Toondoo

ToonDoo is a cool, comic-creating tool, a fun site for kids. The founder is devoted to creating a unique array of free and customizable online games of educational value for children of all abilities.

Creating your own cartoon is not a difficult thing anymore. Try this free tool, you will love it.

Gantt Charts

Along with a traditional calendar, a Gramtt Chart can create a graphically represent of the project start/stop dates and the project progression to help you see the total picture, which improve your time management skills.

To draw up a Gantt diagram (Gant diagram), follow these steps:

• Step 1. List all activities in the plan
• Step 2. Head up graph paper with the days or weeks through to task completion
• Step 3. Plot the tasks onto the graph paper
• Step 4. Presenting the analysis

Gantt charts are useful tools for planning and scheduling projects. They allow you to assess how long a project should take, determine the resources needed, and lay out the order in which tasks need to be carried out. They are useful in managing the dependencies between tasks.

When a project is under way, Gantt charts are useful for monitoring its progress. You can immediately see what should have been achieved at a point in time, and can therefore take remedial action to bring the project back on course. This can be essential for the successful and profitable implementation of the project.

See full article here

Related article: A Teacher's Paradox - Flexible Time Management

Four Myths about the Online Education Experience

http://www.prweb.com/pingpr.php/SW5zZS1QaWdnLUNvdXAtVGhpci1NYWduLVBpZ2ctWmVybw==
This article lists four myths about online learning on behalf of students' perspectives:

1. Myth 1: My online class will be easier than a face-to-face one.
2. Myth 2: I won’t be interacting much with the instructor and other students.
3. Myth 3: I’m not tech-savvy enough to enroll.
4. Myth 4: My degree won’t be respected by employers.

See full article here.

All these myths are common. With more and more students having the online education experience, they will know online learning requires more time and effort than face-to-face learing to devote to communications via media.

A certified online instructor has more sense of online teaching that requires more facilitation to build the learning community in the online enviornment that students can communicate with their instructor, their peer students and even the external content experts.

New technologies did scare away some of students, especially continuing students, but not the new generation. Indeed, a good tech support and a detailed online orientation should help students build confidence on the online learning environment.

Hopefully, with the continuing growth of online education, people will change their mind to give more chance to those who have successfully completed their online education. Meanwhile, a high-quality online education programe is the key for the door open.

fish vs fishing

I read a short ariticle in Tech&Learning online magazine this morning, titled as Students as Meaningful Contributors by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano. Here is one paragraph that I want to highlight for its truthness.

The "why do we have to learn this" comment has bothered me for years. Several
years ago I realized it is a very good question and if I can't answer it with a better response than "you may use this some day" then I better get out of the teaching business. It came to me that we really do NOT remember most of what we are taught. So what is the purpose. I had to change my philosophy. I realized my focus should not be the content, but instead training the brain to think in different ways using the content of my classes. I have come to find the recent brain research agrees with me in that the brain develops different ways of thinking when we encourage it to do so. We as teachers need to let go of the "content focus" and focus on training the brain to think differently. If we arm our students with a brain that can think many different ways we have done our jobs.

Can't agree more than that...

Google Docs updates

Google Docs mades some new changes in their products to enhance the collaboration. The big change is Google Docs will now allow you to see other Collaborators changes in real-time as they type. And here are a few more:

• Creating collaborative drawings from the Docs list rather than only from within a Google Doc
• A ruler within the document for help with adjusting margins
• Additional ease with moving images and formatting your documents

The last but not the least, increasing speed in Docs, so anyone should be able to edit with up to 50 simultaneous users (rather than the actual 10-12 synchronous users that most of us have experienced). Does this sound more useful for your online course?

See the video below for the detailed explanation:

Resources

Illinois Online Network

Quality Matters Rubric

Pedagogy of Online Teaching and Learning

Feebles

Here some free applications that you can download and they are quite user-friendly:

Graphic and Screen Capture Resources:

Gimp Image Editing App: The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

Jing: Jing allows you to snap a picture of your screen or record video. You can incorporate your snapshots and screencasts into your courses or share with friends. For the video recordings, you can use screencast.com to share the link of the flash created file. If you decide to upgrade to Jing Pro, you will have the ability to create MPEG files.

Screencast.com is a TechSmith solution for business and academic professionals looking to manage and share videos, images, documents, or anything else online. Screencast.com's high-quality content-hosting gives you complete control over how, when and to whom your content is distributed.

Screenr℠, a service provided by Articulate Global, Inc. ("Articulate"). You can create screencasts for your followers as easily as you tweet.

PDF Converters:

CutePDF: After installing CutePDF, you'll be able to convert your Microsoft Excel, Word or PowerPoint documents, emails or web sites to PDF files using the print command.

PrimoPDF: Make PDF documents for different uses, including online viewing, eBooks, office printing, and prepress (high-end printing). Combine PDF files after they are converted.

Time flies

It's been a long time not to touch this area, I meant writing in English. I want to give a try again and focus on what I'm doing right now. Things changed a lot in past several years... that long? oh yeah, it's been years... Time flies...