Can Gameful Learning with Social Media Change the World?

Can Gameful Learning with Social Media Change the World?

Today, May 21 at 11:30am Pacific/2:30pm Eastern!

https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/chu0boai9td61aiv7mib0ujkiag?authkey=CI_i-_SC2Mr8ggE

Once upon a time, making change in the world was a lofty goal that, to a student, seemed achievable only to those with great power.  Today, anyone can use social media to sculpt their own network of influencers -- friends, celebrities, politicians, thought leaders, non-profit organizations -- without ever meeting any of these people face-to-face.  How are these new social realities affecting the way we teach our college classes?  What would a class look like that embraces social media at its core as a tool to empower students to change the world?

Join me, Michelle Pacansky-Brock, author of Best Practices for Teaching with Emerging Technologies, for a Google+ Hangout on Air with Jason Rosenblum  and Robert W Strong from St. Edward's University as they share their innovative approach to teaching their Global Social Problems course.  The course design uses a gameful approach, influenced by Jane McGonigal. In Fall 2011, professors Rosenblum and Strong challenged students to complete a series of missions to tackle global social problems: Research problems, take Action to deal with those problems, and Imagine potential solutions with those problems.

In our Hangout on Air, we will discuss this course design, their plans to revise the design, the tools the students used, and the students’ responses and learning outcomes to this creative teaching approach. Click the link above for access to the live video stream of the Hangout on Air in Google+.

Learn with Michelle: GLEAN - A Campus-Supported Suite of Emerging Tools for Students & Faculty

Next week marks the start of my "Learn with Michelle" event series, brought to you by Academic Partnerships.  I'll be hosting a series of Google+ Hangouts that will showcase conversations with higher ed leaders who are using emerging technologies to transition the college paradigm from teaching to learning.

GLEAN: A Campus-Supported Suit of Emerging Tools for Students & Faculty 

Google+ Event:  https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/cto7utn86mvh4b982sdvk20n3fk

On Wednesday, May 15th at 11:30am Pacific/ 2:30pm Eastern, I will meet with Susan Gautsch and Dr. Charla Griffy-Brown of Pepperdine University's Graziadio School of Business in a Hangout on Air to explore how and why they have developed GLEAN, a collection of emerging technologies that are provided to students and faculty to use for content creation and collaboration.  What opportunities come from placing campus supported emerging tools into the hands of students and faculty? What are the challenges? 

The Hangout on Air will be streamed live through the Google Event.  This is a public event. Anyone is welcome to view the live conversation and post questions to the event's comments field.  The questions will be moderated during the conversation.  If you miss the live event, the video archive will be made available shortly thereafter on the Faculty eCommons. 

To receive updates about future Learn with Michelle events, subscribe to the Faculty eCommons Newsletter.

If you have a practice using emerging technologies from your campus that you'd like to share in a Google+ Hangout on Air with Michelle, please submit your proposal here: http://facultyecommons.org/hangout-with-michelle-from-teaching-to-learning-series/

Join Me! VoiceThread Mobile, a Free Webinar

 

Want to learn more about how teaching with VoiceThread mobile supports your students’ learning? Join me for a free interactive webinar, VoiceThread for Mobile, Multisensory Learning On-The-Go:

• May 9th at 12:00pm PDT/2:00 CDT/3:00pm EDT
• Register on the Faculty eCommons

I will share how the VoiceThread Mobile app (available for iPhones and iPads only, Android support is in development) has increased my students' access to voice and video participation and why this is important in online learning.  A demo of the VoiceThread Mobile App will also be included.  The webinar will engage Twitter as a backchannel and provide participants an opportunity to ask questions.

I hope you can join me!

Book Review: Best Practices for Teaching with Emerging Technologies

Here is a new review of my book, Best Practices for Teaching with Emerging Technologies, by Kelly Walsh (@EmergingEdTech) author of EmergingEdTech.com & CIO at The College of Westchester. 

Click here to read Kelly's review of Best Practices for Teaching with Emerging Technologies by Michelle Pacansky-Brock.

  Thanks for the review, Kelly!  I appreciate how you've integrated the video summary too -- great integration of Universal Design for Learning principles! :)

Gamify Your Class With VoiceThread Mobile & A Free Webinar!

I would like to invite you to engage in my most recent blog post at the Faculty eCommons, a free online social learning ecosystem for faculty across the globe to learn, collaborate and share research about effective online teaching and learning, brought to you by Academic Partnerships.

My post is titled "How to Gamify Your Class with VoiceThread Mobile" and explores a specific pedagogical approach for integrating the VoiceThread Mobile app into your students' learning.  The best part, however, is the VoiceThread shared within the post that invites you to listen to some very creative teaching ideas shared by educators about how you could use the app to gamify your class.  Don't forget to share your own idea after you're done listening! I am hooked on this great conversation!

Click here to go to the post, How to Gamify Your Class with VoiceThread Mobile.

 

Free Webinar: VoiceThread Mobile

Also, you are invited to join me for a free webinar, VoiceThread Mobile: Multisensory Learning On-The-Go on May 9th at 12pm PDT/3pm EDT. Register on the Faculty eCommons.

27 "More" Ways to be a Better 21st Century Educator

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

How is Emerging Tech Reshaping the Future of Faculty Development?

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

Launch Pad Participants Revealed for #ET4Online!

Next week, innovative online educators will comingle with some of the hottest entrepreneurial minds in educational technology to foster an additional bridge between the world of business and formalized education.  Fostering more formative feedback loops between these frequently silo'd sectors of society is becoming more and more critical as technology continues to present compelling solutions to old teaching and learning problems and paint exciting visions for the future.  Ensuring today's entrepreneurs are in dialogue with today's educators is critical to the success of teaching and learning.  And that is the objective of the Launch Pad, the brand new program included in next week's Sloan-C/MERLOT ET4Online Conference in Las Vegas, which I have had the honor of chairing this year.

