Best collection of e-Learning articles, e-Learning concepts, e-Learning software, & resources.

This semester, for a variety of reasons, I’m having the opportunity to teach two classes of introductory 5th grade Spanish in addition to our 5th and 6th grade Media Literacy classes . 5th graders at our school take a semester of Spanish and a semester of French, and based on those experiences decide which language to continue studying in 6th, 7th and 8th grade, and possibly beyond. I’ve been facilitating a variety of projects with my students this semester, and our last one has been a “Spanish Dream House Tour.” “ Example Dream House in FloorPlanner.com ” ( CC BY 2.0 ) by  Wesley Fryer Rather than design a physical house on a posterboard or shoebox diorama, we’ve used free “basic” accounts on FloorPlanner.com . Students are able to login using their school-provided Google accounts. To build our Spanish vocabulary of household objects, I initially shared a “movie talk” with students using a clip from “Incredibles 2,” and we built a vocab list together of about 30 wor...

This past summer as we prepared for the challenges and uncertainies of the COVID-19 dominated 2020-21 academic school year, our head of school asked me to work on an educational technology challenge. How could our teachers best share face-to-face / in-person lesson recordings with students who either chose or were required to learn at home because of COVID-19? I almost wrote my dissertation on “lecturecasting,” and in the past I’ve experimented with quite a few tools and workflows for capturing and sharing class lectures with students either as audio recordings / podcasts or videos. I ended up deciding to call the procedures and “workflows” I developed for our faculty “lesson casts,” because while high school and middle school teachers may be comfortable with the term “lecture cast” for capturing in-class lessons, I didn’t think that vocabulary would resonate as well with our elementary and PreK/K teachers. All the resources relating to lesson casts which I developed are available on...

Conspiracy theories are far more than an amusement today. The Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania this week released a study finding that a “Belief in Conspiracy Theories Is a Barrier to Controlling Spread of COVID-19.” Folks who profess beliefs in different outlier conspiracy theories today are more likely to reject mask wearing to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and are more likely to refuse to take a vaccine once one (or more) are released to the general public. Media Matters for America continues to update their article, “Here are the QAnon supporters running for Congress in 2020,” and their count as of this post on September 23rd is up to “81 current or former congressional candidates.” When you consider the heart of the QAnon conspiracy is that “a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles running a global child sex-trafficking ring is plotting against President Donald Trump,” and these 81 candidates for the highest legislative body in our nation appear ...

The rapid improvement of artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning algorithms and systems is one of the most important technological trends to study, discuss, and understand today in 2020. In addition to the adult Sunday School class I’m teaching this year , which is using a book on artificial intelligence as a guiding text ( “2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity” by John C. Lennox @profjohnlennox ), I’m talking to my 5th and 6th grade Media Literacy students about AI and the growing conflicts the United States and China are having over AI technologies as well as other issues. Today as our “Wonder Link” for my 5th grade Computer classes, we discussed a recent new video by Newsy highlighting the latest update in the TikTok controversy making headlines. A large number of my students, even though they are not 13 yet, have and use TikTok accounts. The possibility that TikTok could be shut down has their attention, but none of them have professed an understandi...

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a relatively inexpensive and straightforward way to block all the advertisements in YouTube and other apps on the AppleTV? (Besides paying a monthly subscription for YouTube Premium ?!) Wouldn’t it be great if this same method provided advertisement and malware blocking for ALL Internet-connected devices on your home network? The open source software program Pi Hole , which can run in several configurations including on a less than $100 Raspberry Pi computer, offers up these tantalizing promises. Alas, however, my weekend geeky forays into this solution have been underwhelming, although still informative and not without hope. In this post, I’ll share a few of my lessons learned. My friend and ADE brother Larry Anderson shared a post on Facebook about a week ago touting the benefits of Pi Hole running on Raspberry Pi , and I was intrigued enough to do a little research and order my own hardware late last week. Our son helped me put together this list ...

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the second edition of the MSON Summer 2020 Annual Conference , held virtually via Zoom. MSON is the “Malone Schools Online Network” ( @MaloneSchools ), and for the first time this year (I’m guessing because of COVID-19) their annual conference was open to educators everywhere. Our school (where my wife and I both teach, and our youngest daughter attends), Casady School , is the only school in Oklahoma currently part of the MSON network . Through MSON, some of our high school students each year have opportunities to take a variety of advanced courses offered via a mixed modality of live videoconferencing and asynchronous / online activities. MSON teachers and the MSON community are very knowledgeable about a wide variety of best practices for distance learning / remote learning, so I was confident this would be an exceptional professional learning event. It definitely was, and in this post I’ll share a few key highlights and takeaways. I share...