Updates

One of the most exciting things I found this summer while redesigning my two courses was the TED Talk on why we need a “moral operating system” by Damon Horowitz.  His 16 minute talk has been incorporated into my classes in ethics (online or not) and the students first essay is to explain in one to two pages what their moral operating system is.   Horowitz is Google’s Philosopher In-Residence.

Faculty Guide for Collaborative Online International Learning Course Development

In today’s session I mentioned a resource for those team teaching, the “Faculty Guide for Collaborative Online International Learning Course Development” from the SUNY Center for Collaborative Online International Learning aka SUNY-COIL. If you are interested in this resource you can get it online.  Here are directions from their homepage:

Our current v1.4 guide includes info on globally networked learning, locating a faculty partner, gathering institutional support, and negotiating course content with your partner.

Please email coilinfo@suny.edu to get a free copy of the guide.

If you are interested in this resource, I’d be happy to tell you more. I find it useful for helping you think through the steps for collaborating with a faculty partner to teach a class, and I imagine that the lessons learned apply just as much to those teaching locally as those teaching internationally.

Teach Students to Write Marginalia and to Highlight or Underline Wisely

Rap Genius and moreOne of the recommended readings for flipping the classroom addresses strategies for getting students to do the reading:

Linda Nilson, “Getting Students To Do the Readings,” Ch. 23 in Part Five of Teaching at Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for Instructors (2010), available as an e-book through the SEU library.  (You’ll need to be logged into the SEU library site for this e-book link to work.)

On p. 216 Nilson suggests the strategy, “Teach Students to Write Marginalia and to Highlight or Underline Wisely.”  There are several technology tools to support this strategy for both the individual and for groups. Continue reading

Group Work Required Information Sheet

In the hope that it may help someone I have pasted a document I created to ensure that I track what happens at student group meetings. Collecting the general information helps me to see the functionality of the group and who is doing the majority of the work.  The peer grade helps me to see how the students value their team members contributions. I used to teach group communication and this document is the result of needing to have a better sense of Continue reading

Minimizing risk taking

I have been thinking about our topic of yesterday. Obviously the key to success, and the way to avoid bad evaluations, is to enable the students to see that they will do better if they join the journey. We listened to terrible stats about how little our students are willing to read and I think that may transfer into how much they wish to be ‘spoon-fed’ material. I think that this makes them resistant to our innovations.  So a couple of thoughts on which I would really welcome your ideas: Continue reading

Day 1

Thanks for a thought provoking morning. I am sorry that my “voice” doesn’t seem to work but I can hear all of you very well.

I just wanted to share my thoughts about risk having tried innovation before. I think the students may respond better to small innovations rather than wholesale change in the way they learn.  After my husband obtained his Masters in Education I was inspired to try to teach a class using  one of the ‘cutting-edge’ strategies that he had learned and we had discussed at length.  There is no doubt in my mind that the students achieved excellent higher level learning but I received the worst student evaluations of my career. Students don’t like change and I am certainly hoping to learn ways of helping them to be more accepting of it in the classroom.