For this academic year’s final entry, the Profweb team selected some of the publications that sparked the most interest. These articles had either the highest number of readers, or the highest number of ‘shares,’ by readers that forwarded the article to their colleagues this year. Here is the list:
Top 6 Real Life Stories
- An Online Course to Pass the OQLF French Exam
Chantale Giguère, a French as a Second Language teacher from Dawson College wrote about her experience creating a “45 hour fully online course” with Laurent Duval. This course is a tutorial for Health Care Professionals wanting to pass the OQLF’s French exam. - Meeting Students Where They’re At
This Real Life Story – one of the first published in the 2014-2015 academic year – was submitted by Becki George, a teacher from Northland College (Wisconsin) and Kelly La Venture of Bemidji State University (Minnesota). The story touched on the use of hybrid (blended) learning, technology and trends in teaching. - Evernote and Teaching
Carole Emilie Baddour, A Teacher at the Collégial International Sainte-Anne wrote about her experience moving from personal use of the Evernote app to professional use of the technology in her chemistry courses, adding a variety of Evernote extensions along the way. - Integrating E-commerce Skills into Our Pedagogy
This is how two teachers, Heather Sorella and Maureen Buck, from the Fashion Marketing program at College LaSalle, came to develop an E-commerce AEC. - Immediate Feedback for Student with Google Forms
Kevin Lenton, a Physics teacher at Vanier College provided a Real Life Story on his use of Google Forms with branching to allow students to get immediate feedback in Quizzes. He says that “as a basic instructional principle, learners need feedback, and to receive maximum benefit from feedback, it should be supplied as soon as possible after an assessment or ideally after each question.” The article comes complete with an example quiz and a video tour narrated by Kevin. - Unlocking Research Everywhere
Champlain Saint Lambert’s Library Coordinator, Nicole Haché, writes about UnlockingResearch.com, a resource to assist students to develop information literacy that was inspired by some projects from the French educational network. She also sheds light on how her college’s library is supporting a variety of teachers in different disciplines
Top 3 Articles
- The Oracles of Ed Tech Have Spoken
In this article, Ryan W. Moon from the Profweb Editorial team provides a brief overview of the latest NMC Horizon Report for Higher Education, interviewing the Canadian experts that contributed to this 2015 edition. The report addresses trends in Education technology over the short, medium and long term, as well as issues affecting their adoption. - e-Learning@Dawson College
Norm Spatz provides an overview of an e-Learning website and tool that was developed at Dawson College by Chantale Giguère, who has been involved in blended and fully-online courses. She has kindly begun sharing her expertise with the college network. - Supporting Active Learning and Innovation
This article was an overview of the 2015 SALTISE mini-grant recipients and their projects. SALTISE now stands for Supporting Active Learning and Teaching in the Studies of Education. The organization provided grants to a variety of teachers from the college network to support innovative approaches to active learning, and also organized a conference in early June 2015. Have a look at this article to see what some teachers are doing with Virtual Reality, robotics and plush toy microbial models!
Top 3 Contributions from the IT Partner Organizations
The Editors often write summaries on activities or resources that are suggested by our partners. Many of these partners also publish their own articles. Here are those that were the most popular this year:
- Jeux sérieux et technopédagogie: un nouveau rapport du REFAD
The Réseau d’enseignement francophone à distance du Canada (REFAD) published a report in French entitled Étude sur l’apport des jeux sérieux pour la formation à distance au Canada francophone (Study on the contribution of serious games to distance education) in March 2015. This document, which may be of interest to our bilingual readership, was prepared by Jean Loisier. It is an excellent source of information on the usage of serious games in education, the impetus to use them as well as how they are developed. - Learn Science with Educational Robotics
Christophe Reverd from La Vitrine Technologie-Éducation submitted a great article chock full of links on Educational Robotics. When applied in the educational milieu, Educational Robotics is a tool that helps to make abstract concepts more concrete, such as the diameter of a wheel and the distance travelled, movements and angles, obstacle detection and wave frequencies, etc. - Technopedagogical eBooks at the CDC
The Centre de documentation collégiale offers free access to many resources that can support your teaching practice. Did you know that the CDC has also been on Pinterest since the Fall semester of 2013?
Reports and Digital Tools
In addition to articles and the Real Life Stories of teachers, there are 4 digital tools and 2 new reports that were added to Profweb this year. A summary of the digital tools appears below, but check back at the beginning of the Fall semester 2015 for the translated reports on Distance Education and ePortfolios.
Digital Tools
- MediaWiki: The ideal tool to create a collaborative website where different users can build content together.
- WordPress: A content management system used to create blogs and websites.
- Video capsules on the ICT Profile for college students: Tutorials designed to support the mastery of the abilities targeted by the ICT Profile.
- Zotero: A free bibliographic management tool.
If you would like to know more about a specific tool, you can contact the Editorial team at any time. You can also suggest other topics by sending us your ideas at info@profweb.ca.
Web Space
This free service is available to college network teachers to allow them to put various educational resources on-line and have access to technical support. The service is more and more popular. We currently have more than 1800 users with 2700 web sites. Last June we began working on updating this service. The next phase of the project will begin this Fall (2015).
Have a Great Summer!
Profweb wishes you a summer full of sunshine and gatherings with your family and friends. Whether it be next to the barbecue, a pool or a lake, make sure to savour the moment! Above all, make sure to take some time to recharge your batteries and your creativity this summer!
Profweb was on hand at the ACPQ and AQPC conferences with battery rechargers
