CITE fellow Sean McGee has been refining his ideas of running a simulated crisis event with his students as participants. The plan is to have the event run for period of time midway through the Fall 2015 academic semester. Sean is considering the logistics of running and organizing such an event, and how it would […]
Many classes have an exam scheduled around the middle of the term. Having a review session before an exam can be a good way to reinforce the main ideas that you’re trying to get across to your students. Although cramming for exams does not promote good practices for long-term learning, studies do show that having some kind of review before an exam can improve test scores.
by Christopher Iceman So when I was initially informed of my CITE fellowship I had some safe ideas and some wild ones as well. I was happy to find that the folks at CTL like living a bit on the edge and encouraged me to go for the far fetched (and fun) plan. The motivation for my project […]
Many instructors spent frenzied final hours before launch wrestling content into Blackboard. One frequent source of challenge is that nearly all of us develop our lectures, notes and syllabi in Microsoft Word and when we transfer these materials online, we unwittingly wander into a decades old battleground. We innocently expect that we should be able to copy and paste from our Word document directly into Blackboard. But the potential layers of complexity and conflict can be more than frustrating.
I’d advise everyone who uses Blackboard’s Grade Center to embed this tip–or a link to this WordPress post supporting it–in your “Getting Started' folder. It’s perfect for the student to understand how to see your feedback.
Today’s Teaching Tip, our 142nd, also commemorates UAF CTL’s third year of publishing weekly tips with only the occasional break for the holidays. It feels fitting to celebrate by sharing some of the interesting work being done by the outstanding educators we’ve had the privilege of working with.
Joanne Healy, while pursuing her CITE project goals, wrote two grant submissions in the last two months. She notes, “It’s important for new teachers to shift their pedagogy to a more collaborative approach based on continuous improvement of learning with 21st-century mobile devices.” Her proposal work parallels and supports recent SOE initiatives. While Joanne hopes […]
Giving constructive feedback to help improve someone’s work isn’t always easy. Comments like, “I really liked it' or “I didn’t get it' doesn’t help the originator make improvements. As the instructor, you should be modeling constructive feedback when you are reviewing student work so students have an example to follow.
A person’s first exposure to an academic course can be daunting. As an instructor, this will be you the first time you teach it. It will be your students on their first day of class. A glance at the course calendar will not help. In typical fashion, the weeks of the semester roll on with huge amounts of reading and epic level assignments.
The value of competing against yourself - Ipsative assessment is the practice of determining a student’s progress based on their earlier work. Many assignments and rubrics are designed to measure student work in the normative assessment mode; that is, against a static set of criteria -- often necessarily so.
If you use Google Forms for surveys or to quiz your students in class, you may have found yourself wishing that you could get notifications each time someone submits your form. Logging into Google and checking your Results Sheet often can take a lot of time. Fortunately, there is a way to set up notifications and eliminate unnecessary checks on your Results Sheet.
Are you teaching or are you enrolled in a UAF CTL-supported course? If so, you may have recently noticed a new feature in Blackboard we call the ‘UAF CTL Tab’. If you haven’t checked it out, next time you log into Blackboard, look next to the ‘My Blackboard’ tab at the top right and click on ‘UAF CTL’. You will find three sections there with lots of important and helpful information including links to social media on each page.