Eight outstanding startups have been selected to participate in this year's inaugural Launch Pad. They are listed below.  A representative group of the participants will participate in a plenary panel at the conference on Thursday, moderated by EdSurge's Tony Wan.  If you are attending the conference, please be sure to come by the Launch Pad, explore the creative genius of these products, converse with the creators themselves, share your feedback about their products, and attend the plenary on Thursday morning which will commence immediately following a stimulating presentation by James Byers, co-founder of Wikispaces!

• BuzzMath: a mathematical mission that leads middle school students to proficiency through supported practice. The student-centered and user-inspired design makes BuzzMath practical and motivational for students and teachers.

• Ginkgotree: puts the power of curriculum curation back in the hands of the faculty who teach it, to lower students’ costs and improve their learning outcomes. The platform allows instructors to assemble online curricula from any resource, complete with automated copyright clearance and digital content sourcing.

• HireArt: HireArt is a new type of jobs marketplace that uses online challenge-based interviews to vet job applicants. HireArt screens and sources candidates through work samples and video interviews that simulate what a candidate would do at the real job. 
  
  
• The Predictive Analytics Reporting Framework: a multi-institutional data-mining project, managed by WCET. It brings together 2 year, 4 year, public, proprietary, traditional, and progressive institutions to collaborate on identifying points of student loss and to find effective practices that improve student retention in U.S. higher education.
  
  
• scrible: a tool that lives in your browser that allows a user to seamlessly annotate and comment directly on webpages and save, share and manage them with others. Scrible makes online information usable and manageable.
  
  
• Skyepack: a content-focused educational software environment that is designed to facilitate the delivery of learn-anywhere mobile content as an alternative to texts, course packs, and class handouts. Skyepack enables instructors to easily build mobile-ready learning content from a variety of media and resources, delivering video, audio, documents, self-assessments, and HTML5 applications.
  
  
• STEMscopes: a K-12 comprehensive online science curriculum housed in Rice University's Center for Digital Learning and Scholarship. STEMscopes provides hands-on inquiry activities, assessments, problem-based-learning, intervention tools, acceleration materials, and teacher support resources. Our program is 100% aligned to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) and meets the rigor and depth of both the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR™) and high school End-of-Course (EOC) assessments.
  
  
• ValuePulse: Social learning platform that harnesses the power of social media to provides one-click access to a credible, curated news library to fuel discussions in a course.  Empowers students to achieve learning objectives by engaging current industry news as opposed to textbooks and understand how to effectively apply social media to their professional lives.

New Beginnings for Me & A Mobile Learning Micro MOOC for You!

I am excited to share that I began a new journey today as Director of Academic Services at Academic Partnerships (AP).  After three years as an independent consultant, I've found a position that aligns with my passion for online teaching and student-centered learning!  For those of you who follow my work, this means I am no longer consulting with VoiceThread or teaching for @One -- but my passion for using social media and VoiceThread to support student learning lives on.  And you can bet both will remain prevalent in my work. :)  And ... I have a very helpful eBook that will be available in the next couple of months that is titled "How to Humanize Your Online Class with VoiceThread"... so stay tuned! Hopefully, you'll want to pick it up for your summer professional development plans!

So, what is Academic Partnerships? AP provides assistance to public institutions of higher education to transition their traditional degree programs online.  I will be supporting faculty with their introductory online teaching experiences.  How cool is that? 

The Faculty eCommons

What's even better about my new position is that there will continue to be plenty of opportunities for us all to learn together!  One of the most exciting parts of my new role will be the work I will do in the Faculty eCommons. The Faculty eCommons is a social learning community for faculty in online university programs.  Add it to your RSS reader today or follow @APCommons on Twitter.  And stay tuned as it will evolve into something even better in the coming months! :)

Micro-MOOC
Instructional Design for Mobile Learning
April 15-May 12 - register now!

AP recently began offering free Micro-MOOCs designed to scaffold 21st century educators towards becoming empowered and confident users of technology and facilitators of online learning.  What's a Micro-MOOC, as opposed to a MOOC? AP explains the difference here.

Registration for next Micro-MOOC, Instructional Design for Mobile Learning, is in progress and more than 600 motivated online educators are already signed up.  Join us!  The online course kicks off with a webinar on Tuesday, April 16 at 11:00:00 AM PDT led by David Metcalf from the University of Central Florida.  Then you will learn along with peers in asynchronous sessions and targeted synchronous sessions led by industry experts including myself (I will be presenting a session on the VoiceThread mobile app) and Jackie Gerstein. All kinds of participation is welcome -- so consider this your opportunity to jump in and explore!

Register for the Kickoff Webinar with David Metcalf on April 16th

Register for the Micro-MOOC  April 15-May 12

Book Signing Event at #ET4Online

If you are attending the Sloan-C/MERLOT International Symposium for Emerging Technologies in Online Learning in Las Vegas in April, please visit me at the opening reception on Tuesday, April 9th from 5:30-7:00 in the Planet Hollywood Mezzanine.

I will be hosting a book signing for Best Practices for Teaching with Emerging Technologies.  Paperback copies of my book will also be available for sale (check, cash, and PayPal only) at a 15% discount off the retail cover price for this special event. 

Since its publication in August of 2012, the book has been warmly received by a broad faculty audience (click here for Amazon reviews) and has been adopted by faculty at CSU Channel Islands as a resource in their Blended Learning Planning Program. If you are a member of an institution that has adopted the book recently, please let me know!