MERLOT

MERLOT is a free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty, staff and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy.   MERLOT is a leading edge, user-centered, collection of peer reviewed higher education, online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services.

MERLOT's strategic goal is to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning by increasing the quantity and quality of peer reviewed online learning materials that can be easily incorporated into faculty designed courses.

MERLOT’s activities are based on the creative collaboration and support of its Individual Members,
Institutional Partners, Corporate Partners and Editorial Boards.

Integral to MERLOT’s continuing development of faculty development support services are its:

•       Building and sustaining online academic communities

•       Online teaching and learning initiatives

•       Building, organizing, reviewing, and developing applications of online teaching-learning materials

MERLOT maintains its currency through ongoing and continuing communication with its worldwide supporters in a variety of ways, including the annual MERLOT International Conference, the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT), member publications, news, and our new Voices website to enable MERLOT users to communication with others.

LectureFox

 Lecturefox
It’s all about the joy of learning.
Lecturefox is a free service. You can find high-quality classes from universities all over the world. We collect without exception lectures from official universities, and we have a special interest in lectures from the faculties physics, chemistry, computer science and mathematics. In the category “faculty mix” you can find miscellaneous lectures from other departments like electrical engineering, biology, psychology, economics, history and philosophy.

Lecturefox: Yet Another Online Source of Free University Lectures

I have previously posted a number of websites that offer high quality, free university lectures .  Now comes another site, Lecturefox, which brings you many Ivy League University lectures on sciences, psychology, economics, history, and philosophy.  Many of the Lecturefox lectures include not only audio, which is common on other sites, but also video.

What is Lecturefox?

It’s all about the joy of learning.

Lecturefox is a free service. You can find high-quality classes from universities all over the world. We collect without exception lectures from official universities, and we have a special interest in lectures from the faculties physics, chemistry, computer science and mathematics. In the category “faculty mix” you can find miscellaneous lectures from other departments like electrical engineering, biology, psychology, economics, history and philosophy.

classblogmeister

About Class Blogmeister

Perhaps one of the most fascinating tools that has emerged from the Internet cloud in recent years is the Blog. A shortening of the term Web log, the Blog is an online publishing tool that enables people to easily publish their loves, passions, dislikes, peeves, discoveries, and insights.

Thousands of teachers have discovered the value of classroom blogging, both as an avenue for their communications, but also as a tool for giving voice to what their students are learning and how they are learning.

Class Blogmeister is one of several blogging engines that have been developed specifically for classroom use. You are welcome to explore the writings of teachers and students alike

classblogmeister.com

History of Class BlogMeister

The creator David Warlick is a 35 year educator -- a classroom teacher, district administrator, and staff consultant with the North Carolina State Department of Public Instruction. Since 1995, he has been the owner and principal consultant of The Landmark Project, a professional development and innovations firm in Raleigh, North Carolina. During this time David has spoken at  numerous conferences and delivered workshops for educators throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, the Middle East, and South America. His attribution are:  Citation Machine, serves nearly a million page views a day and classroom blogging tool, Class BlogMeister, has served more than a quarter of a million teachers and students.

Comments by the creator, David Warlick; “The Web has changed dramatically since Landmarks for Schools was launched in 1995. At that time, virtually all of its content was published by organizations. Today, an increasing portion of the Web-based information that people are using is published by individuals. We are not only consuming information, but also sharing knowledge and ideas that we care about. Below, I have installed a number of widgets that serve to mine this new social web and provide glimpses at the global conversation -- as of this minute”.

Class BlogMeister is an online classroom blogging tool which is providedfree of subscription or purchase from The Landmark Project. These and all of
David Warlick’s other web tools for teachers are free.

 Instructional Uses

  

Using BlogMeister with Students

The principal purpose of BlogMeister is to enable teachers to provide authentic publishing 
opportunities for their students. One of the barriers for using most general blogging tools is to 
assure the quality and appropriateness of student publications. Students can work on their 
writings over a period of time, understanding their writing are not public until the teachers

have reviewed and approved the article. In addition to the articles, all comments posted are 
filtered through the teachers before they are made available to students.

