Top 50 Free Education Apps
What could make you more….h”app”y than 50 more free apps!? From NASA to Greek Mythology, there is bound to be something you find interesting.

The Failure of American Higher Education
More and more college grads don’t have basic skills they need for the working world. Is this because of the failure of the higher education system? Are schools more focused on teaching content rather than vital skills their students need? An interesting read on where higher ed institutions have gone wrong.

Is college still worth the investment?
Spoiler: the answer given to this question in this article is “an unequivocal ‘yes’”. But why? In the end, the author claims that the price a student pays for his or her education is worth it when they look at the big picture (which might include better job opportunities now and in the future and a higher income).

I Failed High School Chemistry
Just because a student doesn’t ace a class doesn’t mean she didn’t learn something from it. One of our favorite bloggers, Bill Genereux, talks about a failed Chem class and what he learned from the experience.

So, while we might not be sharing the link love as regularly, we’d still like to tell you about some articles we found interesting in case you haven’t already checked them out. Here are some we stumbled upon recently!

Nation has high college remedial education rate
Students taking high school level classes at college? Something seems amiss…

Podcasts: enhancing or replacing normal lectures?
How are podcasts affecting classrooms? Are they adding to or taking away? Will they quickly become a thing of the past or will they transform the classrooms of the future?

Finished College. Now What?
The goal of graduating with a degree should be more than just finding a job. The awesome people at Wake Forest believe in helping their students find a path that is meaningful and fulfilling post graduation!

What is the Future of Teaching?
Are online learning environments more powerful than the traditional classroom? Do students that learn online outperform those who are taught in face-to-face situations? An interesting article that sheds some light on using online tools in education and what the future might hold for instructors and students everywhere.

High-Tech Cheating Abounds, and Professors Bear Some Blame
Is technology not only helping students to cheat, but blurring the lines of what defines cheating? And how much influence do professors have – positive or negative?

And while you really might not care at all about what you’re teaching (though it would indeed be sad if that were the case), you should care whether or not your students care. Because when students don’t care, they don’t try as hard – or at all – to do well in your course, are more likely to cheat, and in the end, learn very little. All things you should not want for your students!

How can you show that you care? And we don’t mean the ushy-mushy caring. We mean the type of caring that shows you love (or at least, like) what you teach and that you want your students to learn something and succeed in your class. It’s amazing what a little caring can do!

So you want to show that you care but how do you do it?! Here are some ways to get you started.

1. Stress the fact that you want your students to actually learn something. Let it be known that you’re not there just trying to get to get positive feedback and high marks on your end-of-semester evaluations. You’re there to TEACH and to help your pupils LEARN! If nothing else, at least your students will know that you care and want to be there.

2. Hold your ground when it comes to cheating. Regardless of your school’s academic honesty policy, take cheating in your classroom seriously. Cheating doesn’t do any good for anyone, and when you turn a blind eye to it, it further goes to show that you really don’t care if your student learn.

3. Make time to help your students. Do you remember that one professor way back when that never seemed to have the time of day for you? Don’t be like him (or her). Spend a little time outside lecture to be a resource for your students, to answer their questions or help guide them in the right direction. If you know a student is starting to slip up, go the extra mile and pull the student aside and see what’s up. Ask what the student needs to regain his or her footing.

4. Give good feedback. Do you remember that other time, way back when, when you got a paper back with a big fat “C+” written at the top and no other explanation as to WHY you received that grade? How frustrating!! Then, when you marched up to your professor and asked for explanation, the only response you received was “It wasn’t quite sufficient”. How was that supposed to help you improve the next time around? By providing feedback of substance to your students, not only will you prove that you actually took time to look at the assignment and put some thought into your grading, you’ll actually help your students as they work on following assignments.

5. Consider your students’ schedules. While YOU may think your course should take precedence over all the other classes your students are taking, they don’t exactly see it that way. Most of them want to get decent or good grades in all of their courses and will, believe it or not, have to spend some time on them. So, even if you want to assign a lot of reading or homework, don’t purposefully overload your already overloaded students. They will love you for it.

{photo source}

Why did you decide to use SAGrader in your class?
There were basically two reasons. Firstly, I wanted to educate myself by exploring new technology. I always want to have a sense of what the latest teaching tools are, how well they work, and how they can help me to teach better. Secondly, I wanted to know what I could do to adapt to the changing demands of higher institutions, for instance, with colleges offering online courses, and larger class enrollments. I saw in SAGrader an opportunity to address both these reasons.

