Incorporating Active Learning Into an Onlne Environment using Free Internet Tools

Yvette Espinosa, Biology Instructor, South Mountain Community College

Prezi - good for student presentation. Housed online so anyone can have access (as long as you have it set that way)

Teacher Centered-
Lecture format
Competitive
Curriculum based
Low-engagement
low level of student choice
student is passive
power is with teacher

Learner Centered
appeal to many learning syltes
Cooperative
Active Learning
Engaged
more choice
power with student
Significant Learning Experiences

Instructional Methods

Places to start
You want interaction with the teacher, the material and their peers

Five active learning techniques:
1. Socratic Questioning
Audacity
Add question in presentation--telling students where to go to answer
easy to edit
Google chat
Can fascilitate chat with only a google log in
(set up groups)

2. Classroom Assessment Technique (CAT)
clickr poll
survey
muddiest point
FlickrPoet
uses tags to show story
have them pull up 3 specific words and have students define why that photo fits those words
low effort way to assess where they are
Vuvox
can incorporate audio or visual

3. Office Hours
skype (online web conferencing--name is a becomming more common)
VRoom free web conferencing (doesn't hold a lot of people) doesn't record

4. Round Robin
Turn taking discussion
Facebook Group
Twitter

5. Review Sessions
Gives students feedback
Helps them prepare
Survey Monkey
Teacher or Students set up survey
Jing
screen capture program
Create tutorials with audio

Other tools:
freetoolsstudent2material.weebly

ENGAGING STUDENTS IN THE MATERIAL
Poll EveryWhere Can set up a question and students answer with cellphones instant results
Quia Can have students set up assessments (ie right up test questions)
4Teachers (surveys or assessments, variety of tools)
Poll Daddy
Cover It Live (instant feedback)

Mapping tools
ReadThink Write Suite of Tools
WordFramAlpha (good one for math, history, culture) Builds concept maps for students
Widgit
Symbols help to communicate ideas

Virtual Worlds and Avatars
Second Life
Gnomz
Voki
Role Playing and animation

Storytelling
1. Blogging tools
Weebly
Blogs for Teaachers
2. Storytelling Tools
CamStudio (Streaming Video)
Animoto

Case Studies
YouTube
Thinkfinity
MERLOT


OTHER
Glogster (collages) Scrapbooking
Think, Pair, Share
Google Sidewiki (housing) or house at google doc (they can edit each other's document)
Debates
Prezi presentation program
Roundtable
4Square (Downloadable app) to see where each other is at and/or set up a meeting
Slideshare
Cooperative Learning
Group Projects
iSpring (nice for setting up powerpoints and converting them to flash) does well with audio and animation
Digital Dropbox (can pass things back and forth, but housed online) good for large files with don't go through email
Zotero collect citations and research (good for group projects)