Category: Resources

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Save the Date! Perusall Exchange 2021, May 17-28

Perusall - Every student prepared for every class

Perusall is a social reading platform that allows students and instructors to collaboratively markup documents (PDF, EPUB, Word and Excel documents, source code files); video that is hosted on YouTube, Vimeo, Google Drive, or Dropbox; podcasts; and websites.

Students help each other learn by collectively annotating readings in threads, responding to each other’s comments, and interacting with one another.

Only 20-30% of students in the average classroom do assigned reading; in Perusall classes, > 90% consistently do the reading. Peer-reviewed, published, and patented research shows that Perusall works.

Incredible stuff, right? And there’s even MORE to be excited about!

From May 17-28, Perusall will host an asynchronous social learning conference with more than 50 sessions across a diverse array of disciplines that highlight innovative pedagogical approaches by instructors using the platform.

You will be able to pick and choose the sessions that pique your interest — whenever it suits your schedule — and engage with the presenters and other participants asynchronously using the Perusall platform.

At the end of the conference, presenters and participants will gather in a live session to continue the discussion.

Among the sessions currently scheduled are:

  • Perusall Pedagogy for Inclusivity and Active Learning
  • From Novice to Expert: Developing Students’ Metacognitive Reading Practices with Perusall
  • Just in Time Chemistry in Perusall
  • Small Teaching: Building Community in the Online Classroom
  • Analyzing the Breaks: Teaching Hip Hop History with Perusall

Sign up now!

We’ll be there. Will you?

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Wall Street Journal: How to Teach Professors Humility? Hand Them a Rubik’s Cube

Sandy Roberson sent a note to professors at Furman University and Denison University in mid-December with a simple message.
 
“Failure is not an option,” she wrote on a discussion board frequented by a few dozen other academics.
 
Three weeks later, the veteran Furman accounting professor reconsidered and abandoned her assignment. She had been bested by a Rubik’s cube.
 
Ms. Roberson was among roughly 30 faculty members from the two schools who had signed on to a winter-break challenge: learn to solve the cube-shaped puzzle in five minutes or less, within six weeks. And, in the process, learn to become better instructors by being reminded what it’s like to be a novice.
 
“After you do something for a very long time, it just becomes second nature,” said Lew Ludwig. The math professor at Denison, in Granville, Ohio, runs the school’s Center for Learning and Teaching and coordinated the challenge with a counterpart at Furman, in Greenville, S.C. The schools are members of an organization for faculty development at small colleges. “The brain does not like new stuff,” he said. “Learning is hard.”
 
Amen to that!  Read the rest of this article by Melissa Korn.
 
Thanks to Senior Academic Technologist Brandon Bucy for sharing this great article AND these thoughts:
 
“I’ve always thought the expert-novice divide is one of the hardest things to get around when teaching.  We honestly forget how much we struggled in the past with a concept before mastering it, and can’t relate to our struggling students or really help them in a meaningful way except to encourage them to continue the struggle.  I think in a way it represents the internally chaotic nature of learning, that “learning” itself is somehow non-rememberable once you get through it.”
 
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Digital Exit Tickets

What’s an Exit Ticket?

pink exit ticketAn exit ticket is simply a question posed to all students at the end of class/the week/unit of study.

Student responses provide you with immediate insight that you can use to assess students’ understanding, monitor their questions, or gather feedback on your teaching and, if necessary, adjust or adapt your instructional strategies.

In  Art and Science of Teaching/The Many Uses of Exit Slips, Robert J. Marzano suggests 4 different types of prompts for exit tickets:
 

Provide formative assessment data:

    • What was the big idea of today’s lesson?
    • What was the most important thing you learned in today’s class? Why is it important?
    • What is the most difficult question you have about what you learned today?
    • How could the knowledge you learned today be used in the real world?
    • What’s one thing you want to practice again?
    • What are you struggling to understand at the moment?

Stimulate student reflection/analysis:

    • What could you have done today to help yourself learn better?
    • What part of the lesson surprised you?
    • Which part of today’s lesson was most interesting?
    • I used to think … but now I know…
    • What is something you weren’t sure about at the start of class but understand now?
    • Imagine a friend missed class today. How would you explain what we covered in 25 words or less?
    • If you were creating a quiz about today’s class, what are two questions you’d include?
    • How can you apply something you learned today to another class or subject?
    • How can you apply what you learned today to your own life?

Focus on instructional strategies:

    • How did the group work today help you understand the content? What are some things you’d like to see during group work in the future?
    • We did a concept map activity in class today. Was this a useful learning activity for you? Why or why not?
    • Did you value the group activity today? Do you think the activity or task would have been better done alone?
    • Which of the readings was most helpful in preparing you for class? Why?