How has your class improved since you started using SAGrader?
I strongly believe my class has improved in a few ways. Being able to keep a big class of students writing throughout a course is invaluable, something that typically would not be possible with an instructor and two TAs for a big class of 290 students like I’m teaching now. Students benefit from having to understand and apply concepts instead of just hearing about them in lecture. I believe students are more motivated to grasp concepts and theories because instead of being just passive “consumers” of knowledge, they know that through SAGrader they have to engage these concepts as “producers” of knowledge. They are forced to be “hands on” with the concepts and theories, and do things with them by formulating arguments they have to back up and provide evidence for.

What are your favorite tools or features of the program?
I think one of my favorite features of SAGrader is the instant scoring and feedback function. It motivates students since they know their grade is essentially in their hands: they can work on assignments as early as they like, so that they have enough time to resubmit and improve their grades. I also appreciate being able to track which students are not doing well, or who are consistently late submitting assignments. It has given me the opportunity to contact those students, express concern about their performance, and in a few cases to eventually help them get back on track with their grades.

Haven’t heard of Udemy yet? Let me introduce you. To put it in simple terms, Udemy is a place for learning for people who love to teach and who love to learn! It’s online and anyone can use it. For more detail, let’s turn to what Udemy has to say about itself:

“Udemy’s goal is to enable anyone to teach and learn online. In less than 5 minutes, you can create your own online course on Udemy. You can upload presentations, videos, host live classroom sessions and write blog posts. It’s fast, easy and free.

By making it easy to teach online, Udemy also brings together the best teachers on the internet in an effort to educate the world. That means if you want to learn Multivariable Calculus, you can. If you want to learn Photoshop, you can. If you want to learn more about the metaphor for good and evil as presented by the dark and light colors in Star Wars, you can on Udemy.”

Wanting to learn more, I contacted Gagan who was kind enough to answer a few questions for me. Check them out below and I hope you’ll enjoy!

Can you tell me a little more about why you created Udemy? I see on your website that you wanted to solve a problem – that teachers are often constrained by location – but was this an issue that you or Oktay faced personally? (At SAGrader, we’re all about time-shifted collaboration, so the “space-shiftability” (ha!) of Udemy really sparked my interest.)

Ultimately, we created Udemy because we saw a need. We’ve noticed there are thousands of people out there trying to teach over the internet, but they lack the technological capabilities to do it effectively. We didn’t necessarily face the problem on the teacher’s side personally, but we did on the student’s side. Oktay loves learning guitar and I personally watch entrepreneurship videos all the time, but the format and discoverability is very difficult. We created Udemy to solve that problem.

Would you say a majority of users are professors? Was that your goal? And do they take advantage of the “live” aspects of the site?

About half of our users are educators of some sort. They may teach subjects such as How to Paint on Silk or be experts in Innovation Training. We also see some High School and Elementary school teachers leveraging Udemy to augment the in-classroom experience. Over time, we expect more and more people to use the live tool, but currently the most active features are uploading video and PowerPoint content.

And, building off the last question, do you know if professors that use Udemy use it for their actual classes (for their current students to view) or do you think they use it simply because they are passionate about teaching and learning and wish to share what they know?

Currently, you can’t make money or make your courses private on Udemy. As such, the only reason anyone uses the site is because of their inherent passion for teaching and sharing information with the world! It’s great to see how many people are interested in doing that, but we definitely expect usage to increase when we enable paying for courses and making courses private.

I also read that Udemy can easily connect with Facebook and Twitter. Do you find your academic users using these tools and if so, in what ways are they using them?

The social tools are definitely in use! Almost every day, we see a few tweets or Facebook posts about Udemy courses. The Facebook “like” button has been particularly powerful for us, because it is really easy to like a course.

What will we be seeing for Udemy in the future?

The two big things are privacy and payment options. Many educators are interested in charging for their courses on Udemy so they can make some extra income. Others want to leverage Udemy to host private courses for select students. Both are highly requested features and we’ll roll them out soon!

Thanks so much for taking the time to answer our questions, Gagan!

To learn more about the gentlemen that started and run Udemy (Gagan, Oktay Caglar and Eren Bali), click on over to Udemy’s about page. Or, jump right in and start browsing courses.

As the author states, the tips in the article “will help you know just how to get started using Twitter in academia, teach you etiquette, offer strategies and benefits, provide suggestions for specific ways to use Twitter, list tools to use with Twitter, and more.” It includes sections on getting started with Twitter, Twitter Etiquette, Strategies, Ideas for Instructors, Benefits for Students, Tips for the Class, Twitter Tools, and Assignments Using Twitter. There is even a great list of resources to help you get started with finding people to follow.

Check out the full article here!

Going green is something a lot of people are doing these days in their personal and professional lives. As a professor, what are you doing to be more eco-friendly or environmentally conscious? Here are some ideas to help you leave a smaller footprint while you’re making your mark as an educator.

