Faculty Focus

A FREE PUBLICATION FROM THE CREATORS OF THE TEACHING PROFESSOR

teaching with technology

Pearson Partners with Knewton on Adaptive Science and Business Products

Pearson, the world’s leading learning company, today announced a substantial rollout of additional MyLab & Mastering products enhanced with technology from leading adaptive learning partner Knewton. This fall semester alone, Pearson’s widely used MyLab & Mastering offerings will deliver continuously adaptive recommendations to more than 400,000 students across subject areas including biology, anatomy & physiology, chemistry, physics, finance and accounting. These are in addition to math, economics, reading and writing, which launched in the fall of 2012.

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The Benefits of Flipping Your Classroom

A small but growing number of faculty at major universities are experimenting with the inverted or flipped classroom. It’s an instructional model popularized by, among other influences, a Ted Talk by Khan Academy founder Salman Khan, which has received more than 2.5 million views. Institutions as varied as Duke University’s School of Medicine, Boston University’s College of Engineering, and the University of Washington School of Business have joined Clemson, Michigan State, the University of Texas, and many others in experimenting with changing from in-class lectures to video lectures and using class time to explore the challenging and more difficult aspects of course content.

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i>clicker Announces Release of i>clicker GO, Now Offers Mobile-Friendly Hybrid Response Solution

i>clicker, one of the most widely used student response systems in higher education, today announced the release of i>clicker GO, a mobile response solution that transforms laptops, smartphones and tablets into student response devices. i>clicker GO is available for purchase at https://www.iclickergo.com or as an app from the iTunes and Google Play app stores.

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Half of Faculty Say Their Job is More Difficult Today than Five Years Ago

If you find yourself working longer hours or maybe feeling a bit more stressed at the end of the day, you’re not alone. Fifty percent of college faculty who completed the annual Faculty Focus reader survey said that their job is more difficult than it was five years ago. Only nine percent said their job is less difficult, while 33 percent said it’s about the same.

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Experimenting with Facebook in the College Classroom

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.

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Echo360 Active Learning Platform Delivers Student Analytics with Insight on Student Activity, Participation and Engagement

Echo360, the global leader in campus-wide active and distance learning solutions, is announcing a product release that provides analytics for student activity before, during and after class. Data-rich summaries provide instructors intelligent insight on each student’s participation, flags topics of difficulty and measures student engagement in and out of class. Ultimately, this data will guide instructor-led course adjustments and improve academic outcomes as teaching pedagogies changes to respond to student cues in real time.

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App Review: Doceri Combines Screencasting, Desktop Control, and Interactive Whiteboard

The Doceri interactive whiteboard and screencast recorder app, like the Splashtop app I reviewed earlier, is useful to anyone wishing to remotely control a projected image from a connected computer, make screen annotations on what is displayed (you can make the annotations on a displayed image or a whiteboard), and send your creation for others to see. The thing I liked the most about using Doceri is the ease with which recorded audio and screen annotations can be made and the ability to send/post the finished product to a LMS or similar system for students to access. This app can save you the expense associated with costly classroom whiteboards and the controls in the app are easy to navigate.

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NetClick Makes Classroom Interaction Easy

With the use of mobile devices such as tablets, smartphones and laptops transforming the 21st century classroom, teachers and professors around the world are looking to streamline and revolutionize the way they present content and interact with students. To meet this demand for Education 2.0, Waterloo technology startup NetClick today announced the release of its new Cloud-based solution that helps educators transform their lessons and lectures into engaging, interactive classroom experiences in seconds and with use of existing class infrastructure. It is a unique, patent pending service, not available in any other Classroom Response System.

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