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Poll Everywhere Conversations and Recommendations
By Kristine Dreaver-Charles, Academic Innovation Specialist with Academic Innovation Technologies The challenge of technology is when it fails. I’ve had those moments of presenting or trying to demonstrate something and my technology just does not do what I intended. Sometimes it is the technology. Sometimes it’s the hardware. But sometimes it’s me and I’ve forgotten a critical step. Ultimately, I am aiming to fail forward and learn from the experience rather than give up completely. If you’ve tried Poll Everywhere and been challenged by it not doing what you need or expect, consider what support you need and where you can find it. My usual beginning point is to talk…
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Getting AI to make questions for you
You know you should make your class active. Asking students regular, low stakes questions about the key concepts, skills, and process you are teaching is essential. In a 50 minute lesson, it is great to do that 5 times. You shouldn’t grade any of the questions, and you should asks students to talk with with each other about each one. Even when you know it is important, it can be hard to do. Who actually has time? We wind up avoiding doing making active components because we are already spending so much time making slides of our content and creating assessment we then spend even more time marking. The good…
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Prompting Generative AI to help you plan for your class quickly
Having a good teaching assistant (TA) can be so important. While anyone needs clear direction to grade an essay with the same criteria you use, it is incredibly helpful to have someone help carry the teaching load. Turns out that Generative AI (like Chat GPT) doesn’t just force you to redesign your assessments for academic integrity reasons – with good prompting it can even help you do that redesign. It just needs the clear direction and oversight you give a TA. Learning to prompt can save you time Prompting AI is the process of giving clear parameters for what you want. When you start chatting with an AI you are…
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USask Assessment Principles
In the 2022-23, USask adopted an updated set of principles about how we try to assess students. Here are some tips about using each of the principles in your course. Each principle is defined and related posts are listed. Is aligned with learning outcomes and instructional strategies (assessment of learning). Alignment refers to the process of planning your learning outcomes to describe what your students will be able to do, know or value, and then planning how you will assess and teach based on those outcomes. When align to outcomes, you only gather evidence of academic achievement that is critical to those outcomes. Watch this video what “aligned” means Understand…
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Assessing student participation and attendance
While everyone agrees a grade is designed to represent what a student has learned, some educators also think grade should be used to motivate students. When our students seemed less inclined to attend or participate during and after the pandemic, we turned to something the grading literature does not support – giving a grade for being in class. Here’s a quick summary of what the research says on the subject of grades for participating (like the 1 mark quiz) or attending: You might think What research says What experts recommend Giving a small grade for attendance motivates students to come to class You should include academic achievements, not behavior, in…
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Efficient Feedback
Struggling to learn something? Trying something complex or hard? There is nothing like feedback to help you learn well. For many of us teaching in higher education, however, providing feedback is an aspiration. We know it is important, but we struggle to provide it early or sometimes at all, particularly in large classes. Even when we have specifically designed an activity where students have an experience in an authentic context, we struggle to give timely feedback that students can use to improve their learning. Most of our feedback comes at the end when learning is done (e.g., final paper). It’s laborious, and we question if students are even using it. …
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Grading reflection
We want students to reflect as a part of the learning process, because it helps them to consolidate what they have learned, think about why it is important to them, and be able to apply what they have learned later. But when we get ready to grade that reflection, it can be challenging. How can you determine if someone’s reflection is good enough, and how can you signal that to students so they reflect well and understand the feedback and grades they receive? Step 1 – Clarify why you want students to reflect Start by thinking about your learning outcome. Why is reflection great evidence of learning it, and what…
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Keep it active with classroom polling
After about 15 minutes listening in a large lecture hall, many students’ minds are likely wandering. An easy way to make your class more active and allow your students to see if they are understanding is to use polling software. A poll can be an open text response, multiple choice, and even a visual you interact with. The USask tool is called Poll Everywhere. You can see all the details for how to set up and use Poll Everywhere, including in Canvas, in the Poll Everywhere teaching guide in the Learning Technology Ecosystem. To keep students engaged when you are doing a lot of the talking, space questions and activities…
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You May Have Too Much Content, But What Should You Take Out?
One of my favourite blog posts is actually entitled “Everything you know about curriculum may be wrong, really” and it’s by Grant Wiggins. I know it’s a depressing title, but it speaks to the problem we often have in higher education of thinking of curriculum as content. Wiggins’ post goes back to Dewey and Tyler to clarify that higher education is not about learning the sum of knowledge: “In medicine, engineering, business, and law courses are no longer built backward from content. They are built backward from key performances and problems in the fields.” Since there is always more content as knowledge develops, and I, as an expert, might know…
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Choosing a mix of F2F and remote online? Tips for smoother hybrid approaches
The University has announced a return to campus stating Feb. 7th. With the exception of some specific programs designed to provide hybrid options, instructors are not expected to teach students face to face (F2F) and online at the same time in their F2F course(s). However, you may be trying to provide some extra options for your students in these complicated times, and if you are, here are some tips you may wish to use to help your students avoid pitfalls: Help students hold the details: Review where to find everything in your Canvas course, and remember that half of USask students access Canvas through the app. (see how to video…