Two years ago, we hosted a session on lectio divina which married two prominent themes in CAT programming: our campus-wide initiative, "Read Today Lead Tomorrow," and contemplative practice. The session was well-received but only hinted at the rich possibilities of contemplative reading, and some participants expressed a desire for more information.
Therefore we are pleased to report that noted scholar Robert-Louis Abrahamson has published a guide on "contemplative engagement with a text." This is not a technique per se; it's more of an attitude. Nevertheless, Abrahamson does prescribe six steps in a clear pattern, with plenty of substantive advice for teachers.
How can higher education best address global environmental challenges? How can we most meaningfully teach and research about environmental issues? How can we cultivate our inner lives through active engagement with environmental challenges?
This workshop explores the contribution of contemplative practices to scholarly inquiry and teaching in environmental studies. Through discussions with distinguished scholars, focused conversations among colleagues, artistic exercises, and regular contemplative practice (meditation, yoga, journaling, and nature walks), participants will investigate ways to deepen their teaching, research, and lives at this historic moment of environmental intensification.
Part workshop and part retreat, this 6-day summer institute provides an opportunity to step back from the frenetic pace of our lives, and cultivate our inner resources and nurture the resiliency we need as teachers committed to education on a fragile and wild planet.
Hopefully by now you've gotten in the habit of using your CAT XX water bottle, bringing it with you to CAT events, and refilling it at our shiny new bottle-filling station.
You may wonder why we decided to stop purchasing flats of bottled water.
Edutopia's 53 Ways to Check for Understanding offers several quick and easy activities for formative assessment. While these were established for a face to face environment, I think we can adapt several of them to our online/hybrid courses.
A number of the formative assessments listed require defining, identifying objectives, explaining why a reading is important, etc. For these types of assessments, Blackboard offers an array of discussion boards, wikis, journals, etc. They can be set up for students to view other postings and comment, thus providing opportunities for dialogue and collaboration.
Suggestion 20 is to create a collage using the themes from the current lesson. A word cloud can be used for this activity and it can be uploaded in a discussion board. Wordle is commonly used, but here is one I created from Tagxedo (Also item 35 in this article)--can you tell the topic I chose?
I've successfully used Item 45, Bio Poem, in my French classes. In my case, I used this idea for the students to practice using newly learned French vocabulary by describing themselves, but it can certainly be used to as a formative assessment check to make sure the students understand literary characters or historical figures. For those unfamiliar with the Bio Poem, here are the items to include:
Line 1: First Name
Line 2: 3-4 adjectives that describe the person
Line 3: An important relationship
Line 4: 2-3 things, people or ideas that the person loved
Line 5: 3 feelings the person experienced
Line 6: 3 fears the person experienced
Line 7: Accomplishments
Line 8: 2-3 things the person experienced or wanted to see happen
Line 9: Person's place of residence
Line 10: Last name
Let's be creative ourselves! Complete this bio poem about yourself or a literary or historical figures and share with us in a post!
Social media has evolved into more than a simple tool to stay in touch with friends or to share vacation pictures. Educators are finding interesting ways to use social media in their teaching and learning. Benefits to using social media in teaching and learning include putting concepts into context, keeping course content up-to-date, and fostering a sense of community both in and out of the classroom.
Facebook and Twitter may be ubiquitous, but there are many other social media tools out there that can enhance teaching and learning.
Facebook and Twitter are social media tools that are familiar to most people. Here are a few other social media tools that are being used in education:
If you setup a discussion forum with date and time restrictions, once the scheduled available time has passed the forum becomes unavailable and disappears from the student's view. If you would like students to be able to read posts once the date restriction has past but not be able to submit new posts, you can "lock" the discussion thread to prevent new posts. Students may read the threads but not make any additions or modifications.
Follow these steps to do it.
To lock discussion board threads, you should:
Open the Forum in the Discussion Board.
Select the threads you want to lock (you can select all threads by checking the box to the left of “Date” in the header).
Click the [Thread Actions] menu button and choose [Lock] from the list. Verify the status under the discussion board shows "Locked".
Once you have successfully locked the thread, remember to go back and edit the forum to remove the date and time restrictions so that the students can see the threads.
QR (QR being short for Quick Response) codes were first created in 1994 by Toyota to track vehicles in manufacturing using a small barcode that allowed for high-speed component scanning. Although initially used for tracking parts in vehicle manufacturing, QR code technology is experiencing a revival — but not in the automotive industry. The small, square codes are ubiquitous, showing up on everything from billboards and flyers to food packaging.