Offer open communications:

    • What could I do differently to help you understand better
    • What is one thing you’d like me to explain more clearly?
    • What’s one change we could make to the way we learn in this class?
    • What’s one thing you’d like me to START doing in class?
    • What’s one thing you’d like me to STOP doing in class?
    • What’s one thing you’d like me to CONTINUE doing in class?

Ideally, exit tickets are no more than one or two short, open-ended (when possible) questions that take students less than 5 minutes to complete. 

Tools you can use to implement exit tickets

Microsoft Forms

 
Microsoft Forms example of an exit ticket form
Click this image to view this one question Exit Ticket form

Poll Everywhere

Poll Everywhere one question exit ticket survey

3 question Exit Ticket survey in Poll Everywhere

Need a Poll Everywhere account? Email the ITS Information Desk at help@wlu.edu or call 540.458.4357 (HELP).

Polling for Zoom meetings

  1. Enable Polls in Zoom
  2. Create a Poll
  3. Launch a Poll

Anonymous Ungraded Survey in Canvas

Exit Ticket survey in Canvas

Flipgrid

My Ah-ha Moment! Flipgrid exit ticket
Click to view this Flipgrid exit ticket!

Do you use exit tickets in your class? Have they been helpful? If you have any thoughts to share, we’d love to hear ’em!

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If there’s one tweet you need to read, read THIS one!

Thematically, it sounds as if instructors are embracing:

  • Zoom office hours in place of — or in addition to — face-to-face office hours
  • greater flexibility (soft deadlines/due dates, choices/alternatives in projects)
  • collaborative annotating of readings (Perusall, hypothes.is) 
  • open book and open note quizzes and tests OR shifting from tests to assignments/projects
  • scheduling “break days” into the syllabus
  • allowing themselves to be “real” (allowing pets to show up on camera)
  • actively checking in on how students are doing physically/emotionally/mentally 

This thread is pure gold. Many thanks to Professor Dennie for asking this great question!

BONUS: W&L Peeps You Should be Following on Twitter (If we’ve missed someone, please let us know!)

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130 IDEAS FOR CHECK-IN QUESTIONS DURING REMOTE LEARNING

Taking time to connect with each student not only helps maintain relationships but also allows us an opportunity to gather important data to inform our assessment. It gives US feedback on the effectiveness of what we are doing. In a bricks and mortar environment, this would be equivalent to informal checkins through the day or the kind of personalised conversations we have when we confer with students individually and in small groups. 

By scheduling regular check-ins with our students, we gather data that can inform plans for ‘where to next’ for their learning.  

Check out this great resource  (.PDF) compiled from the audience of “Inquiry by the Fire” with Kimberly Mitchell, Trevor Mackenzie and Kath Murdoch.

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How can I create an inclusive online learning environment?

Creating an Inclusive Online Learning Environment
Friday, October 2, 2020, 3:00pm ET

10/2/2020 ACUE webinar: Creating an Inclusive Online Learning Environment

Panelists will share practices they have found helpful to effectively set expectations for valuing diverse viewpoints, facilitating respectful conversations, and engaging students in inclusive active learning exercises. The teaching practices discussed in this FREE webinar can be utilized in a variety of disciplines and course sizes to promote equity and inclusion.

Moderated by Charity Peak, Regional Director of Academic Programs at ACUE, this panel will feature a brief keynote from Michael Benitez Jr., Vice President for the Office of Diversity and Inclusion at Metropolitan State University, Denver.

Register NOW!

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What’s New in Perusall: You can now add VIDEO! ?? ?? ??

  • Your students can now engage socially around video content in the same way they already can around books, articles, and other documents. Go to Library > Add > Video and select a video from YouTube, Vimeo, Google Drive, Dropbox, or a video file hosted elsewhere to add to your course.
  • You can now allow colleagues to copy your course (your documents, assignments, instructor-initiated threads, and settings) without having to give them instructor access to your course. Go to Settings > Access to obtain your course’s unique “copy code” that another instructor can use to copy from your course. Instructors with your copy code can copy the content in your course but have no access to student data.
  • You can now use more flexible search syntax to search books and other documents, like a web search: search for exact phrases by enclosing them in quotation marks, indicate that a word must appear with a plus sign, or indicate that a word must not appear with a minus sign. Visit the search page on Perusall’s support site for more information.
  • When you use the Canvas integration, Perusall can now mirror your Canvas groups within Perusall, avoiding the need to define groups manually in Perusall. Visit the Canvas setup page on Perusall’s support site for more information.
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Excellent advice and practical tips for moving to virtual recorded learning!

Gearing up for asynchronous lecturing and thinking about student engagement in online and/or hybrid courses? Then set aside a few minutes to read this terrific thread with practical tips and tricks on lecture capture. Many thanks to @vijisathy for compiling and sharing your thoughts about creating a “high-structure active learning classroom”.