New Resources for the Advanced Internet Class

While I will be teaching 3 online courses in the spring, I am still working on the Advanced Internet course design.  I have designed all of the assessments and am now working on finding appropriate readings and other resources that my distance students can access.  I am sometimes surprised at the number of resources that are available.  While not all are of good quality, I have discovered two recently that I find very good.

Usually, most of the readings that I assign my students are from the university library online article databases and open-access online journals (many are now peer reviewed).  While searching for resources, I made the discovery of a Creative Commons university publisher in Canada at Athabasca University.  The books are freely available in eformat and you can download them at no cost.  The books are peer reviewed which helps provide standards for the material found in them.  I will have my students read a couple of the chapters from:  The Theory and Practice of Online Learning, edited by Terry Anderson and Fathi Elloumi.  The book is found at: http://cde.athabascau.ca/online_book/.  Athabasca Univeristy has books in a variety of fields that are made freely available.

Another resource I particularly liked was The Rapid E-Learning Blog at: http://www.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/.  This blog has some wonderful enties and interesting discussions.  I plan to go through it carefully and point my students to some of the entries that will be useful to them in the course. 

These are not the only online resources I found or will be using, just the most recent.

Playing with Comics Online

I have been working on the design and activities for an online class, Advanced Internet Uses in Education.  While I have used internet resources in several other classes, this is the first time I am teaching this class.  The web has a great number of resources that can be used for both formal and informal learning.  The challenge is to narrow things down but let students in the class have some options.

Students in the class will be required to complete some main assignments but will be able to choose some of the assignments.  Since I wanted to have a variety of activities for them to choose from, I needed to look at different tools that were available.  Students will need to have an instructional focus for all activities but that doesn't mean there can't be a bit of fun, too.  So, in the class I have included the opportunity to create comic strips, animations, and so forth.

I hadn't used comic strips for instruction (although I have used a variety of animations).  I decided to try to develop one using the freely available Stripgenerator at http://stripgenerator.com/ .  It was actually fun and easy to do.  I hope to make some additional ones in the future that have a tighter instructional focus, rather than just joking about "homework excuses".  Here's what I developed:

The Newest Homework Excuse by drksg

The site provides the code to embed the cartoon in a website, which is what I used here.  While my mother-in-law went into hysterical laughter about this, my husband just lifted his eyebrows at me. 

If you decide to try the Stripgenerator, please let me know how you liked it.  If you create a "teaching" related or instructional comic strip, please share it with me here.