properly organised activity should get the students thinking about the task, not the tool! So, Induction & Icebreaker activities. Of course this is by no means an exhaustive list, and I'm happy to hear your activities, so please post below. Try to keep all your activities using tools already available to the students in the VLE or One aspect of learning online is that the students will feel distant and isolated from not only you (the Institution and staff facilitator) but also from each other. So, what can you do to make them feel included and valued?

Many educational benefits are attributed to the activity known as social bookmarking. Whilst re-iterating these benefits this article will discuss and offer a solution to the task of managing social bookmarking learning activities. Portability and Flexibility: Because social bookmarking websites can be accessed anytime from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection the opportunity to tag bookmarks, retrieve information from saved bookmarks and keep up to date with the tagging Three reasons why teachers and students should join a social bookmarking site 1. Accelerated

My approach towards scenarios When designing any kind of elearning, I like to use Cathy Moore's action mapping approach to first define the scenario-based activities. Tags: interactivity demos creativity scenario based learning activities learning elearnin So last week I tweeted an example of immersive learning scenario built entirely in Powerpoint and published using Articulate Presenter . Given that I saw the tweet travel a fair bit, I thought it might be a good idea to share some of the related ideas on this blog.

We were partly dissatisfied with previous activities we'd used, and on the other hand we also wanted to try our hand at something new. Since I was feeling inventive, I came up with a new Retrospective activity - "Eye on the future" . We tried the activity with great success in the retro that Jaggu was running; as did Rohith Rajagopal/ Siva Jagadeesan in the other retro that was running at the same time and apparently Pat Sarnacke tried this out in an end of release retro as well. Today, Jaggu and I spent some time debating the best retro format for a team that was taking some learning from a training program and was about to apply it onto a simulation.

Tags: Articles Course Activities Pedagogical Theory Social Networkin "Cyberpunk Lit Class in the Metaverse", cc licensed image by Paul Graham Raven This is apparently the Summer of Second Life for online education. For its June/July issue, the Journal of Online Education (Innovate) published an entire issue devoted to the medium as a teaching venue.

Tags: Course Activities Time Management Web Tool For those who enjoy using Skype, the new beta 4.1 for Windows will include a screen-sharing feature — allowing users to share their desktop screen with any contact. Skype 4.1 beta screen capture

The Canadian Institute of Distance Education Research , University of Athabasca, presents the next presentation in their series of free CIDER sessions. Their next session features a presentation and discussion with Ismael Pe ñ a-López, Lecturer and Researcher, Open University of Catalonia. Title: The Personal Research Portal: The Virtual Faculty or the Net behind the Classroom .

like the metaphor of a speedboat/ hot air balloon and I used that instead of a plain jane force field. This is quite a simple activity to conduct: On a whiteboard, draw a (speed)boat and draw an arrow forward (Fuel) and an arrow backward (Anchors) Ask participants to reflect on the goal at hand in light of the week gone by and imagine it to be a speedboat. Timebox the activity. Sometimes retrospectives could lose their effectiveness when they become too repetitive. I

You could also use YouTube or Vimeo to upload a recorded process or activity to ask for the same thing--"what's wrong with this" or "what could we do differently?" I like the visual aspect, the ability to engage the community and the various possibilities here. How could you adapt this for a learning activity or project you're working on? ...Tags: Through a really excellent article about how the Smithsonian is embracing social media, I ran across their "Fill the Gap" project, in which they used Flickr to engage the public in finding a piece of art from their collection to "fill the gap" to be left by a painting that will go into storage. This also seems like a really fun learning and community-building strategy to me.