The Tools for Successful Online Teaching

As many universities have found, online courses are efficient and cost-effective ways to attract non-traditional and even traditional students. The boom in such courses, however, has created a need for instructors comfortable with the online environment at a time when most expected to teach in regular classrooms. Dawley (educational technology, Boise State U.) assumes readers intend to developing educational relationships with their students and promote lifelong learning as they develop technical skills so along with listing and explaining tools she also shows how to apply them creatively so they will not get in the way of instruction. She describes current and future trends, content organizers (syllabus, notes, lesson plans), e-mail, discussion forums, small group learning, chat and instant messaging, audio-visual conferencing and electronic whiteboards, assessment and survey tools, blogs and wikis, and using multiple tools in dealing with inappropriate online behavior, finding new resources, and keeping current. Annotation c2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)