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Pre-Assessment: Saving time, gaining buy-in and setting the stage
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler Although BOPPPS model suggests discussing objectives before pre-assessment, I often start with a quick polling activity. What I do… I poll students through a quick show of hands of where they are along a continuum of confidence or competence in today’s topic. I stand in a corner at the front of the class and describe a continuum with one wall representing “I may have heard about a mean, but I am not sure how to calculate it or if it is the statistical definition, or I may vaguely remember so please remind me” the opposite wall represents “I know how to calculate a mean…
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Lynda.com Open to All at U of S
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Lavonne Cloke Have you ever wanted to learn new software, design or business skills to enhance your personal or professional goals but don’t have the money for expensive courses? U of S faculty, staff and students now have the opportunity to fully access thousands of unlimited, free tutorials, seven days a week, day and night with lynda.usask.ca – a valuable online training resource. Lynda.usask.ca is an online training library that contains thousands of professional grade Windows and Mac tutorials accessed through streaming video. In these videos you will find information that covers many software titles, scripting languages, design and web development platforms as well as popular online…
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Bridge-In / Intro: Creating an Opening Scene
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler The smell of popcorn wafts by, the lights dim, the audience stills, the screen darkens then comes to life…ready for a movie? Cues signal the activity we are about to engage in and prepare our minds and bodies. We look, listen and wait for cues that tell us to wash our hands and fell hunger because dinner is about to happen, to get comfortable and be swept away by music, to wait in anticipation then yell surprise to a friend, to get warmed up and ready for a sports game… What cues are there in your class? When I teach statistics, the first slide…
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Learning Not to Learn?
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler We teach so that students engage in actions to continue to learn including completing assignments, readings and answering questions in class. But does our teaching increase such behaviours or decrease them? One lens, psychology of learning, suggests we likely do both. Unlike classical conditioning’s focus on reflexes such as drooling, B. F. Skinners’ operant conditioning examines the rewarding of active behaviours including participating in class discussion or completing homework. What is Operant conditioning? As Thorndike’s Law of Effect and B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning notes we are influenced by the consequences of our actions. Good consequences encourage more of this activity, while unpleasant (or unhelpful)…
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Open Textbooks – An Instructor’s Perspective
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Karla Panchuk This post originally appeared on the blog Petragogy on March 23, 2014. I’ve wondered before about the feasibility of creating an open textbook for introductory physical geology. I got as far as sketching out some of the ideas and stopped when it became clear that a lot of work would be involved. My most recent thinking about open textbooks was motivated by learning some startling facts from my students: (1) At sea level, water boils at 1007°C. (2) In areas on the ocean floor where new ocean crust is produced, water can be heated up to 10,007°C. Setting aside for a moment the fact that that my students…
- Assessment and Evaluation, Curriculum Development, General, Instructional / Course Design, Instructional Strategies
Four Student Misconceptions About Learning
[social_share/] [social-bio] The main section of this blog post is a reprint of an article from Faculty Focus by Maryellen Welmer. It follows a brief introduction by Nancy Turner. I thought readers of this blog would be interested in the article reprinted below on common student misconceptions about learning. These points are usefully discussed openly with students at the start of a course or year of study but are also points for faculty to be aware of when planning curriculum and learning experiences. Both explicit discussion of the misconceptions alongside curriculum, assessment and session design to implicitly counter their effects (specific examples for each are included in the text of…
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Where Are You From?
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Colleen Charles Academically speaking, when you first meet a professional on campus, you state your name, job title and credentials accordingly. However, for First Nations people, and I speak for myself as a Woodland Cree, Treaty Six Territory, from the Lac La Ronge Indian Band, La Ronge, Saskatchewan, I have been raised to ask the question, “Where are you from?” when being introduced to new people. This is to find out if you have relations to the individual and their family. Also, I used this technique in a presentation that I did for the GSR 989 Philosophy and Practice of University Teaching. According to Kim West, Educational…
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Catching a Falling Star or Lost in Outer Space? That’s what feedback is for!
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler What would it be like to wait for 31 months before finding out if you were on your way to success or have burst into flames? The European Space Agency had such a wait to hear how its Rosetta space mission to study a comet is going, hearing this week for the first time from their spacecraft that had finally travelled close enough to the sun to have solar power to wake up. In comparison most 4-year undergraduate programs are 32 months (e.g., September 2013 to April 2017 not counting summers) – a long time to wait for student feedback on their orientation and…
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Thanks GSR 984: Thinking Critically
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Colleen George I am a graduate student. Like many graduate students, I spend my days in front of my computer writing, editing, analyzing, and checking Facebook. Working to complete a graduate thesis has taught me many things: self-discipline and commitment, organization, and writing skills; but I found that as I moved further through my program I was not exposed to opportunities that would help me advance many of the professional skills that I felt I needed both for my own personal development and to market myself after my degree. Because of this, I began to look for these opportunities on campus. That is when I found the…
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Curriculum of Fractal Beauty
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler What image of our discipline are we sharing with students or with colleagues as we start a new term? Are we sharing glimpses of the beauty that intrigue and motivate us? Just as lecture is a piece of the course, each course is embedded within a program, and each program within the ongoing history of a discipline. The transformative concepts and essential knowledge, skills, or values of the discipline are embodied within the program, enacted within the course, seen within the lecture activities, readings and assessments. These central features thus appear as more than just a single layer of foundational ideas. Instead, our programs…