10 Tips for Effective Communication, Online and Offline

 

According to Saga Briggs, "It might seem like good communication strategies are timeless, but in actual fact they are constantly evolving. In an increasingly globalized world, not to mention rapidly shifting virtual landscape, what qualified as effective five or ten years ago–even last year–may not longer be relevant. Here are ten of our tips for crafting good communication in 2021."  To see her strategies click here.

Stanford University - Teach Your Class Online: The Essentials

 

This would be great to look at over the holidays if you are going virtual for quadmester 3.

Available for instructors worldwide, this free course offered in July 2020 covers the essentials of online teaching. The five-day course covers general guidelines for adapting your course to an online format, best practices for varied situations, common pitfalls in online course design, and how to troubleshoot student issues online.

Teach Your Class Online: Day 1  
This two hour course will provide you with the essentials of online learning.

Teach Your Class Online: Day 2  

Getting Specific: Situations and Tools
Science: Labs in Online Pedagogy

Teach Your Class Online: Day 3

Online Classroom Example Clips
Building and Maintaining a Classroom Community

Teach Your Class Online: Day 4

Review of Submitted Sample Lesson Drafts
Troubleshooting Obstacles to Success in the Online Environment

Teach Your Class Online: Day 5

Math: Using Writing Tablets and Whiteboards
Modern Languages: Tips for Highly Interactive Class During Which Students Actively Speak and Write in the Target Language
Humanities: Productive Classroom Conversations About Challenging Subjects
Closing Thoughts

M.O.O.C.

M.O.O.C.s = Massive Open Online Courses

These are free creditless massive courses offered in partnership with some of the biggest universities in the world.  They offer courses from many different disciplines and in many different subjects.  Maybe over the Christmas holiday you can take a course and get a certificate.  Some examples are: Coursera , EdX and Udacity.  If you would like more click here and here.  Also here is a list of 1500 free online courses.

Cueprompter - a free online telepromter

If your students are video recording themselves reading out a script they might want to consider Cuepromter.  It is a free online teleprompter that displays their script scrolling down on their screen.  You just enter the script into the dialogue box and then select the size of font, how wide the screen is, the speed of scrolling and other attributes.  To see the website click here. 

VideoAnt - Online video annotation and commenting

If you have a video that you would like to easily annotate then videoAnt might just work for you.  Better yet with this service if you share the link with your students you can have them make comments to the video at any point easily as guests and they do not have to login.  So you could share the link with Schoology,  To see a quick primer on videoAnt by Nathan Hall click here.  To see the videoAnt website click here.

Purdue's Online Writing Lab - OWL

The Online Writing Lab or OWL is a free resource with information on writing.  This site covers all aspects of writing and could be used as a reference for writing assignments and papers.  Look at either of the two links to see the site in two different views.  Click here or here.