How you choose to use extra credit can enhance a student's learning opportunities. Whether you're for or against the use, a few simple rules will make it easier to deploy. Consider using optional quizzes over the reading material prior to the start of class to encourage students to be prepared for in-class discussion.
Learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and promoting meaningful discussion in the classroom helps create a more dynamic and effective learning community. Get some ideas in this week's Teaching Tip.
Maintain order over your files by instilling file management best practices: give your files comprehensive titles, and save them in appropriate subfolders (not just lobbed into the pile on the desktop!).
Get an overview of your activity within the Blackboard world all in one spot by using the new Global Navigation feature in the update, Service Pack 11, for Blackboard 9.1. This efficient suite of tools will help you and your students get an overview of your activity within the Blackboard world —all in one spot.
The Understanding by Design model teaches us how to create our curriculum backward from big ideas to activities...but what about the benefits of teaching backward? Allowing students to explore larger concepts, while you fill in, here and there, with the details, helps to enliven the experience of the subject.
Pinterest is a free image-based curation site that allows users to create themed “boards' onto which they may “pin' relevant links, which appear as tiles. Board creators and viewers alike may comment on the pins. In this week's teaching tip find out how Pinterest relates to education.
The cliché, “A picture is worth a thousand words,' has taken on a new meaning in the online world of web 2.0 tools. Using an online service such as Thinglink.com, you can actually create an interactive image by adding text, video, music, and web links to increase the meaning of your— image.
Use Google Drive to do more than create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc., with the many apps that you can add to your Drive for creating a vast variety of media. Simply click "Create" and then "Add More Apps," then choose from the list of apps which appear.
The ability to quickly create a form for collecting information is packaged within UA Google Applications. Google Form is a very handy application for creating forms with multiple possible uses within your class or department or program. Create a form to collect information on a wide variety of topics and review the responses in an aggregated, organized-for-you format.
Google has recently added sharing features to its Maps tool, making it easier than ever to collaborate on building custom map-based resources. With these new features you can build your own information into a Google map, share it with others and embed it in your web site.
Critical inquiry often benefits from the incorporation of visual elements, like comics, to complicate and challenge the idea of how we interact with text. Pixton is one of the most flexible and useful online comics-generating tools.
Domain knowledge, critical thinking, and presentation and participation: these are elements that make up information fluency. The terms for this model have been chosen carefully - it’s information fluency, not digital fluency. Many parts of the information fluency model are analog, or comprised of characteristics for which the digital/analog terminology isn’t germane. It is fluency, not literacy.