Communicate 3.2.1 The Newsletter Quest

Creating a collaborative online community amongst stakeholders is an essential part of all virtual instruction programs and best practices. Reflect, for a moment, upon the examples provided throughout this quest and the preceding sections in Communicate. Identify three highly effective methods of communicating with stakeholders and create an artifact for each utilizing the resources outlined throughout the module and discuss the topic in your blog.

Smore is new and I just used it for the first time the on a previous assignment two days ago. I liked it. Thought it had a variety of tenmplates to choose from and lots of formats. You can change the font color, font... etc and I can see creating posters with this tool as well as online announcements. You can emphasize in a easy to read way so that it sticks with the student.

Thinklink I have not used but it sounds like a more interactive Glogster. You can organise a whole lesson with instructions to do a hunt for hints. Students would have to find the first hint and then that leads them to the second. Just the fact that you can embed many forms of media in them makes it more fun. I can see assigning the students to do one with videos made from their cell phones!

Flipstack is interesting. You can 'flip' though a series of slides that lead to a conclusion. I can see a student starting with an hypothesis and then flipping through the research and experiment to find the result of the conclusion.

These are only thre of many many online tools. Everyday I find more and more. I think this can drive teacher's crazy because as soon as they get use to using one tool then another one comes out with a few more features. The nice thing about all these online tools is that the smaller versions are free and usually have enough attributes that it is fine to use with a class. You can also take the final product and use it in a variety of ways, whether including in an email, Glogster, video, Prezi, PPT or any lesson on a LMS.