Innovative-Live Portal -The Innovative-Live Portal is an excellent resource for developing or expanding ideas on what works in education. It also provides welcoming ground for experimenting and finding out what other experimenters are doing. I reviewed a couple of this month's articles, as follow, in the Innovative Journal section. Both sites are free, but you must sign up.

http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=433&action=article - Game-Based Learning: A Different Perspective, by Karl Royle: "Because the goals of games and the object of school-based learning are fundamentally mismatched, efforts to integrate games into the curriculum have largely fallen flat despite the best intentions of teachers and the gaming industry." This article offers very helpful suggestions as to why gaming may not be used more, how it should be used, and what to avoid in selecting games for instructional purposes.

http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=495&action=article - Moving from Theory to Real-World Experiences in an e-Learning Community, Ana-Paula Correia - The first paragraph might invite you to read further. "Many programs in higher education are focused more on the transmission and replication of knowledge than on providing opportunities for learning in real-world contexts and "[testing] in action what [students] have learned” (Kolb and Kolb 2005, 208). Similarly, many online courses deliver enormous amounts of information instead of offering pedagogies and processes that might allow for the development of transferable and professional skills (McLoughlin and Luca 2002). This pedagogical tendency to privilege information transmission over experience is a problem because employers expect colleges and universities [and adult ed programs!] to produce workers capable of leveraging information and communication technologies and instructional techniques to perform highly demanding tasks at work. Accordingly, classes need to offer experiential learning opportunities—activities that go beyond case analyses and technical training to provide real-world experiences." 

Learning Times - I love this site and its free resources for teachers. Learning Times is an open community for education-minded people. Members have free access to a wide range of opportunities to interact and to network with peers from across the globe -- live online, asynchronously and face-to-face.

Sound Recording: Creating a CD Portfolio for Documenting Student Progress, by Susan Manning, Ed.D. - "Documenting student progress in a speech class can be a challenge, regardless of whether the speaker is using a native language or a new target language. Using digital video and audio recordings along with supporting documents, the progress of student speech in an English as a Second Language class was catalogued and preserved on CD portfolios. By the end of the semester, each student had a CD that showcased progress in organization, delivery, pronunciation and grammar. The CD also contained reflective elements in which the student commented on his own progress in language acquisition and delivery. This strategy of documenting student performance is applicable to many settings and courses."

Sounds Recording: "Learning by Doing" with Clark Aldrich, by Paul Stacey and C Host Paul Stacey conducts a webcast dialogue with Clark Aldrich featuring an exploration of games and simulations from Clark’s latest book “Learning by Doing”. Find out how to select, research, build, sell, deploy, and measure the right type of educational simulation for the right situation. From simple approaches that use basic or no technology through projects on the scale of computer games and flight simulators. Clark’s insights will be of interest to all learning professionals. Clark Aldrich

Wufoo - Wuf what? This is a great little site for instantly creating and publishing forms. If you signed up for next month's DE Retreat, you will have used the site. The free version allows you to post up to three forms at a time, with a nice selection of fields and text input. The paid version is not that expensive, however. Have your students sign up for a free account and create surveys for other students to take. From there, they can gather responses, create graphs, develop % and other math skills, reading skills, organizational skills, on and on. Imagination is the only limit these days. Enjoy at http://wufoo.com/ .

Google Apps Education Edition

http://www.google.com/apps/edu/index.html#utmsource=educators2&utm_medium=et

Google Apps Education Edition is a broad IT solution that programs can use to bring communication and collaboration tools to the entire academic community for free. Google manages all the technology details, so you can focus your time, energy and budgets on teaching.

Students, teachers and staff can share ideas more quickly and get things done more effectively when they have access to the same powerful communication and sharing tools. Google Apps Education Edition lets tech administrators provide email, sharable online calendars, instant messaging tools and even a dedicated website to faculty, students and staff for free. There's no hardware or software to install or maintain, since everything is delivered through a standard web browser -- anytime, from anyplace.

You can mix and match from the following services for your entire program :

• Gmail - Offer email to your faculty, students and staff with 2 gigabytes of storage per account, search tools to help them find information fast, and instant messaging built right into the browser (chat can easily be disabled for the whole school if you don't want students to be able to IM with their accounts).
• Google Talk - Teachers and students can call or send instant messages to their contacts for free -- anytime, anywhere in the world. Imagine the possibilities for people collaborating on projects from different locations.
• Google Calendar - People can organize their schedules and share events, meetings and entire calendars with others. You can even publish the program's calendar on your website to let the community know about events and classes that are taking place.
• Google Docs - Students and teachers can create documents, spreadsheets and presentations and then collaborate with each other in real-time right inside a web browser window.
• Google Sites - Create a class site and edit it the same way you'd edit a document -- no technical expertise required. Your site can bring together all the information you want to share with your colleagues and students, including docs, calendars, photos, videos and attachments.