online teaching tools

A Suite of OER Tools to Try in Your Courses

Two of the most important developments in education over the past 10 years are (1) the emergence of digital tools that allow faculty to assign students new and interesting learning activities and (2) the proliferation of open educational resources (OER) to broaden access to

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Digital Drawing Tools for Online Teaching

Digital drawing tools are a powerful yet underused resource for online educators. They are helpful in quantitative courses with equations, art and other classes that are heavy on visual analysis, and interactive sessions such as videoconferences.

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Google Earth icon on a smartphone screen

Using Google Earth in the Classroom

Google Earth is a powerful tool for linking curriculum to the real world. It can add a sense of place to historical events, and by creating customized maps, teachers and students can add pins to locations, providing additional information in the form of text, audio,

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Online Tools for Durable Learning

In our previous article, we explored retrieval practice, spaced practice, and metacognition as strategies that provide more durable learning experiences for students. In our work as learning designers in the Colleges of Earth and Mineral Sciences and Business at Penn State University, we incorporate all

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Entwined! A Tool Kit for Creating Branching Narratives

In 2019 we were tasked with building an online graduate-level survey design course. We wanted students to make decisions about survey design and experience the consequences of those decisions in a low-stakes, self-paced environment. The solution was Twine, a free, open-source game-development platform that allows

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Using Technology to Strengthen Preservice Skills in Education and Nursing

The University of West Alabama’s (UWA’s) education and nursing programs have hands-on field experiences during which instructors watch the students teach or work in a health-care environment and provide feedback on their work. When the programs went online, the institution faced the problem of providing

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Wooden cubes with the letters W E B I N A R placed between a pen, a laptop, and earbuds atop a wooden surface.

Best Practices for Using Webinars in Teaching

Webinars can be valuable additions to online courses because they lend a synchronous element to the class. They can also be valuable additions to face-to-face courses because some students are more comfortable interacting in a digital environment than they are having the attention of an

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Tools for adding animation to your course.

Simple Animation for Your Courses

Animation is an engaging format for delivering online content. We see it used in TED-Ed presentations, educational documentaries, and elsewhere. It is also much easier to make than many people think. Simple and free, or inexpensive, online systems allow anyone to make animated videos in

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