With the rapid development of online e-learning, more than 65 percent of educational organizations use LMS (Learning Management System) for education and more than 83.8 million registered e-learning users receive online education courses. as of 2010. It has become a sensitive and important issue. for teachers to bring together their teaching resources and impart knowledge to students with e-learning tools, signaling better e-learning communications.
The key to success in e-learning communications is how to activate, control, and track student interests in learning. It sounds comprehensive, but once you get up to speed with popular forms of online education, you can guide your students to use tools, gain knowledge, and share their ideas.
Here are the five things teachers need to learn before creating strong, positive e-learning communications with students.
1. Social networks
Teachers now have more options to contact and exchange ideas with students in addition to blogs, wikis, and forums due to the popularity of social media. Facebook, the largest online community, is not only the place where you can find old friends and schoolmates, but also a good place for communication between teachers and students. Teachers can announce an event, conference, or vote in advance and invite their students to participate, so you get plenty of feedback to catch up on student thinking and optimize courses. The mircoblog, like Twitter, allows participants to send instant messages to share ideas with others. Having a Twitter account will be a great way to update in real time what your students are thinking and doing.
2.Broadcast screen
Online education could be the effective distance learning solution through text delivery, screencast technically creates another possibility to make e-learning communications more vivid and interactive with multimedia. Teacher can use screen recording software to create screencast to teach students online courses, share knowledge on blogs or video streaming sites. With the help of comprehensive features offered by these tools, teachers can edit their screenshots with Flash objects, add narration, and publish the demo as an interactive Flash video. Some screen recorders can publish the video courses with SCROM/AICC compliance, so it is very convenient to share the videos on LMS.
3. YouTube
Video streaming site like YouTube is a great place for teachers and students to share and communicate their ideas about teaching and learning. There are many educators who upload their videos to YouTube and have established a whole video channel for education. Students can find many interesting open courses on this channel, and it’s also a great place for teachers to communicate with others. You can encourage students to create and upload their work in the form of a video. Most of them love to see their work published online and are eager to share it with their friends and family.
4.iTouch
iTouch is no longer just a portable media player. You can find many educational apps on it. According to research from university library feedback, many librarians are beginning to use handheld devices as part of the Book Library Management System. And practice shows that iTouch applications can be a communication bridge between educators and students. These educational apps can arouse the curiosity of the students and activate their study interests on the subjects they did not like in the past. Another use for iTouch is that it can be a portable textbook. Teachers can record their lessons as videos or audio files and store them on iTouch so students can view or listen to lessons anytime, anywhere.
5.Share slides
Slideshare is a type of “online PowerPoint presentation” platform that allows people to publish and share their PowerPoint presentations. For teachers, you don’t have to worry about your students not being able to view your presentations if they don’t have PowerPoint installed on their computers because people can view the presentation in the web browser. In addition to the browse and embed features, there are some slideshow sites that allow students to download PowerPoint as a video so they can view it on the iPad and other portable devices. One more, the PowerPoint video converter can burn the course videos to DVD for backup as well as portable media.
