How Office Mix is a powerful tool for blended or flipped learning

15 features that make the free Office Mix software a resource for any teacher involved in flipped or blended learning

office-mix-learningOffice Mix is a free addition for PowerPoint 2013 that lets you turn PowerPoint documents into interactive online lessons or presentations. It takes any existing or new PowerPoint presentation to a whole new level, making it easy to create resources for flipped or blended learning. Here are 15 reasons Office Mix should be part of your “teaching toolbox.”

1. You can leverage existing resources.

Many teachers have existing PowerPoint presentations on a variety of topics. These presentations can be revisited and reused by quickly converting them to a Mix. With little time and effort, an existing teaching resource that is only moderately effective in a flipped or blended learning environment can become a much more effective learning resource. The difference between these two types of resources is outlined in the article “It’s called blended learning (not blended teaching) for a reason.”…Read More

Community helps makes smarter software decisions

SoftwarePhD is a new community for higher-ed professionals that seeks to change the lack of objective user reviews

community-user-reviewLooking for reviews of the latest smartphone? CNET has your back. Wondering how well that new stapler for the office will hold up? Look no further than Amazon.

However, if you are considering a new Student Information System (SIS), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Learning Management System (LMS) for your campus, you’ll be hard-pressed to find much of anything in the way of objective user experiences or reviews.

SoftwarePhD is a new community for higher education professionals that is seeking to change this deficiency.…Read More

Our readers’ top 40 ed-tech services for 2013-14

Ed-tech has made significant strides in 2013.

Which ed-tech products and services do our readers like best? Here are their top 40 choices for the 2013-14 school year.

This past spring, we asked readers to give us their top picks for school hardware, software, websites, and services. Nearly 700 readers responded via one of our three websites: eSchoolNews.com, eCampusNews.com, and eClassroomNews.com.

In nominating their favorite products, we asked readers to tell us how they’re using these products to improve teaching, learning, or school administration—and to what effect. We then chose the 40 best responses, which appear alphabetically by product name.…Read More