Kamehameha Schools Distance Learning (KSDL) Owau

7/20 and 7/27/09 There are a lot of reasons we want to rethink how we present content, engage students, and assess their outcomes. Many students, and especially students with learning and physical disabilities have trouble hearing, processing, and assimilating content at the same time. Persons with disabilities, while appreciating accommodations, don’t like being pointed out as different, or being given a different experience than the “regular” students. So Universal Design in Instruction, UDI, is aimed at considering the broadest range of learners from the beginning. Everyone can benefit. Part I Adam Tanners 7/13/09 Adam covered common adaptations for persons with a variety of disabilities - vision, hearing learning disabilities. Here are some of his tips: label graphics, describe videos and provide control buttons, use selectable text etc.. He recommends a script that becomes the notes to attach to the PPT and your captions. It keeps you organized too, this population becomes confu...

Social networking tools are becoming used by higher education as a learning tool for students to collaborate. Today, I was able to attend a presentation by Ruben Zamora and Christopher Jazinski. They spoke of many ways to utilize social networking tool as a means to enrich student experience. One example they gave was a synchronous session that was occurring on Adobe Connect. They utilized the Twitter follower base to find anyone interested in participating as experts on the subject matter. The Tweet simply said “Those of you interested in participating as experts in _____, please go to “url for Adobe Connect” at 6pm Eastern time, They had hoped to receive five people who volunteered for this roundtable discussion, but actually received ten who responded. These people that responded were known experts in their fields. The conversations that generated between students and the experts were rich and engaging. The presenters were amazed at the response that this partic...

The last day ended with Lester Holt, co-anchor of TODAY Weekend Edition and Anchor of NBC nightly News, Weekend Edition. A very recent partnership with Blackboard and NBC Learn (the educational arm of NBC). This partnership will offer colleges, universities, and K-12 schools the ability to enhance instruction with their incredible repository of digital news and supplemental content developed for educational use. The partnership will enable instructors and students to access audio, video and other news content within their e-learning platform to strengthen the learning experience. For more information about NBC Learn click on the link. News archives will be available from Franklin D. Roosevelt's election in 1932 to present day. Examples of footage that will always be important parts of our history include Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The video resources will span across various subject matter and include original audio, video, a...

Aloha mai käkou, I was reading through the staff profiles we prepared for Terry as I was brainstorming on the best O wau topic to post. I liked reading what everyone stated was their "committment." I think it was inspiring to see everyone put down in writing what each of us are committed to in our work. I know one of the goals of our O wau sessions is to keep on the cutting edge of emerging technology and online teaching and learning innovations/strategies, but what stood out to me, in all of our committments, was our committment to create, teach, and spread cultural learning opportunitites for Hawaiian students of all ages. Which led me to think about doing some O wau postings focusing on cultural topics; not necessarily teaching or sharing something new but providing us with the opportunity to think about and reflect on cultural content that we already use with our learners that can help us increase our own cultural awareness. Then I thought about Dorothy's blog pos...

Today was the first day of Blackboard World 2009. Terry and I got to see Seth Godin, a best-selling author, entrepreneur, and agent of change. His whole presentation was based upon his book on "Tribes: We Need you to Lead Us." It was an interesting concept on marketing. He said people like belonging to a group or having a sense of belonging. He said the best way to market a product is to be a leader in the product. It made me think of A`o Makua and the particpants/ambassadors that have taken the courses time and time again. They like that sense of belonging to this unique group and enjoy all things common to the group. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/ It was nice to see a new take on marketing products. The take home message was obviously be the catalyst for change in leading your institution into the 21st century. One of the products that had many presentations during this conference was called "Soft Chalk" http://www.softchalk.com/ . Soft Chalk is an au...

Anywhere access, online meetings, PDF creation, file sharing and document collaboration. Target Audience - people who need to work on docs and presentations collaboratively Bringing people to documents, not sending attachments to inboxes Working together in real time labs.acrobat.com presentation tool, create presentations online, simultaneous editing. Coming soon - import and export PPT files. Does not have audio recording features - will not replace Adobe Presenter at this time. No LMS integration at this time Buzzword - online word processor, levels of access, commenting features, step through changes on a timeline Mobile client coming in the Fall Acrobat.com Other docs that you can't create in labs. Upload docs (e.g. PDF), create a URL that's secure or open Embed interactive docs on Web page Comparison to Google Docs - similar in some ways, Adobe says it Google loses some fidelity because it uses Ajax. I also think it has some similar features to Google Wave - working c...