Designing Across Nine Time Zones: Twiddla to the Rescue!
Sometimes you need a no-cost way to work collaboratively and synchronously at a distance. For instance, earlier this year I was a member of a graduate-student team designing an interactive app for the iPad. We had a member in Saudi Arabia, another on the eastern seaboard, and several members spread across the Chicago metro area. [...]

Illustrative Multimedia: Meaningful Enhancement of Online Course Content
Multimedia is not a new concept. It’s been around in multifaceted forms long before learning management systems and the development of online courses came to fruition. If asked “what’s the most popular form of media in today’s society?” one would be able to argue the Internet or television depending on your generation, technological savviness, etc. [...]

L’immersion? Mais oui!
(Listen to this entry in the Everything that FITS podcast.) My wife and I just had the opportunity to visit Montréal over Columbus Day weekend, and it provided a nice little vacation, as well as an opportunity for me to practice my French skills. I was a little nervous at first, because although I had [...]

Management by Exception (MBE)
As a long-time project manager in the software engineering industry and especially during my time at Apple Computer, I’ve had to work in environments with a frenetic pace, to say the least. Limited time was available to manage multiple projects, let alone deal with the intricacies of the details. Hence, I learned early on to [...]

Reliving History, 140 Characters at a Time
In her October post, Emily Stone talked about using Twitter as a way to engage with her students. It allowed her to create a conversation and foster a community of sharing. These types of interactions are really Twitter’s bread-and-butter. But I’m more of a passive Twitter user. My last tweet was January 31, 2010: “really [...]

Teaching in Disguise: Are You Game?
My six-year-old son Grant loves school—that is, all school except the Sunday Chinese School. To him, it is boring, too hard, and no fun. Last year, after trying the kindergarten class at our local Chinese school (and being a left-behind student) for two months, he dropped out. Being a liberal educator and a non-tiger mom, [...]

Use EmbedPlus to Customize and Annotate Video Embeds
The most recent issue of Technology and Learning: Ideas and Tools for Ed Tech Leaders (January 2012) includes a wonderful list of their top one-hundred education websites for the classroom and beyond. While many of them are really intended for the K–12 audience, this list provides a few tools that could be of interest to [...]

Arm Yourself with Basic HTML Knowledge
I started working in the FITS department (then called Instructional Design and Development) at DePaul as a graduate assistant, and a large percentage of my duties at the time involved moving instructor-created content from a word-processing document into the learning management system–basically, a lot of copying and pasting. But it wasn’t as easy as it [...]

Getting my Tweet Wet
I’ve had a Twitter account for several months, and aside from occasionally checking my feed to see what’s for dinner @RachaelRayShow, I really do not use it. In preparation for teaching my online Educational Technology class, I’ve been thinking about how I might use Twitter to enhance participant engagement with the material and with one [...]

What Mobile Platforms Could Do for Higher Education but Aren’t (Yet)
If you’re the type who likes to follow trends in technology, you know one of the most remarkable trends in the last few years is the pace of innovation in mobile platforms like Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. If you have a smartphone, it’s probably already become your notepad, your navigation system, and your external [...]