Kamehameha Schools Distance Learning (KSDL) Owau

Current and Evolving Accessibility Practices: Practical Advice from Two Institutions Presented by: Afsaneh Sharif & Donna Scalzo, Office of Learning Technology, University of British Columbia, John Louviere & Neal Legler, Faculty Assistance Center for Teaching, Utah State University Online learning environments hold great promise for expanding access to education for students with time and geographic challenges. Providing a supportive learning environment involves considering the needs of a wide range of learners and instructors, including those with physical and cognitive disabilities or technical limitations. The ability to do this can be somewhat challenged within the structure of a course management system such as Blackboard (WebCT) Vista, as full control of the web interface may not be possible. In response to student and faculty needs, educational developers from two institutions, the University of British Columbia and Utah State University have worked to determine how so...

Aloha kākou, I while back, I learned about this product from a presentation at the eSchool conference. The speaker was so excited about Scratch and was having so much fun demonstrating it that my mind began racing immediately. "I could use it in `Ike Hawai`i courses and I bet I could use it to develop tons of activities for the A`o Makua `ōlelo Hawai`i courses". Then, reality set in as I returned to work intending to try it out after I finished my "next" task. Well, you know how that goes. 7 months later, I finally took a stab at it out of necessity of course. I really wanted some type of activity to teach my students about different Kapu in old Hawai`i without having them just read a list of them. So, what it Sratch? Simply put, it's a developer's tool (a very inexpereinced developer like myself). It allows you to create activities and games using "coding" that is in a drag and drop format. The codes are pre-written & range from phrases like ...

Aloha Everyone, I was cleaning up my Inbox today and found and email from Adobe Connect, which led me directly to the Adobe Connect Exchange where you can download things to enhance Adobe Connect. I fooled around with the “Meeting Room Backgrounds” and “Quick Meeting” downloads. http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=productHome&exc=14&loc=en_us (I’ve also added it to my delicious site if you’d like to link up directly from my network list) For the meeting room background, it looks like you can upload content and customize your background to the way you want it. Most of the time, we use up most of the space for pods, so I’m not sure how useful this would be unless we show the pods after users log in. The quick meeting download was cool. I uploaded the file already as http://elearn.ksbe.edu/welcome, so if you folks want to integrate this with meeting rooms you’d like to direct users to, you just need to do the following. http://elearn.ksbe.edu/welcome?m= NAMEOFME...

Aloha all, Here's my o wau topic for this week. We all know the power of the Avatar and their popularity with our learners from our A`o Makua courses and I know we have discussed ways to incorporate them into our `Ike Hawai`i classes as well. Well, I can't take credit for finding this resource. Our resident Avatar expert a.k.a. Christy told me to check it out because Avatars can now chat. So please join me in finding out what other engaging and motivating feats these amazing characters can do to help us provide meaningful learning experiences for all our students. You can read about OddCast and their AvatarSpace or go to their Web site and test out some of these features. I'm hoping that this may provide us with a motivating way to get students, in both programs, to participate in some cooperative learning and sharing. Let me know what you think and if you feel this would be a valuable application to use. Mahalo - look forward to reading your responses! Kelly