Education Building

There is an interesting blog posting on creating a dynamic and updatable online syllabus using Google Spreadsheet and Calendar. I can see how well it could work, and then you could embed it anywhere – on your website, in the blog system, or WebCT.

A round-up of some recent (and not so recent) postings and musing on clickers in the classroom.

Clickers are multiple choice question: how do you use them to encourage critical thinking? From the same author, more thoughts on using clickers in a statistics course.

This posting is short and with some very specific hints and tricks to using clickers. It offers opinions (but not lots of discussion) on topics such as how many questions you should ask per class, what to do if students forget their clickers, and aligning questions with specific learning goals.

Why using clickers just for attendance is not the ideal.

It comes down to writing effective questions for different situations or objectives.

In my wanders in the internet today, I came across a 2002 article called Teaching to the Six*. In, Michael Berube discuss’ his acceptance of the fact that he cannot reach all his student. That “for half or more of the than half of the students in an undergraduate-survey classroom, you are a node in their lives just as they are nodes in yours.” It’s a delicate balance that I think he plays with. Some instructors who accept that they teach to their six can be dismissive or angry at the other 12 to 18 – how do you find an acceptance of who your students are, and what you are to your students?

*from the journal: Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition and Culture. Volume 2, Number 1. Available from the SFU library

I am trying to catch up on my blog reading (over 500 unread postings in Google Reader), and as a result, I have a few links that I’ve starred, am planning to incorporate into a project, or just plain old resonated with me.

Writer as Athlete over at Profhacker.com compares the writer to the athlete. You can (and I will) also extend this to teachers. Advice like plan ahead, be resilient to “failure” and find your focus are all ideas worth remembering. It seems like everyone is talking about how we’ve got too much to do, so here is a link to the Academic Life and the Get Things Done approach.

Did you know that our neighbors at BCIT have a blog? They’ve linked to an article that suggests that learning styles might not be a big determining factor in teaching.

And then FacultyFocus had a nice posting on making peer assessment actually a working idea, not just a good idea.