Go Digital. Instead of passing out papers every class period, post course materials on your content management site and allow students to print what they feel necessary or bring their computers to class to take notes. Not only will this help keep everyone organized, it will reduce the amount of paper used overall by you and your students.

Let your students stay home. If you plan on lecturing for 15 minutes or don’t have any real content to share with your students on lecture day, don’t make them come to campus. Instead of making your students drive to campus only to be there for a total of twenty minutes, try recording your would-be lecture and posting it online. Let your students know they need to listen to it before they come to class next time.

Reuse textbooks. It takes a lot of energy to create new things like books. Save the trees, the planet, electricity, and your students’ pocketbooks and use the same text book(s) in your classroom so the books can be used over again. If you’re feeling really generous, don’t even use a textbook at all! Use an ebook that is much cheaper and didn’t take a factory to produce.

According to Green Press Initiative, every year around 30 million trees are used to make books that are sold in the US (which is 1,153 times the number of trees in New York City’s Central Park)! The same source states that the book and newspaper industry emit nearly 125 million tons of CO2 annually, which is equivalent to over 7.2 million cars. On top of that, the industry has contributed to endangering forests and impacting the climate and communities around the world.

Pick green publishers. When you have to use new books, go with a publisher that has pledged to be green. Many publishers are doing what they can to make more environmentally conscious decisions about their book production. If you have the ability, pick a book made by a company that is doing whatever they can to shrink their footprint on the planet.

Have your lecture outside. It might sound a bit silly, but why not enjoy some beautiful weather? If you have a smaller class, take everyone outside and find a good spot to sit and have class. Why sit in a dim room when you can soak up some sun and save some energy?

Encourage recycling. Many campuses have their own recycling programs. Be sure to take part in yours by placing recycle bins (most likely for paper and plastic bottles) in a visible spot in your classroom and making sure students are aware of them. Then, make yourself use them! If your campus doesn’t have a program and it’s something you’d like to see, take the initiative and start one yourself. There are tons of great resources out there to help you get started. Check out this great article on how to start up a recycling program on a college campus – Green Campus: College and University Waste Reduction.

Use SAGrader! Okay, so maybe we’re a little biased, but SAGrader really is a green tool. Think of it this way: instead of making your students print out draft after draft for their essays and papers, which you will use pen after pen to grade, have them submit their papers electronically, receive personalized feedback instantly they can use to revise their work. Then you can view their work and progress all without printing a single paper or wasting your favorite pen!

What ways are you keeping your college classroom and campus green?

And while we still believe in all of this, we wanted to make SAGrader even more robust by adding metrics. The first three metrics in the lineup are Spellcheck, Grammar, and Fluff. Let’s take a look at what these mean.

Spellcheck – This one is pretty obvious. SAGrader will pick up on spelling errors made my students and list out each of the misspelled words. Students have the ability to go back in their submissions, correct their mistakes, and resubmit.

Grammar – Though they may want to, students doesn’t always use proper grammar. SAGrader can nudge them in the right direction by pointing out grammatical errors and areas that need more work. Again, SAGrader will use examples from student submissions to show them where and how they messed up, along with suggestions for improvement.

Fluff – Every once in a while, students will add some “fluff” to their writing to either add length or make it seem like they know what they’re talking about when they don’t. Fluff is essentially anything in a submission that doesn’t add value to the response – things like wordy phrases and unnecessary sentences or paragraphs.

Below, take a look at some example feedback for the new SAGrader metrics.

Check out the summary below or click here to visit the source and to read the original article.

1. The assessment of student learning begins with educational value. Assessment is a vehicle for educational improvement. Educational values should drive not only what educators chose to assess but how they do it.

2. Assessment is most effective when it reflects an understanding of learning as multidimensional, integrated, and revealed in performance over time. Learning is a complex process that entails knowledge, abilities, values, attitudes, and habit of the mind – each something that affects both academic success and performance beyond the classroom. Assessment should take each of these things into consideration by employing diverse methods.

3. Assessment works best when the programs it seeks to improve have clear, explicitly stated purposes. Assessment is a goal oriented process and entails comparing educational performance with educational purposes and expectations.

4. Assessment requires attention to outcomes but also and equally to the experiences that lead to those outcomes. Looking at where students “end up” is only part of the puzzle. To improve outcomes, educators must look at what students experienced along the way.

5. Assessment works best when it is ongoing not episodic. Although one-time assessment instances can be better than none, assessment is most powerful when it entails a linked series of activities over time.

6. Assessment fosters wider improvement when representatives from across the educational community are involved. Student learning is a campus-wide responsibility, and assessment is a good way of enacting that responsibility. While any assessment effort may start small, the aim should be to involve people from across the educational community over time.