Some examples of teacher use:

• to present a lesson where students learn how to read and write
• to present a lesson on selecting books - reading

Some examples of student use:

• to  demonstrate different book and career interests 
• to present a story - The Fairy Tale 
• to reading outloud - recording 

Classblogmeister is specifically made for teachers and students. It is one of the many ways to provide a vast teaching-learning environment. We could also define classblogmeister as an extension of school. In here, teachers and students are able to still teach and learn.

flickr

    Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community created by Ludicorp in 2004 and later acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media . Yahoo has reported that Flickr has a total of 51 million registered member and 80 million unique visitors.  In August 2011, it reported that it was hosting more than 6 billion images and this number continues to grow steadily according to reporting sources  Photos and videos can be accessed from Flickr without the need of registering an account but an account must be made in order for the user to upload content onto the website. Registering an account also allows users to create a profile page containing photos and videos that the user has uploaded and also grants the ability to add another Flickr user as a contact. For mobile users, Flickr has an official app for iPhon , for Windows Phone 7, and for Android.

Using Flickr in Education

The presence of visual elements in today’s teaching and learning is increasing as the integration of images and visual presentations with text in textbooks, instructional manuals, classroom presentations, and computer interfaces broadens (Benson, 1997; Branton, 1999; Dwyer 1999)

The use of images in teaching and learning makes most students react positively. Everybody can get different things out of images. How can we embrace visual enhancements in instruction? Flickr is an online photo management and sharing application that allows educators to play with many different tools.

Let´s take a look at some of the visual possibilities we can include in our teaching scenarios.

FlickrStorm - a website where you can find creative common copyrighted photos and create a tray of photos you choose.

Flickr Toys - a website where you can create trading cards, movie posters, picture cubes and lots more with your photographs

Flickr Related Tag Viewer - a website that offers ideas of other tag words for the word that you type in.

Searching tools that use Flickr

Compfight Find and share Creative Commons images with this tools.

Flickr Storm Search on Flickr with some magic.

FlickRiver A great search option to view photos quickly and easily, in one seamless “river of photos” view. Browse images by group, by tag word, by user and by place.

World Cup teaching themes using Flickr images

Bubblr Is a very simple and easy website. Drag speech bubbles onto the photo and add text. Students have to describe their favourite football player.

Big Huge Labs This website allows you to create several things with your Flickr images and even the images uploaded from your own computer.

My students used the following options:

Create a magazine cover

Imagine that the World cup has just finished. Create a magazine cover informing who won the world cup.

Create your World cup billboard

Create a map with the countries that are participating in the World cup

Add special effects to the picture of your favourite football player

Turn words into pictures Write down the name and last name of a famous football player. This application will turn the words into letter pictures from Flickr cc library.

Other applications that use Flickr images

 

Picnik This online editing tools allow you to use your Flickr photos to edit them and add special effects. No registration required and you can save your edited picture into Flickr.

Splashr Search for Flickr images via tags, user ID, photo set ID or email address. The result obtained can be embedded to another site.

Retrievr Sketch a shape and then explore Flickr images that have similar shapes and colours.

Fastr Nice game to guess the tags of the different pictures shown.

 

twitter

TWITTER

         Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".

       Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. Twitter rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with 200 million users as of 2011, generating over 200 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet." 

Twitter Inc., the company that operates the service and associated website, is based in San Francisco, with additional servers and offices in San Antonio, Boston, and New York City.

    Twitter is the most popular microblogging application, with almost one million users called twitterers, who can send and receive messages via the web, SMS, instant messaging clients, and by third party applications. Posts are limited to 140 text characters in length. With a solid experience in using Web2.0 technologies in education, the authors are trying to provide arguments for using Twitter as microblogging platform social network in education, underlining its advantages, but also possible bad points. The article also presents an application related to the Romanian Twitosphere and a Romanian microblogging platform, 

already used in education.

