No matter your age, background, or experience, effective communication is a skill you can learn. The greatest leaders of all time are also fantastic communicators and orators. In fact, communications is one of the most popular college degrees today; people recognize the value of a truly efficient communicator. With a little self-confidence and knowledge of the basics, you'll be able to get your point across in no time.

For the past few years, my college required instructors to create their own rubrics. This was helpful as instructors have different requirements within their courses. Recently, we were required to work with others who teach identical courses to create a standard rubric for each course. Although, I was hesitant, this process proved to be very helpful. It allowed me to see what other instructors valued in the course and to refine the course objectives for the course. I'd love to hear from some of you about the process you use to create rubrics.

I use rubrics a lot. The let my students know what to expect and they let me know where to put the emphasis in grading the students.

Not all baby boomers are technology challenged. Some are very technical. I do find ( and I am 1 ) that baby boomers are not as flexible as the later 2 generations.

My students have to respond to the postings of other students. They tend to reply good post or great job. I try to break them of this habit by contacting them privately and giving them a 0- for the post.

I am an older instructor and do not like texting. However I find I can get student to respond better when I text them as opposed to calling them.

When I get a low responder to open up, I always say good answer or that was very interesting, but consider... This seems to work as the low responders start to respond more often.

The greatest problem I have with posting is plagiarism. The students copy directly from articles, or WEB pages. I constantly remind them and provide 0 grades where appropriate. There are some students that I just cannot get to list references and quote sources.

I add a code of communication to all my class syllabi. I did this after having a student that wanted to hog the discussion. I have not needed it sense. It is nict to know there is one if I need one.

Our school had an instance where all of the live chats for a night were lost. We now have to find time to re-record them. Recording them is important as our students need the information that was imparted. Finding the time to do this is difficult

Discuss the pros and cons of using various blogging software. What do you prefer and why?

I would love to hear real examples, what has and has not worked for you?

I still see zero use for this if you know how to manage an online discussion and tools within the LMS.

Maybe this is good for the younger generation, but to be honest for graduate students and those not into technology this sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

With the free avail of tools such as Jing, Magisto, etc.. there are many other options where the content can be controlled within the LMS itself.

I have never been a fan of this in the class as anyone can make a fake account and hard to track the actual real student.

The idea of reward seems intertwined with student participation in discussion. They seems to naturally seek a sure fire format as instructed and hover around the idea of affirmation rather than constructive criticism. The ego of some is demonstrated by trying to outperform the others in total verbiage.

I have noticed that setting a clear example of what specifically is expected of a student in terms of the scope of their discussion responses is key to having them stay on target. A simple shopping list for a given topic listing required resources and format considerations go a long way to setting the right tone.

As the online experience is essentially by default primarily asynchronous it is important to humanize the interaction with a sense of common purpose focused around learning the topic as a common goal. The development of an atmosphere of accessibility where students feel that they can count on the instructor as an involved partner in the process of their achieving success in their career seems a nexus. This provides a context for communication where the student trusts that the observations of the instructor about that world beyond are a sort of initiatory process that brings them a step closer to their ultimate post educational goal.

Adobe Connect can be a vehicle for student teacher conferences where a particular technique needs to be reviewed on a step by step basis.