As you look to build your own personal learning network, here’s a great collection of technology blogs specifically geared toward education that you might find of interest:

http://www.onlinedegrees.org/top-100-technology-blogs-for-teachers

~ Dr. J

Why should you consider blogging as an educator? Check out this article discussing the importance of teacher bloggers and offering blogging suggestions for teachers.

http://www.teachhub.com/importance-teacher-bloggers

Examples of visual design are everywhere around you! As a student in #ETT511, each week you will take a photo of at least 1 example of visual design that you come across in your everyday life. Post the photo to Instagram using hashtag #etraeyespy and include in the description why in your opinion the visual design you’ve photographed is either effective or not.

To receive full credit, a minimum of 1 photo each week with brief description should be posted to Instagram with hashtag #etraeyespy. Follow hashtag #etraeyespy to see the visual design examples your classmates “spy” and comment on the ones that you find most interesting.

In addition to the course videos being available on YouTube for #ETT511 this summer, I’ll plan to try also making audio-only versions of my weekly course videos available as a course podcast that you can subscribe to using any podcast app of your choice (options include Downcast, Instacast, Apple’s Podcast app, or others to and be able to then easily download & access all future course podcast episodes directly from your smart phone or tablet.

The course podcast will contain audio-only versions of all course videos (so, you can choose to either view the videos or listen to the audio in podcast form). You don’t need to watch both, unless you would like to hear the same message twice 🙂

Here’s the podcast URL you can use to subscribe to our course podcast in your podcast app of choice:

http://justcast.herokuapp.com/shows/371/audioposts.rss

I’ll be curious to hear at the end of the course whether you preferred the audio or video option for my communications in the course.

As previously shared, I plan to incorporate a number of communication media options for students in ETT 511: Advanced Instructional Media Design. After the very popular implementation of video from my last online course, which I recently presented at the Sloan Consortium International Symposium on Emerging Technologies for Online Learning, I plan to incorporate video once again in my online course this summer, using YouTube’s built-in recording and captioning capabilities. While these videos will be embedded within the Blackboard course for my students, I’ve also setup an unlisted YouTube playlist that my students can subscribe to in order to easily access and view on their smart phones and/or tablets.

The beauty about a YouTube playlist is that the video with playlist can be easily embedded within any LMS or other web-based tool. Here’s an example of the video with playlist embedded:

Here’s an example of an alternative embedding option, just a single video without the playlist:

I plan to also experiment with audio versions of the videos, distributed as a podcast. More details to come in a future post about the workflow and process I’m exploring.