 TEACHING WITH TWITTER

   
    Most would agree that Twitter was one of the social networking phenomena of 2008, and has enjoyed exponential growth in popularity. The micro blogging tool has obvious potential to be used in formal learning, both in traditional online classroom settings and - through mobile technologies - for mobile learners.

    Ever since I first began to use Twitter I have been thinking about how to harness the potential of micro blogging for the benefits of my own students, and have tried out several ideas to exploit it already. Below are my 10 top uses of Twitter for education:

1. ‘Twit Board’ Notify students of changes to course content, schedules, venues or other important information.

2. ‘Summing Up’ Ask students to read an article or chapter and then post their brief summary or précis of the key point(s). A limit of 140 characters demands a lot of academic discipline.

3. ‘Twit Links’ Share a hyperlink – a directed task for students – each is required to regularly share one new hyperlink to a useful site they have found.

4. ‘Twitter Stalking’ Follow a famous person and document their progress. Better still if this can be linked to an event (During the recent U.S. Presidential elections, many people followed @BarackObama and kept up to date with his speeches, etc).

5. ‘Time Tweet’ Choose a famous person from the past and create a twitter account for them – choose an image which represents the historical figure and over a period of time write regular tweets in the role of that character, in a style and using the vocabulary you think they would have used (e.g. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar).

6. ‘Micro Meet’ Hold discussions involving all the subscribing students. As long as everyone is following the whole group, no-one should miss out on the Twitter stream. All students participate because a sequence of contributors is agreed beforehand.

7. ‘Micro Write’ Progressive collaborative writing on Twitter. Students agree to take it in turns to contribute to an account or ‘story’ over a period of time.

8. ‘Lingua Tweeta’ Good for modern language learning. Send tweets in foreign languages and ask students to respond in the same language or to translate the tweet into their native language.

9. ‘Tweming’ Start off a meme – agree on a common hash-tag so that all the created content is automatically captured by Twemes or another aggregator.

10. ‘Twitter Pals’ Encourage students to find a Twitter ‘penpal’ and regularly converse with them over a period of time to find out about their culture, hobbies, friends, family etc. Ideal for learning about people from other cultures.

 

Definition, Nature and Theories of Learning

Learning

§  From a Dictionary: “To gain knowledge or understanding of, or skill in, by study, instruction, or investigation.”

§  Defined as a modification of behavior through experience

§  An acquisition of behavior pattern. It is a modification and coordination of the responses of organism.

§  A process of having one’s behavior modified, more or less permanently by what happens in the world around him by what observes. It is only change that results from experience except change

§  It is also an active process.

§  It was characterized into: motivation, readiness, responses, reinforcement and generation. These learning processes are classical conditioning, operant conditioning (instrumental conditioning), social learning and cognitive learning.

Nature of learning

According to Thorndike, hull and Skinner, it is a process of acquisition of new behavior or strengthening or weakening the old behavior as the result of experiences with a view of modifying the behavior, this process may involve many changes in perception and behavior.

Learning includes a wide variety of changes in behavior. it may involve adjustment with others , or it may involve the learning use of skills in day to day work or inculcation  of healthy habits, it may also involve the fostering of right attitudes or learning to control emotions.

§  Learning process involves some motives, drives on the part of learner and these motives, or drives spring in a goal.

§  Entire learning situation is a very complex process. Learning may also necessitate involvement of symbols

Theories of Learning

S- R bond Theory

§  It assumes that through conditioning specific responses can be directly linked with a particular stimulus.

Behaviorism

§  It assumes that learning process of building conditioned reflexes through the substitution of one stimulus for another.

Gestalt Theory

§  It emphasizes use of instinct as basic principle and is opposed to trial and error.

Functionalism

§  It assumes that behavior and mental processes are adaptive.

Humanistic 

§  Emotions and affect play a role in learning. Arising from a value-base of empowering and even liberating the learner

Social

§  humans learn best in group activities

Sources:

Book: Principles and Methods of Teaching

Principles of Teaching and Learning

http://www.infed.org/biblio/b-learn.htm

http://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1687132.html