Four weeks. One class. Your undivided attention. In the lab, in the field, on the road, around the world. Come and celebrate with us!
The festival is free and all are invited. Refreshments will be provided.
We’re excited that you want to celebrate the work of your students who have been exploring the depth and breadth of a single course for an intense four weeks! Please sign up for the Spring Term Festival to tell us what you’ll need to be able to showcase your students’ work. The more information you can provide, the better.
We will do our very best to honor all requests. Please keep in mind that we will honor requests in the order in which they are submitted. Thank you!
To support W&L’s commitment to diversity and inclusion, ITS is committed to ensuring that web and online content is accessible to all. As such, we are in the process of making WordPress sites more web accessible for individuals with disabilities.
As part of that process, we would like your assistance with educational course sites created in WordPress, in particular, course sites that are public-facing.
No action is necessary during the term, but after the end of the current term, we will request your permission to change the visibility settings on created course sites from public to private. This will allow you and your enrolled students access to the site after the term, but will restrict access beyond your class.
We have worked to ensure that all themes and settings are accessibility-ready in our WordPress service, and we will be happy to work with you at that point to ensure your added content meets these guidelines as well.
Whew! We did it! We made it! What a great fall! We wish everyone a safe and happy, relaxing, restful winter break, and we look forward to seeing you in January 2019!
(For any of you overachievers, here’s a great, curated Lynda.com playlist created especially for students: Skills and Tools for Student Success.
If you want to prepare yourself for academic success by exploring the top tools and skills students need to effectively organize their work, present their knowledge, and prepare to transition to their careers, then this playlist is for you. Annnnnnnndddddd if you need to focus on getting some R&R, we totally understand!)
In this weekly series on being productive with technology, Lynda.com authors Jess Stratton, Garrick Chow, and Nick Brazzi introduce tools and tips to help make today’s software and devices work more efficiently and powerfully for you. With everything from pointers on using Microsoft Office and Google platforms to learning social networking skills and discovering the most useful apps for your iPhone or Android device, there’s something for everyone.
This week’s pointers: Safely clearing drive space in macOS
Want to receive our newsletter? We’ll send only one or two emails per semester, promise! Sign up is easy! Just go to http://go.wlu.edu/acadtechsignup.
We promise we will never SPAM you with unwanted emails. We respect your privacy and will never share your email address with any person or organization.
The Center for Academic Resources and Pedagogical Excellence (CARPE) will be a state-of-the-art Teaching and Learning Center. It will have two primary functions: CARPE will support faculty development towards becoming ever better teachers, through workshops, experimental classrooms, presentations, practice space, and uses of new technology and techniques in teaching; and CARPE will support student learning, through tutoring expertise, a writing and communication center, executive function support, group and individual learning sessions, and uses of new technologies for learning.
Members of the CARPE Task Force discuss the impact that CARPE will have on the campus, including benefits for faculty and students and changes to Leyburn Library. Watch below!
What do you think is important for an instructor to do when using classroom response systems (polling software or clickers)? Select all that apply.
A) Choose questions that most students will be able to answer correctly. B) Vary the types of poll questions beyond multiple choice. C) Ask students “Please discuss your answer with a neighbor.” D) Stress that students answer questions independent of their peers.
Note:Kelly Hogan and Viji Sathy will be presenting at Winter Academy! Sign up for “Leveraging Technology to Cultivate an Inclusive Classroom” on Monday, December 10th at 9:15 am in Hillel 101 at go.wlu.edu/winteracademy.
Early in my career, I focused most of my efforts on teaching content. That is, after all, what most of us are hired to do, right? With experience and greater understanding of how learning works, my attention shifted toward metacognition. I began investing lots of time and energy reading and identifying ways to help students grow as learners while they learned the content.
Marcos E. García-Ojeda wants to improve his teaching. He has flipped his classroom and embraced active-learning techniques. And he’s even invited some observers to sit in on his “General Microbiology” class here at the University of California at Merced on a recent afternoon.
The observers will give Mr. García-Ojeda, an associate teaching professor of biology, a detailed depiction of the teaching and learning in his class — actions that are central to a college’s purpose but rarely examined.
This examination is especially unusual because of who’s performing it: undergraduates.
We all endorse it and we all want our students to do it. We also claim to teach it. “It” is critical thinking, and very few of us actually teach it or even understand what it is (Paul & Elder, 2013).
Our Pedagogy and Pizza Luncheons has been a huge success. Thanks for joining us for lively and thought-provoking discussions. For the Winter term, we’re going to try something a little different … a faculty development book club!
We buy the book, you read it, and we all show up to talk/listen/debate over coffee and pastries catered by Pronto Caffè & Gelateria!
The book we’ve chosen is “Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School“. John Medina, a molecular biologist, researcher, and professor, takes what neuroscientists have learned about the brain and explains it in a way so that anybody can understand. With countless references to peer-reviewed studies, Medina explains 12 basic principles that help you understand how the brain functions. Having a better understanding of how the brain works means (hopefully!) that we can use our brain the way it was designed to be used and change the way we think about learning, so that we can be more impactful teachers.
If interested, please sign up at go.wlu.edu/pbj (PBJ = Pedadogy, Books, and Java). Enrollment is limited to 10, so register for your spot now!
But we still managed to have a great time at our second Pedagogy and Pizza luncheon. Today’s topic was about the use of technology in the classroom.
For years, professors, administrators, and policy makers alike have weighed the benefits of technology in education against its risks and consequences. And the debate is more pressing than ever, as curricula increasingly incorporate technology and professors try new methods of teaching and assessment. On one hand, using technology in the classroom allows you to experiment in pedagogy, democratize the classroom, and better engage students. On the other hand, some argue that phones, tablets, and laptops in the classroom are unhelpful, distracting, and could even potentially foster cheating.
Michael Laughy, Classics, gave an overview of the approaches that he takes in his classes. In Beginning Greek, almost all the readings and resources he assigns are in a digital form, so the use of technology is required. But that’s not the case with Intermediate and Advanced Greek – online resources and apps are not to be used when translating text.
In Mackenzie Brooks’s Digital Culture and Information (DCI) class, students work together to design an agreement for classroom norms, rules, and consequences, part of which includes the acceptable use of devices during class time. Mackenzie believes that students HAVE to learn how to manage distractions. Some day, in the not too distant future, they’ll be expected to perform sustained, focused work and effectively handling distractions and interruptions will be key.
Paul Youngman, German, was the last to offer his thoughts. His take is that teaching literature and teaching a language are two different birds, which call for, and exclude, different tools.
Thanks to all for coming out!
Michael Laughy, Classics
Michael Laughy, Classics
The classes for which Professor Laughy allows and bans technology
Mackenzie Brooks, Assistant Professor and Digital Humanities Librarian
Mackenzie Brooks, Assistant Professor and Digital Humanities Librarian
Paul Youngman, Associate Provost, Redenbaugh Professor of German, Avowed Hater of Cursive Handwriting