7. Assessment makes a difference when it begins with issues of use and illuminates questions that people really care about. To be the most useful, assessment must be connected to issues or questions that people really care about. The point of assessment isn’t to gather data and return “results”, but rather a process that starts with the questions of decision makers, involves them gathering and interpreting data, and informs and helps guide them to make continuous improvements.

8. Assessment is most likely to lead to improvement when it is part of a larger set of conditions that promote change. Assessment alone changes little. Its greatest contribution comes on campuses where the quality of teaching and learning is valued and worked at. Such campuses push to improve educational performance and the quality of education.

9. Through assessment, educators meet responsibilities to students and to the public. There is a certain responsibility of educators to public stakeholders. The responsibility goes beyond reporting information. Rather, educators are obliged, on behalf of themselves, their students, and society to improve. And, those who are accountable to these educators are obligated to support their attempts at improvement.

The way we learn and soak up information is always changing, along with the technology we use to access that information. Innovations in education (and in this case, those with an added entertainment factor) are always hot topics. In the past we’ve mentioned textbook alternatives, and today we introduce a new approach altogether.

In this post, I’m excited to share some Q&A with Bradley Inman, the CEO and founder of Vook, a “new innovation in reading that blends a well-written book, high-quality video and the power of the Internet into a single, complete story”. Here Inman tells us about the story behind Vook, the future he sees for the company in general and its products in higher education, and shares a bit of advice for innovators in any field. Enjoy!

What is the story behind Vook? Tell us about the people behind the idea and how you turned the idea into a reality.
I founded Vook in 2008 after seeing the value proposition of enhancing the reading experience beyond text. Previously, I founded TurnHere, an online video company that produces high quality content for publishers and other businesses, and this experience helped show me the great opportunities that existed with online video and its ability to enhance the reading experience with multi-media. Combining book + video led to the name Vook, and in 2009 we launched our first vooks in collaboration with Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette and others. In 2010, we’re focused on developing relationships with publishers, agencies and authors of all kinds and continuing to release new vooks in a variety of genres throughout the year.

I noticed only a few available vooks. What’s in the lineup to be released soon?
We are growing very quickly and plan to release over 500 titles in 2010. We recently developed a publishing technology tool called MotherVook, which will allow us to streamline the creation of an individual vook. The MotherVook technology will make it very easy, fast and cost-effective to integrate the author’s text with professional video and other multi-media elements in the creation of each vook and will ultimately allow Vook to publish hundreds of titles each week.

We recently announced a new series of vooks devoted entirely to children’s titles, including “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” “The Frog Prince: Stories from Around the World,” “Jack and the Beanstalk” and two volumes of “Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” which consist of ten of the most well-known stories such as “Rapunzel,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Snow White,” “Red Riding Hood” and “Rumpelstiltskin.” This library builds on a growing, diverse group of genres and subjects Vook has produced, including vooks from bestselling writers Anne Rice and Seth Godin.

Do you see a future for Vook in the world of education, specifically higher education? If so, where do you see it going?
There’s certainly a strong future for Vook in the realm of higher education, and it’s an area we are very interested in. With Vook, students will be able to engage with their textbooks and class materials on a much more in-depth level than ever before. As opposed to a traditional e-book, which only offers text, Vook is a multi-media ebook, which adds another dimension to reading by blending text, video, images, links, social media and animation into one medium. This allows readers to have a much more immersive experience, bringing characters to life, and showing step-by-step instructions in a how-to video. Vooks also incorporate social networking, so students can take part in discussions with their classmates, teachers and professors.

For example, you can imagine a medical student’s textbook that seamlessly incorporates videos and animation of a complex procedure alongside its description in the text, or a history book that links to websites with additional historical context. The possibilities for vooks in higher education are endless.

Do you think vooks will eventually beat out traditional books and the more modern ebooks?
We currently see vooks complimenting traditional books. In many situations, a reader will turn to a Vook because they are interested in going beyond the text and immersing themselves in the story with a multi-media experience. Also, vooks are a matter of convenience, allowing readers to access vook content anywhere they have an internet connection or a mobile phone signal.

While the publishing platform is fundamentally changing to include a new era of multimedia books, I don’t see this as necessarily replacing traditional books. Ultimately, it’s about offering consumers more choices, to let them decide what they prefer.

What advice do you have for today’s innovator, in any field (education, technology, business, etc.)?
My advice would be to always be looking ahead to see what’s coming. You might not be the one creating the iPad, but you can create an application that’s timed to take advantage of its capabilities. To an innovator in any field, I would challenge them to imagine and then create the future.

Visit Vook.com to learn more about the company and their current vook offerings. Follow on twitter – @vooktv