Online Learning Made Easy for all Ages

Imagine what the everyday math, social studies, or science teacher goes through each day as they try to teach a group of students about a certain skill or concept.

Now, jump into a students shoes as they watch, participate, and attempt to learn from what they are seeing and hearing. What happens when, as a student, you don’t fully grasp the skill, but watch the teacher erase what was on the board. Now you are totally lost. You could raise your hand, but you don’t want to look foolish. What should you do next?

This scenario is always a possibility for any group of students. So what can a teacher do to change these dynamics? They could stop and ask if there are any questions, but the shy student isn’t going to ask. In fact, most of the students won’t step out of their comfort zone to ask. At this point you’re asking, what can I do.

Watch this video for your answer.




Now, having seen this video, how could this website change the way you do things in class. When it comes to math, this isn’t just for high school, but for every grade. The students can watch the tutorial, stop it at any point, take it back and re-watch a section. That’s not possible to do with a live teacher. You can’t rewind them, or pause them so that you can think about what is going on. The tutorials are always available online at anytime, where a teacher isn’t. It takes away the fear, as a student, of stepping out of your comfort zone. You can feel very safe in this learning environment.

On the teacher side of things, this is a great support tool. It frees you to work with the students that are struggling while the other students can move on once they’ve proven mastery. Check the Khanacademy website out and try some of the tutorials. Also, take a look at the self paced lessons. There’s also an app. for the iTouch, iPhone, and iPad that’s free for downloading called KhanAcademy. Then, plan how you could use this site and tools for your students benefit. For myself, I’ve embedded a number of these tutorials in my Moodle site for my students to use. I’m in the process of designing lessons based upon using these tutorials, so that I will be freed up to work with the students that struggle with math no matter what you do.

Educational Networking

I’ve talked about this before, but let’s look at it again. Is your network working? Have you expanded to a point that you are learning and sharing with others what you learn on a day-to-day basis?

For those I’ve already lost, let’s back up and look at what personal networking is all about. Networking comes from connecting and following others on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and many others. I have two Facebook accounts that I’ve set up. One is for personal and the other is professional. The personal one is used for connecting to friends and family and seeing what they are doing in their lives. What I want to focus on is my professional Facebook page.

It is here that I connect to those that are in my profession as an educator and instructional technologist. On this account I can post many videos and blogs that I find on the Internet dealing with my profession. Likewise, my friends are doing the same things. From this, there is always so much to learn when you have many eyes scouring the Internet for news about educational change and what’s going on. Sure, I still find out what is going on in their lives, and that’s great, but it also helps me grow as a professional from the many things they post about our profession.

Also, as individualized learning keeps growing, we need to teach our students how to build their own learning network. We need to show them that learning can be fun by connecting to things that are of interest to them. The Internet opens the world to everyone.

Watch this short YouTube video on this subject.




I hope this challenges you to get more connected as a professional. You’ll be glad you did.

What Making Your Own Tutorials Can Do for You

We live in a world that revolves around the Internet and the use of computers. With today’s multi-media explosion, and our brains being rewired so that we are far more visually oriented, are there tools available for demonstrations on the computer?

Two tools that have been made for just such a need are Camtasia Studio for the PC and Screen Flow for the Mac. Camtasia Studio recently created a Mac version, but it’s not at all equal to its PC counterpart.

Within these tools you can record anything on the computer screen. You can record or not record the computer audio. Also, while recording the computer desktop you can record yourself by using the camera on your computer. One requirement is to have a headphone with microphone so that you can give the background audio to what you are demonstrating on the desktop.

Once recorded, you can work with the recording screen by changing the size of the screen to get a close-up and then going back to normal size over and over. You can clip parts of the audio or video. You can set your mouse with different effects to emphasis something on the screen. Check out the video below to see what is possible.



In conclusion, I have found many uses for this application. It’s a great training and teaching tool. As an educator, it frees you up to work with students because once posted online, students can view it over and over and don’t need to bother you on the little things.