Create:  Using the examples above as a point of reference, create three original digital resources that could be utilized when evaluating student work. Then discuss in your blog how these resources would enhance the level of specific feedback offered to students. I'm currently in an online teaching endorsement program, and in one of our recent courses we have been learning about the importance of targeted feedback. (The artifacts shared here are some things I've recycled from submissions to my endorsement instructor). Candidates in the program have been taught that it is important that feedback must be aligned to the standards and learning objectives, timely, positive, and instructional. Lessons in the TOOL have been very closely aligned with what I've been learning in my endorsement program. One very interesting thing that I learned from Communicate 3, Lesson 1 is that there is an important difference in praise an encouragement. I know that I personally am "guilty...

Answer:  Which LMS is best?  How does the selected LMS meet the needs of all stakeholders, including administrators, students, teachers and faculty, instructional technology, development, support, and parents? How does the selected LMS align with the initiatives, growth, and technological needs of your organization? I believe that the best LMS option for my classes would be Google Classroom, followed by open source Moodle, with all it's cool plugins, as an alternate. I know that Classroom was not really listed in the module, but it is listed by PCMag as one of the leading LMS for 2018 . Classroom meets the needs of all stakeholders involved in my personal situation. We are are GSuite for Education district, with every employee and student having a GSuite account. Among the plethora of benefits is single sign-on for all users' apps, including Gmail, Calendar, Drive (document storage), apps for creating content (Docs, Slides, Sheets, Forms), and Classroom. We are also almost ...

Answer:  What synchronous vendor application/tool did you select? Using the application, what did you experience using the synchronous learning tool? Was the task easy? Challenging? Did the process present problems? As I've shared in previous posts, my choice for synchronous sessions has been Google Hangouts (specifically Hangouts on Air). I choose Hangouts because it is a part of the GSuite apps that my students and I already have access to. Our in-house instructional tech team also is available for support with this particular tool. Overall, my experiences with Hangouts and Hangouts on Air have been positive. Hangouts on Air (via YouTube Live) allows me to run synchronous sessions at home or work with my students wherever they are. I used this twice during a two week absence when my child was born, as well as for a few at-home review sessions the night before students had a big test. I create the Hangout in advance and share a link to the Hangout through one of my communicati...

Answer:  When would an open source application take precedence over a commercial product? What are the issues when choosing between Open Source vs. Commercial Software? In this lesson, I have researched the open source and commercial the virtual classroom options presented and evaluated each from the perspective of a teacher looking for options for synchronous learning. When comparing the open source options with commercial options, I have found that most of the features are comparable. The main reasons I would say that open source options may take precedence over a commercial product would be cost and the ongoing collaboration among users and developers. I foresee though that t hese advantages would, of course come with concessions.  Many open source programs are free or "freemium," meaning you can get all of the basic functions with some additional features for a cost. Commercial software offers some free trials or "freemium" versions too, but commercial softw...