Five Ways for Teachers to Make Good Elearning Communications

With the fast development of online elearning, over 65 percent of education organizations use LMS (Learning Management System) for education and more than 83.8 million registered elearning users are received online education courses as of 2010. It has become a sensitive as well as import topic for teachers to gather their teaching resources and impart knowledge to students with elearning tools, indicating better elearning communications.

The key to the success in elearning communications is how to activate, control and track students’instrests of learning. It sounds comprehensive but once you catch up with the popular ways of online education, you can guide your students to use tools, learn knowleage and share their ideas.

Here are the five things that teachers need to learn before you create solid and postive elearning communications with students.

1. Social Media

Teachers now have more options to contact and exchange ideas with students besides blog, wiki and forum because of the popularity of social media. The largest online community Facebook, is not only the place where you can find old friends and schoolfellows but also a good place for communicating between teachers and students. Teachers can annouce an event, a lecture or a vote in advance and invite their students to take part in, so that you receive many feedbacks to catch up with student’s thoughts and optimize courses. The mircoblog, like Twitter, allows participants to send instant messaging to share ideas with others. Having a Twitter account will be a great way to make real time updates of what your students are thinking and doing.

2. Screencast

Online education might be the effective distance learning solution via text delivery, the screencast technic generates another possibility to make elearning communications more vivid and interactive with multimedia. Teacher can use screen recording software to create screencast to teach students courses online, share knowledge on blogs or streaming video sites. With the help of the comprehensive features these tools offer, teachers can edit their screencasts with Flash objects, add narration and publish the demo as 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

The streaming video site like YouTube is a great place for teachers and students to share and communicate their ideas in teaching and learning. There are many educators uploading their videos to YouTube, and they have established a comprehensive video channel for education. Students can find many insteresting open courses in this channel, and it is also a great venue for teachers to communicate with others. You can encourage students to create and upload their work in the form of video. Majority of them love to see their work posted online and are eager to share with their friends and family.

4. iTouch

iTouch is not just simply a portable media player anymore. You can find many educational apps on it. According to the reaserch of feedback from college libraries, many librarians begin to use portable devices as one part of Book Library Managemant System. And the practice proves that iTouch apps can be a communication brige between educators and students. These educational apps can provoke curiosities of students and activate their study insterests on the subjects which they dislike in the past. Another usage of iTouch is that it can be a portable textbook. Teachers can record their lesson in either videos or audio file and store them in iTouch so that students can watch or listen to the lessons any time and any where.

5. Slideshare

Slideshare is one kind of “online PowerPoint presentation”platform which allows people to post and share their PowerPoint presentations. For teachers, you don’t have to worry about whether your presentations can not be viewed by your students if they don’t have PowerPoint installed on their computers because people can view the presentation in the web browser. Besides the browse and embed features, there are some slideshare sites allowing students to download the PowerPoint as video so they can watch it on iPad and other portable devices. One more, the PowerPoint to DVD converter can burn the course videos on DVD for backup as well as portable multimedia.