District Through Technology workshops, Maine, US. Puentedura, R. (2011): Thinking About Change in Learning and Technology. Presentation given September 25, 2012 at the 1st Global Mobile Learning Conference, Al Ain, UAE.Filed under: Adults / Young Adults, Multimedia & Digital Tagged: Academic skills, Apps, Digital, E-books, Effective Academic Writing, English for Academic Purposes, Inside Reading, mlearning, Oxford Learner's Bookshelf, Q Skills for Success, Sean Dowling, tablets, Technology, Webinar

50 Education Technology Tools Every Teacher Should Know About - Lists of great technology tools for teachers broken down by category - Learning, Lesson planning, etc Source: www.edudemic.com See on Scoop.it - Educational News and Web Tools

As your eLearning business grows, it is good to know about the tools and options you will eventually need for expansion. For example, what is a LRS? First, you should know that a Learning Management System (LMS) like the lifterLMS plugin for WordPress includes enough data storage for the requirements of a moderately sized eLearning business, but at some point a more robust and scalable data warehousing system will become necessary. This is where the LRS comes into play. A LRS is a Learning Record Store. It’s like a large centralized database where you can store student records and other internal data as well as resources and data from outside of your LMS. This makes data retrieval fast and simple, and also allows for report generation, data tracking, and sharing of information and resources, such as student records, with other institutions. The vehicle for sharing this stored information with other educational institutions and entities is called an API, or Application Program Interface. This is software that allows for one LRS to connect to another LRS through their LMS interfaces to exchange data and resources directly. The Tin Can API is a commonly used API that works well with eLearning systems and LRS requirements, so compatibility with this software is an important consideration in choosing your LMS. Some of the information you may need to share at this level includes student records, such as courses completed and final grades, certifications earned, and degree plans for credit transfers. Having a standardized system like the Tin Can API allows most educational providers to share this important data securely and reliably. Obviously it will be important for your eLearning business to be able to share this kind of data seamlessly as well. If you are not yet at this level of data sharing this is just good information for you to be absorbing for future expansion. Just knowing that LRS and API systems exist and why will give you a head start on being able to use them when you eventually need to. For now a scalable platform like lifterLMS will provide all the storage, reporting, tracking, and data retrieval you require as an eLearning entrepreneur with online courses in a WordPress environment and will be compatible with more advanced applications as you expand. Remember that 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 and I’m joined with Christopher Badgett. Today, we’re going to be answering some of the more technical definitions that you might come across when you’re researching an LMS. LMS stands for Learning Management System. We’re active in that space with our lifterLMS plugin, which is a WordPress plugin, that allows you to take WordPress and create a learning management system. Today, we’re going to be talking about something that works hand in hand with that, which is an LRS. Chris, tell us what that acronym means and why it isn’t may be important to some of our listeners. Chris Badgett:           All right. This is where it gets a little heavy in the eLearning space and you may be graduating from being a solo entrepreneur and getting a little more institutional, or trying to have differences and just talk to each other. You’re basically getting a little bigger and your needs start changing. One of the things we’ve noticed with the lifterLMS plugin and with our clients in the eLearning space is that over time people’s needs tend to get pretty accustomed. One of those needs is to be able to store data that happened from the learning environment and maybe collect that data from different places. Maybe there’s multiple LMSs in action and you want to store data in one place, either for reporting or just to house that data, which you could do all types of things with. That’s what a Learning Record Store is as opposed to the Learning Management System, which is kind of the front-end delivery of the educational content. The Learning Record Store is the house for all the data. Some of that data could come from a Learning Management System, some of it could come from even like a live event. Data could come from all kinds of places and then it can be stored in that LRS. Joshua Millage:       Got it. Chris, just so the listeners understand, what we’re talking about here is an advance topic like you said and so I don’t want people who are just starting out, just trying to create a course online to think that this is something that they automatically need. I personally don’t feel like it is. It’s more of an advance thing. You’re probably a larger business or maybe an educational institution, that type of person who’s going to be utilizing this. Am I correct in thinking that? Chris Badgett:           Absolutely. I mean, you can grab data from LMS like an online Learning Management System with Lifter or any other Learning Management System solution. You can also be pulling data from a virtual world or a game or these in-person events, when someone’s recording your attendance that data can go into the LRS. It’s far more complex situations where that reporting and that data integrity and trackings are really important. Joshua Millage:       Right on. That’s awesome. I think this is something that as people grow, I see a progression happening where someone who says … maybe he’s an expert in local marketing, local business marketing and as he grows as an eLearning education entrepreneur, he gets more credibility and then a college comes along and says, "Hey, we want to take your information and we want to actually put some accreditation around it so that if people