Articles
June 19 - Defining and Promoting Teamwork in the Classroom
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
Group work and teamwork. In college courses the terms refer to students working together, often on an assignment or an activity. Group work is the more neutral term, whereas teamwork implies something about how the students are working together. And although teamwork is easy to identify when we see it on a playing field or court, what does teamwork look like in a college classroom?
June 18 - Seven Guidelines for Designing Effective Course Pages for the Online Classroom
By: Rob Kelly in Instructional Design
The design of your course pages can have a significant effect on the learning experience in your online course. Good design can draw students in, help them comprehend the information the first time they read it, and enable them to easily retrieve information, says Sheree Webb, an instructional designer at Tyler Junior College.
June 17 - Teaching Inequality: Denial, Defensiveness, and the Diminishing of Oppression
By: Kimberly D. Brostrom in Teaching and Learning
As a sociology teacher, not only do I discuss topics related to oppression and inequality, but these topics comprise a pervasive and substantial portion of our pedagogy. The chapters on class stratification, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexuality are a required chunk of the curriculum by the social science department, and an obvious pedagogical necessity to the social scientist who knows that our location on the social hierarchy is tremendously dependent upon the “isms”—on an individual and institutional level. When covering a lesson on privilege and oppression—almost inexorably, and amongst others—at least one of the following responses from students ensues: denial, defensiveness, and/or diminishment. Aptly enough, their reactions exemplify a part of the lesson, and therefore can be used as a learning device in the liberal arts and social sciences classroom.
June 14 - AspirEDU Attains Certified Partner Status with Canvas by Instructure
By: Press Release in EdTech News and Trends
AspirEDU, a company specializing in data driven educational analytics, announced that it has attained Certified Partner status with Canvas, joining the ranks of other Canvas partners such as Pearson, McGraw Hill, Wiley and Adobe. Canvas by Instructure is a cloud native learning management system (LMS) used every day by more than 400 colleges, universities and school districts. In addition, the Cisco Networking Academy selected Canvas to power “The World’s Largest Classroom.”
June 14 - The Importance of Relevancy in Improving Student Engagement and Learning
By: Steve Wyre, EdD in Faculty Development
For more than nine years, I have been deeply interested in metacognition as it applies to the art and science of teaching. I have also been involved in taking non-professional teachers and training them to be both content area experts and more than adequate teachers in the classroom. This can be a tough endeavor as people like to teach in non-traditional schools for a variety of reasons and some are not always interested in becoming teachers qua teachers. Worse are those who feel being a subject matter expert is enough because as long as they’re talking, the students must be learning, right?
June 13 - Lessons Learned from My Students
By: Candice Dowd Barnes, PhD in Teaching and Learning
My students have taught me some invaluable lessons during my first two years as a college professor. I’d like to share three of the most important ones here. They aren’t new lessons and I didn’t use any unique methods to learn them. I collected data midsemester from students, I talked with them, and I looked closely at what was happening in my classroom. The lessons were there for me to learn, and taken together they have helped me think more clearly about what I want my students to know and do, and who I want them to become. They are lessons that have made me a better teacher.
June 12 - Reflections on Teaching: Learning from Our Stories
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
Here’s a great story. A graduate student is attending a lecture being given by one of her intellectual heroes, the Brazilian educator and theorist Paulo Freire. She takes notes furiously, trying to capture as many of his words as possible. Seeing that she is keenly interested in what Freire had to say, his translator asks if she would like to meet him. Of course! She is introduced and he begins by inquiring about her work. Then he graciously agrees to respond to a set of questions she and her colleagues hoped they would get the chance to ask him. She is impressed beyond belief, but time prevents her from asking one last, difficult question. They meet accidently once more at the event and he wonders if she asked all her questions? No, there is one more. “Given your work, we want to know ‘where is the hope’?” Without hesitating he moves toward her, takes her face in his hands, looks into her eyes, and replies, “You tell them, ‘you are the hope, because theory needs to be reinvented, not replicated … it is a guide. We make history as we move through it and that is the hope.”
June 11 - Panopto and Instructure Expand Integration between Lecture Capture and Learning Management Systems
By: Press Release in EdTech News and Trends
Video platform provider Panopto today announced a unique, expanded integration with Canvas, an easy-to-use learning management system (LMS) by Instructure, enabling educators and students one-click access to Panopto-recorded video lectures inside Canvas and enabling IT administrators one-click integration of all courses and lectures.
June 11 - Private Journal Replaces Discussion Forum in Blended Course
By: Rob Kelly in Asynchronous Learning and Trends, Teaching with Technology
The discussion board in Kathleen Lowney’s large blended (or hybrid) section of introduction to sociology at Valdosta State University wasn’t serving its intended purpose of engaging learners with the content and preparing them for face-to-face class sessions. She tried dividing the students into smaller discussion groups of 50 and then 20, and the results were the same: the weaker students waited until the last minute and essentially repeated what the better students had posted previously. When she replaced the public discussions with private journals, the quality of students’ posts improved, as did their grades.
June 10 - Experimenting with Facebook in the College Classroom
By: Nisha Malhotra, PhD in Teaching with Technology
While discussing the nuances of regression analysis, I saw some of my students smiling. It wasn’t a smile of understanding; it was a response to seeing a Facebook comment on their smart phone. I later learned that 99% of the students in the research method class were Facebook users, routinely checking for updates 10-20 times a day. I asked them to refrain checking their phones during class.
