Mackenzie's ETEC Blog

Finding Online Video Resources In a world where 3.7 MILLION videos are being uploaded you YouTube everyday. You'd think it would be easy to find quality content for any topic! Unfortunately, while it's easy to search this resource, finding quality videos that meet you content and pedagogical goals for the exact student audience level you are teaching is not always easy, and can take hours of watching hundreds of videos to find the right resources.  While paying for videos through some educational services (i.e. Brilliant.org, which produces some amazing videos) is an option for some, not all schools have access or subscriptions to this content. In addition, most paid plans are subscription based, which means you can't assign them to students without getting them individual log-ins, passwords, etc.  Free YouTube videos are easily accessible without passwords and can be embedded into many different learning platforms to streamline use. Many do come with advertising, but most ...

What is a Course Management System? According to the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching : A  course management system  (CMS) is a collection of software tools providing an online environment  for course interactions. A CMS typically includes a variety of online tools and environments, such as: An area for faculty posting of class materials such as course syllabus and handouts An area for student posting of papers and other assignments A gradebook where faculty can record grades and each student can view his or her grades An integrated email tool allowing participants to send announcement email messages to the entire class or to a subset of the entire class A chat tool allowing synchronous communication among class participants A threaded discussion board allowing asynchronous communication among participants So, how is this different from a Learning Management System? I'm still trying to figure that out, and there seems to be a lot of overlap in the definitions. Exploring CMS...

Exploration of Google Apps... with AI? For this design experiment, I explored several Google apps in a new context! I have been using Google apps for year, from Sheets, Docs and Slides to create and collaborate within documents to Maps and Translate when I travel to Sites and Blogger to share online content. While I've played around some with Google Classroom, my school doesn't use it, so I haven't been able to effectively test it with student populations or with a school framework. However, early this week, I got a well-timed invite to help test a new version of some familiar Google tools using Google's own (still under development) in-house AI called Google Workspace Labs .  Figure 1: Screenshot of M. Miller's "trusted tester" invitation for Google Workspace Labs When I got this invitation I was intrigued! Only a limited number of "tester" invitations have been sent out, so this is a sneak peak at some software still in development! From what I...