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Remind 101: Text Messaging for Instructors
[social-bio] How do your students do the majority of communication? The obvious answer is text messaging. Students seem to live on their phones and always have them with them; I think that we need to use this to our advantage! Remind101 is a free service that was designed for K-12 teachers, but can easily be used in a higher education setting. It allows teachers to send messages to students in the form of a text message. The teacher simply creates an account on Remind101.com and sets up his or her class(es). The site then provides a number and a code. The students must subscribe to messages from the instructor by…
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Instead of a MOOC, How About a SOOC?
[social-bio] This post was originally published on Heather Ross’s blog on October 3, 2012 There’s been a lot of talk about MOOCs lately. I’ve even written a couple of posts related to them here and here. We were talking about them during a recent staff meeting and the term SOOC came out of my mouth. My boss said I should trademark it, but I’m not sure that A) someone else hasn’t already said or B) trademarking such a term would be in the spirit of what I’m advocating. A SOOC is a “small open online course” (as opposed to the “massive open online course”) and I’m currently building one for…
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Teaching Online: A Practical Guide
[social-bio] The Book Ko, S. & Rossen, S. (2010). Teaching online: A practical guide (3rd ed.) New York, NY: Routledge. The target audiences of this book are post-secondary instructors and instructional designers. It is extremely thorough and covers three main topics of Getting Started, Putting the Course Together and Teaching in the Online Classroom. Getting Started is an overview of online teaching, including answers to many common questions or concerns, reasons why classes should be offered online and also a detailed look at your institution’s level of readiness. At the University of Saskatchewan we fall into the high-readiness category, which bodes well for any instructors that are moving into teaching…
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Questions to Ask When Assessing Our Own Teaching
[social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler Solving a puzzle involves selecting, viewing, planning, and placing many pieces in order to see the full image. Answering questions of how well do I teach, how is this activity going, or what should I do differently next time, entails a similar set of four phases. As each instructor is unique, the questions embedded within each phase allows us to customize the feedback process to our own needs. So what might we want to think about to make evaluating our teaching a rewarding experience? Planning and gathering insights: What? Preconditions: demographics, prior experience, knowledge, location of class Plans: course goals (e.g., How clear are course…
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Connecting with People and Skills as a Graduate Student
[social-bio] People go to grad school for a variety of reasons, including the desire to learn more about something they fell in love with as an undergrad. Regardless of their reasons for being there, most grad students must consider how they will pay the rent when their funding dries up and they graduate from an MA or PhD program in a climate of high economic uncertainty. In disciplines like my own, philosophy, the opportunities to be employed full time as a philosopher are limited. This does not make the degree worthless, but it does mean it is wise for a student to stockpile a cache of skills and experience that…
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To Extend or Not to Extend: Is it an Academic Integrity Question?
[social-bio] It was interesting to me in my discussions with students for my doctoral study that the matter of unwarranted or easily begotten extensions came up as a concern for academic integrity. Of course, I realize the students who volunteered to participate in my study on students’ understandings of academic honesty and dishonesty could have been unique in some way or had their own “bones to pick” with teaching practices. This was, however, still a striking concern voiced by students and one worth passing along. Students in my study said the meeting of deadlines, especially those established well in advance, was a skill to cultivate and one that was worth…
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BE VOCAL: Characteristics of Successful Online Instructors – An Article Review
[social-bio] If I had to recommend just one article for instructors new to online education, it just might be BE VOCAL: characteristics of successful online instructors by John R. Savery (Savery, John R. (2005). BE VOCAL: characteristics of successful online instructors. Journal of Interactive Online Learning, 4(2), 141-152). In it, Savery describes many of the best practices that I suggest to instructors and faculty who are designing or teaching online courses in what he calls the VOCAL model. VOCAL is an acronym that stands for Visible, Organized, Compassionate, Analytical, and Leader-by-Example. Visible refers to what we often call “instructor presence”. In an online course, an instructor cannot see their students…
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Organizing With Evernote
[social-bio] Sticky notes, notebooks, loose leaf, Word documents…we all have different ways of taking and storing notes. Many of us even have multiple methods of taking notes. Last fall I began experimenting with Evernote and haven’t looked back. Evernote is an application and also a website that is designed to take notes. You can easily type out text-based notes, take pictures, record audio and save online content. This may sound fairly common but there are a few things that set Evernote apart from its competitors. Free – there is a premium account but 99% of users only need the free features Works on all operating systems and devices – PCs,…
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Do We Give Them Fish, Teach Them to Bait a Hook, or Teach Them Ways of Deciding When, Where, and How to Fish?
[social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler Reading articles and books is a regular part of my academic life, however I haven’t been reading them forever so at some point I must have learned how. The strategies such as skimming, selecting specific sections, quick annotation, and others improve my effectiveness. But it is not these skills alone, rather it is my ability to decide whether to skim or read in depth, to choose which paragraph to read next, and to identify what information to annotate. In short, my ability to think about how I’m thinking matters, not the mindless enactment of routinized skills. When our students learn strategies, it can be frustrating…
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Ideas that ‘Stick’
[social-bio] The Book: Heath, C. and Heath, D. 2008. Made to stick: Why some ideas survive and others die. New York: Random House Why do we remember certain things, like the scary music from the movie Jaws, but forget others, like the name of that theory we learned in economics class years ago? Why is it easier for some people to remember an urban legend about missing kidneys than a concept they studied in the college or university classroom? Why do some ideas “stick” while others are just as easily forgotten? This question is the premise of the New York Times bestseller book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive…