This Week’s Topics are:

Mobile Devices and Apps
Digital Textbooks
Screencasting
Video Conferencing
Social Networking
Social Bookmarking
Blogs
Wikis
Adaptive Learning

Introduction

As you move into the online teaching environment, you’ll discover that there are a wide variety of tools that can enhance the learning activities you create for your course. Some of the newer and more innovative tools, which are reviewed in this week’s content, are referred to as emerging technologies. As you review these tools, please remember to focus on the pedagogical needs and objectives of your course and consider how these tools might meet them.

Emerging technologies help students to engage in higher-level thinking skills, such as creating, evaluating, and analyzing, which in turn create engaging activities. Also, these tools help students collaborate, communicate, organize information, and build an online community together.

As you prepare your online course, you may find that the activities in the face-to-face setting are tricky or difficult to convert into your online course. The tools provided in this week’s content are designed to help you resolve those concerns.

Choose Your Path

Keep in mind that you do not need to read all of the material in this section. If some of the tools are appealing to you, explore them. If you’re not sure whether you want to incorporate any of these tools at this time, consider revisiting this section at a later date or discuss these options with your instructional designer to obtain further information. Browse through the following topics to see how faculty integrate them into their online courses:

Mobile Learning – With the advent of smart phone technology, users utilize mobile technologies to access the Internet. Learn about the variety of tools that allow your students to learn on the go.

Digital Textbook - With more and more content becoming available digitally, students are coming to expect that they will be able to access their course materials through multiple devices. This expectation is beginning to extend to the course textbook as well.

Screencasting – Some concepts may be difficult to explain while solely relying on text and still images. This is where screencasting can help. Learn about how you can create videos to demonstrate concepts or provide powerful tutorials for your students.

Video Conferencing – Video conferencing allows users to communicate from different parts of the world at the same time. See how faculty members are using this tool to chat with their students during virtual office hours or how they implement synchronous discussions.

Social Networking – Many will recognize applications such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, which are all social networking tools. These tools allow you to connect with other users to discuss a variety of topics with each other.

Social Bookmarking – If you’ve ever wanted to keep a list of all the resources you’ve collected online and be able to access them anywhere on the web then this tool is for you! Faculty can have students collaborate together to manage and share their resources using these applications.

Blogs – This tool allows users to create journal-type digital media. Interactivity is built in as readers can comment upon the content generated by the author.

Wikis – Excellent for collaborative group work, wikis allow users to create documents together without running the risk of overwriting each other’s work. The most famous and recognizable wiki is Wikipedia.

Last week, you created an outline of your module and shared it within your small groups and perhaps received helpful feedback from them about your module. After reviewing the various tools, begin building your module content in your <Replace - Your LMS> development section. This is the module that you will present at the <Replace - Course Title> Showcase.

Learning Objectives

Review various emerging technologies that interest you.
Identify an emerging technology you plan to incorporate into your course, and how it will help meet the course objectives (optional).
Create, edit, and add items to a Module in <Replace - Your LMS> based on your Module Outline

Assignments Overview

Build Module Draft - Begin developing the learning module you have already outlined, including at a minimum an introduction, learning objectives, content, and assessment concerning a unit of material in your course.
Consultation #3

Creative Commons License

TOPKit Sample Course was prepared by the University of Central Florida (UCF). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.