From the French Side: Transmedia, the Cloud, Liki Labs, LMSes, MOOCs, Apps and a Challenge!
As has become our custom every couple of months, Profweb English Edition is providing you with an overview of some of the inspiring and thought-provoking publications that have appeared on the French side of Profweb from August to October 2015.
Profweb’s Andréanne Turgeon has been very busy writing articles to provide Teachers with some helpful tips and resources to get the 2015-2016 academic year off on the right foot. Her first article touched on considerations related to course planning, covering turnkey lesson plans for ICT integration, open source software and ePortfolios. Another article explores the usefulness of cloud computing for Teachers, looking at Google Apps, Chromebooks and referencing some organizations that are helping Teachers to integrate cloud computing into their teaching practice. And while we’re on the subject of applications in the cloud, Andréanne also submitted an article about how to get started with a Learning Management System (LMS) such as LEA or Moodle. For those Teachers that are hoping to integrate BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) this year, Andréanne penned another article on the use of tablets and smart phones in class. EducApplis, which is a website dedicated to helping Teachers choose mobile applications for their class is mentioned in this article. We’re happy to announce that the site has recently been translated into English for the college network.
Natacha Tremblay from Lasalle College submitted an inspiring story about her use of the tool Liki Lab in her Sales Office or Store Layout course (Aménagement d’un espace de vente). The Liki Lab tool facilitated the creation of on-line stores for her students in her course, which leads to the integrative project in their program. The story comes complete with the steps that Ms. Tremblay used with her students to create these sites and a link to a live example of one of the sites.
Gamification and the narration of ‘transmedia’ is the subject of an article submitted by Jean Desjardins, an IT-REP from Collégial international Saint-Anne. He recounts that he attended a REFAD webinar earlier this year that was led by Oliver Alfieri, from the Centre franco-ontarien de ressources pédagogiques who spoke about ‘transmedia.’ Alfieri described transmedia as a narrative universe that uses complementary supports such as blogs, infographics, comics and cartoons, podcasts, videos, augmented reality et al. Alfieri said that transmedia is a way of opening different doors to discover or help others to discover a world. Mr. Desjardins explores the thin line that separates gamification and transmedia in his article, elucidating the Francophone readership with examples of each.
Charles Laporte, a Teacher from Lasalle College filed a Real Life Story about his use of “video selfies” in his Linear Algebra and Vector Geometry class. The idea came to him while he was solving one of the problems he had assigned in front of his class. Read on to learn more about how this innovation in his approach helps his students to get around their shyness while also reaching higher levels of competency in Bloom’s Taxonomy. Not to mention he gets to know his students much better!
Isabelle Laplante, from the CDC, Profweb’s Andréanne Turgeon, and Roxanne Poissant from the Collège de Valleyfield submitted an article with a summary of an Association pour la recherche au collégial (ARC) meeting held in September. This article provides some important information for those Teachers that want access to scientific scholarly research that is generally only available to faculty members at universities or colleges that can afford to pay the expensive licence fees. The article also mentions the many useful services that are provided by the Centre de Documentation Collégiale.
Profweb’s Web Integrator Guillaume Vachon published a Featured Report on Google Apps (and Education) that provides an overview of Google’s offering. The many useful services and applications offered by Google are mentioned with a look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of using them in the classroom. The report will almost certainly be translated and adapted for Profweb’s English Edition within the next few weeks.
Profweb’s newest team member Audrey Corbeil has provided a glowing review of her experience at the 2nd International Conference on Education and 3rd iPad Summit held last spring, while also issuing a challenge to the entire college network present our innovative practices with mobile technologies at the next conference. The deadline to submit a proposal to present at the 2016 edition of the conference is November 13th 2015. The conference is organized by CRIFPE, which is associated with the Université de Montréal. The university is home to a new MOOC about Education Technology integration in Higher Education. You can read an article about this MOOC that was submitted by Thierry Karsenti and Bruno Poellhueber.
The Profweb français team is dynamic, and they have many more exciting publications lined up that are sure to keep our readership enthralled until the end of the semester. Stay tuned, as Profweb English Edition will provide more summaries and even translate a few of the publications that are particularly relevant to the English college network.
Until then, bonne lecture!
