Amelia Robinson

Blogs can be used for classroom management, collaboration, discussions or student portfolios. Before using them, you should carefully  consider the role of the activity and the role of the medium. Blogs may be used to develop student reading and writing skills, present persuasive arguments, brainstorm, or provide reflection, ammong other activities. As with the use of other social media, rubrics must be adjusted for the medium andn expectations and guidelilnes should be made clear to students at the outset.

Microblogging, on platforrms such as Twitter, can be used to follow important personalities, post relevant facts related to the learning, or redirect to sites such as Nurph for more extensive discussion. Instructors can use microblogging to ask discussion questions, send out announcements or reminders, poll students, or post links to relevant research sites. Rubrics shold be used and must be modified for things such as accounting for or disallowing the use of web language. microblogging can provide the real time communication that replicates a F2F environment or allows for group projects, such as collaborative tweets. I would probably use these… >>>

Learnnig  products, discusssions, and research can all be conducted on media hosting or sharing sites. Instructors should be sure that the sites they choose are appropriate for the content, free or low cost, easy to learn, and have appropriate policies and advertisers. Policies must be ini place to support positive outcomes, and students must be familiar with those policies. Thesee sites can be used for content presentation, and instructors must ensure that the content is appropriately chunked and presented in the best medium.

Social media can be a terrific tool for connecting students to resources, experts and the worldwide community, as well as building learning communities annd increasing peer-to-peer interaction. Guidelines must be in place foro both students and instructors to ensure all postings are appropriate, civil, and related to the content. Students can post their learing products to social media, and this can be used as an assessment. Rubrics are particularly important to this type of assessment, so students will have a clear picture of how their postings will be evaluated. I have experimented with the use of YouTube and Pinterest for… >>>

Instructors must ensure coursework and assignments allow everyone a chance to use their own best skills and personality traits to complete the learning and contribute to the course. Student personality types can be assessed early on with a list of four completion questions that require stduents to describe their own personality, preferences, etc. These can be used to design coursework that allows for all to succeed. For instance, blue students may enjoy group work the most and need to be able to communicate with others frequently. Gold students like deadlines, rules and procedures and may be more comfortable with strit… >>>

Several personality traits can make instructors more successful. These include respect warmth and caring, ability to build learning communities, accessibility enthusiasm, lover of learning, accessibility, leadership, collaboration, and professionalism. Traits that help students to be successful include curiosity, motivation and diligence, questioning and sharing. ION believes they must also be good at written communications and pro-active with communication, be motivated and self-desciplined, and have critical thinking and decision-making skills. Instructors may use five different teaching styles: authority/lecture; demonstrator/coach; facilitator/activity; delegator/group; and hybrid/blended style. Although facilitator/activity style is noted to be the most effective for online learning, it seems that a… >>>

The True Colors system of categorinzing personalities assigns colors to describe four different personality types. Blue individuals tend to be friendly, cooperative, cause-oriented, and sensitive to the needs of others. Gold individuals are planners who like structure and are loyal, organized, and determined. Green individuals are competent, independent and visionary. Orange individuals are active, kinesthetic, and somewhat flamboyant. To me, it seems an oversimplification of human nature, which is very complex, and it seems it would be difficult to try to categorize the learners in an online course without seeing what they wear, how they speak, or how they behave,… >>>

There are several types of personality inventories and systems that categorize individuals according to anywhere from four to sixteen types based on their preferences, actions and communications. These can be used to anticipate preferences in the ways students behave and interact with other students. Understanding these personality types can help to design courses that allow for each of the different types to excel. Just as I consider learning styles in designing courses, I can now keep in mind the different personality types, attitudes and behaviors to ensure everyone has a chance to excel and contribute in the way they are… >>>

Critical thinking creates problem-solvers and teamwork promotes positive relationships with teammates, said to be critical to employment. Active online learning helps develop both of these attributes through cooperative and collaborative learning. This type of learning requires students to research answers on their own reflect on them and bring them back to the group for discussion and evaluation or the creation of a jig saw project. The flipped classroom also contributes greatly to critical thinking and reflection, allowing collaboration in the discussion of the findings in the following synchronous session or through discussion boards. Real world topics and situations may be… >>>

One of the most important components of active online learning is instructor attitude. Online instructors must come to online teaching with a positive attitude and be willing to put in the time and effort to develop two or three active learning activities. Student attitudes must also be managed by setting clear expectations, including the estimated amount of time needed to complete projects and how they will be graded on completion of those projects. Clear rubrics can address the challenges of grading activities such as role play and group discussion, and may be partially based on active participation and time on… >>>