come to your course online and take your course, we want that to actually count as credits in our degree." That is where an LRS really makes sense because he’s going to need to take that data and pipe it through to their records store, their LRS system. Just to give people a use case as I understand it and again, I’m always learning. Chris here is our in-house expert. Chris Badgett:           When it comes to the Learning Record Stores and the Tin Can API and things like that, I’m still learning too, but I have been around it a bit. We definitely hear it a lot with the lifterLMS community. There’s a section of the group that is interested in compatibility with the Tin Can API or different types of Learning Record Store systems, whether it’s on your LMS or externally somewhere else. Joshua Millage:       Right. Right. Absolutely. I think it’s really useful. Chris, next episode, we’re actually going to dive into what the Tin Can API is. Can you give us a little preview, just high level, like what is that, because that’s really important when we’re talking about an LRS? Chris Badgett:           Absolutely. The Tin Can API is essentially a way to communicate through statements that a learning activity happened and send that statement to the Learning Record Store that records that data. An API is kind of like a way for different softwares or technologies to talk to each other. The Tin Can API is kind of like that tunnel between that LMS, like this dude completed this course and that’s like a statement that goes to the LRS. One of the things that’s been our goal here at LMScast is we want to get tried and true Tin Can API expert on the show and really unpacking and getting the great detail with it. If anybody who listens to this who considers yourself a Tin Can API or experienced API expert or who wants to make an introduction, we’d love to do that we’d love to have that person on the show. Joshua Millage:       Absolutely. I think the thing that I want to say is to kind of make it even simpler is I’ve always looked at it as like a telephone communication system. Like the LMS would call the LRS via the API and that API, the Tin Can API would be the connection between the two. I would use the API and say, "Hey, we’ve got Chris’ record for you. He aced this quiz, put it in his profile as acing the quiz in your LRS," and that’s just a simple way that of all the technical things that I’ve read that’s how I understand it. I think that it’s pretty accurate as to what it does. It’s a standard though, so it’s a way of standardizing the industry so that a bunch of different LMSs can communicate with a bunch of different LRSs. It’s exciting things, man. I mean, we’re on such of I think the dawn of this revolution. I don’t think we’re that far into it and these things are shifting. I remember when I was a young lad, USB was being questioned as a standard. Now we don’t even question it. There was other players out there; there was FireWire and there was all of these ways of communicating. As time went on, things solidified. I think right now, what I see is the Tin Can API being the true winner, but who knows? Who knows what’s around the corner? We’ll keep everyone up to date on that though as time progresses. It’s exciting to do this podcast and share what we’re learning with the community and we’re always excited to hear your thoughts. You can find this episode at LMScast.com and I would encourage all of you to go check out our site. Anyway, there’s a lot of other information on there. Subscribe to our email newsletter because we’re going to be emailing a lot of other news outside of podcast news there with blog posts case studies that we’re doing, plugin comparisons so you can understand the differences between lifterLMS and the other plugins in the WordPress community. We’re just going to create the highest quality blog and podcast news outlet for the LMS industry and really do our part in supporting the community with good information. I’m excited about that. That’s a little bit of the vision that we have for this new year and I’m excited for everyone to take the journey with us. Chris, any closing thoughts for the crew? Chris Badgett:           Yeah. I would just say if you’re just kind of getting comfortable with the Learning Management System where instead of a membership site and eCommerce and selling online courses, don’t feel like you have to jump right in and understand an LRS or the Tin Can API, because like for example, with our lifterLMS plugin, there is data that is stored there about the users; there are certificates. Right now, we’re currently building out our analytic systems so that you can look at data that’s happening in your Learning Management System. LRS and Tin Can stuff is more advance and complex so you don’t have to start there is all I’m saying. Joshua Millage:       I think it’s a great, great footnote. We want to keep people in the know of what’s happening but at the same time, know that they don’t have to go to this extreme quite yet. You can be extremely effective with just a simple WordPress site and a plugin like lifterLMS. Awesome. Well on that we are going to close this episode up. Next episode we’ll be talking to you more in-depth about the Tin Can API, what that’s all about and why it’s important to know about it. Thank you for listening and we’ll see you in the next episode. The post What is a LRS? And what does it do for your LMS business? appeared first on LMScast.

Today’s question for the Q: Skills for Success authors: How can I get my students to use smart devices in the classroom? Joe McVeigh responds. Do you have a question about teaching English to adults that you’d like to ask our Q author team? Comment below or email your question to qskills@oup.com. Related articles How do I motivate my students to speak English instead of their native language in class? (oupeltglobalblog.com) Should you give homework to students who only meet with the teacher once a week? (oupeltglobalblog.com) What do I do when I ask the class a question and no-one is speaking? (oupeltglobalblog.com) Filed under: Adults / Young Adults, Skills Tagged: Adult Learners, Business English, EdTech, English Language, Joe McVeigh, mlearning, Q Skills for Success, Questions for Q authors, Smart devices