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Supporting Your Flipped Classroom with Open Resources
[social_share/] [social-bio] We’ve talked about flipped classrooms in this space before. In a nutshell, flipped classrooms involve taking the regular lecture style content out of the classroom and assigning it as homework prior to coming to class. The majority of the time, this involves having the students watch videos, often created by the instructor, to prepare for class. Recently I came across the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) and have considered how it would couple with a flipped classroom. The Open Learning Initiative “is a grant-funded group at Carnegie Mellon University, offering innovative online courses to anyone who wants to learn or teach. [Their] aim is to create high-quality courses and contribute…
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You’ve Got Teaching Problems? This Site Has the Answers!
[social_share/] [social-bio] When I was recently scouring the Internet for good teaching resources, I came across an exceptional site. The Solving a Teaching Problem webpage from the Eberly Center: Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation takes teachers through three steps to find practical solutions to teaching problems. As I walk through the process, Step 1 asks me to identify a problem that I am experiencing in my teaching. For example, “Students don’t seek help when they need it”. In Step 2, I am provided with a list of possible reasons for this problem. In this case, some possible reasons are “Students overestimate their understanding and ability Students may perceive you as…
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What Do Automobile Engines and Educational Innovation Have in Common?
[social-bio] Recently, someone recommended that I read “Design Research for Sustained Innovation” by Carl Bereiter. Although, the article was published in 2002, I found it to be very relevant today. The premise of the article is that, “innovative practices seldom win out against those with a long evolutionary history” (p. 321). This is not only true in education, but in all aspects of human life. He makes a thought-provoking comparison between innovation in education and innovation in the automobile engine. The automobile engine has drawbacks related to the reciprocating piston that were recognized early. Bereiter explains that the a “better engine” called the Wankel engine was invented in the 1920s,…
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So You’re Thinking of Flipping your Class: We Can Help
[social-bio] Perhaps you’ve been hearing rumblings about flipped teaching. Maybe you even read my post about it in December (What is Flipped Teaching?). If you haven’t heard of it, flipped teaching is, “the process of moving lecture content from face-to-face class time to before class by assigning it as homework. This allows for more interactive and student-centred types of learning to take place during the scheduled class time. Flipped teaching often involves, but is not limited to, students viewing lecture videos as homework.” So, now that we’re all on the same page, I am pleased to announce a new support from the Gwenna Moss Centre that we’re referring to as…
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Backchannels In Education
[social-bio] If you have attended a conference in the past year, then you probably at least heard about the conference’s “backchannel”. Essentially, a backchannel is a conversation that is taking place during an event, alongside the main activity or presentation. At conferences, this often takes place on Twitter by attendees using a hashtag for the event. For example, we have created a hashtag for our upcoming Teaching and Learning to the Power of Technology conference (TLt 2013) and will encourage those in attendance to discuss the presentations on Twitter by including “#tlt13” in their tweets. By using the hashtag, those in attendance can follow the discussion by searching #tlt13 on…
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PLN (Personal Learning Network): What, Why, and How?
[social-bio] Do you work in a specialized field? Do you work in a small department? Do you ever wish you had colleagues that you could share ideas with or someone to bounce teaching ideas off of? The answers to these questions are expectedly “yes” for most faculty members. One way to address these questions is by creating a Personal Learning Network (PLN). A PLN is an informal group of people that you can learn from and along with. The difficulty with creating a PLN is the fact that you may not be able to find people with common interests, skills and subject-matter knowledge. This is where the Internet comes in.…
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Planning or Re-Designing a Course: Where to Begin
[social-bio] You have a new course to plan or are planning to re-design a current course. Where do you begin? The place where you should begin is technically called a front-end analysis, but could be thought of as the pre-planning you do before you actually start lesson planning. The first step involves exploring what it is that the instruction or course is intended to do. For example, ask yourself the question, “What do we want students to be able to do after taking this course that they can’t do now?” You should take a moment to confirm that this is an instructional problem, which is, “a problem that can be…
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What is Flipped Teaching?
[social-bio] Flipped teaching is a new instructional method that has risen with the proliferation of high-speed Internet connections. Flipped teaching is the process of moving lecture content from face-to-face class time to before class by assigning it as homework. Often this involves students watching lecture videos prior to coming to class. Why would you want to do this? The reason to use flipped teaching is to be able to use interactive learning methods within face-to-face class time. Rather than spending an hour lecturing, you can spend the hour having students working on problems independently or in groups, working on or discussing cases, group discussion, receiving assistance from you…anything you want!…
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Google Docs for Teaching and Learning
[social-bio] Google Docs have been around for about five years now and it “…is a free, Web-based office suite and data storage service offered by Google within its Google Drive service. It allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating in real-time with other users” (Wikipedia) I originally found Google Docs to be very convenient to be able to have access to my files on multiple computers. As I have experimented with them more, I have found them to be extremely useful in an educational setting. I have used them as both a teacher and also as a grad student. Note that once you create a document you…
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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…