QR codes allow people to connect to video, audio, pictures, web sites and more by linking the individual to content on any supported smart phone or with a desktop reader. With the increasing use of mobile technology, QR codes are becoming more common in business and educational settings. The possibilities for their use are endless, and many translate into the classroom, offering a fun and exciting way for students to use technology for learning. If you are interested in how you might utilize QR codes in teaching and learning, read more in this article 50 Great Ways to Use QR Codes in the College Classroom.
Are you using QR codes? If so, we would like to hear about it. Please feel free to leave a comment telling us how you are using QR codes in your teaching and learning.
You can use the course calendar to provide students with dates for course-related events. Instructors can create events on their respective course calendars. Everyone who is enrolled in the course will see the course-related events in their calendar.
The calendar displays a consolidated view of all institution, course, organization, and personal calendar events. You can view events by day, week, or month. Color coding makes it easy to distinguish which course each event is tied to.
Common calendar entries include:
Instructor office hours
Due dates for assignments
Exams
Guest speakers
Meetings
Course items with due dates are automatically created in the course calendar. If an instructor edits an item to change the due date, the calendar gets updated as well.
Drag and drop works in the calendar. Instructors can drag and drop an item onto a new date to change the due date.
As a shortcut to view, edit, or grade attempts for an item, instructors can simply click on the item in the calendar.
You cannot import external calendars into Blackboard. However, you can import your Bb Learn calendar into an external calendar application (i.e., Google Calendar, iCal).
Follow these steps to do it.
To create a new event on the course calendar:
On the calendar, click the plus (+) to create a new event or click a specific date to create an event.
Type the New Event Name.
Select the course calendar to associate the event to.
Select the Start and End times.
Type the Event Description.
Click [Save].
To add a course item with a due date to the course calendar:
When you create items with due dates, the calendar event automatically appears on the course calendar. Content items with adaptive release and availability rules are shown on the calendar at the appropriate time, ensuring that the release of an item on the course calendar is in sync with the availability rules you set.
To edit or delete an event:
Click the event to edit or delete it. OR
Click and drag the event to another date in the main view (or on the smaller monthly view) to change the due date of the event. The time of the event and calendar it is associated with remain the same.
If the event is a course item that has date availability rules set, you should edit the item to adjust the availability dates.
Did you experiment with avatars when they were the latest craze some years ago? Maybe you created one (or more) to enjoy gaming experiences such as Second Life. Mardi Gras is a great time to re-visit the use of avatars in education because, like masking for carnival, avatars can provide you and your students with opportunities for role-playing as well as creating conversations and presentations as well as providing information. Anecdotally, my students used to tell me that if I send them a message in the form of an avatar, they'll actually open it and listen to it because they're fun and different and not boring like words on a page. As a French instructor, I would ask the students to create an avatar that speaks French or have them use the avatar to explain a cultural event we were learning.
Voki is the most popular free site for education, although there is a paid version of it too. It belongs to the company that offers a premium range of services for monthly fees called Site Pal.
If you would like to use simple avatars to dress up an email or announcement to your students or have the students create an avatar for a particular assignment, then you can start with the free site, Voki. Voki will allow you to create one-time avatars and messages without signing up for an account. Here are the directions:
1. Once on Voki.com, click on the Create tab, top left of the page.
2. Choose Customize your Character and then play around a bit to check out the facial features, clothing, etc. When finished, click the small green Done tab at the bottom right corner.
3. Next choose Give it a Voice. You'll see a variety of options from calling in or recording your text so that the voki will have your voice, to typing a message and choosing one of the voices already programmed. Note that if you type the text and choose a voice, there will be no emotion and some of the words may not be pronounced as you wish. This is the choice I made for the little voki below so that you could hear what I'm explaining. I also had to spell phonetically, Happy Mardi Grah, so that the US voice would not pronounce the "s". Remember to click the green Done tab at the bottom right corner.
4. Choose a background next.
5. Choose a player, the frame for the voki with the buttons the receivers will click on.
6. Happy with your voki? Click publish and name it. When you click "publish" you receive the option to email a friend, link to it via the website, or copy the code to embed the voki as I did below.
Site Pal, the premium site intended for the corporate world, is much more robust and not only offers simple avatars like Voki, but other ways to use them. My colleague who teaches Spanish and I have experimented with Artificial Intelligence in the form of a Graduate Assistant avatar. You may have seen something similar if you shop online catalogs. Our Grad Assistant was available with a click on any page in the language course. She popped up and asked how she could help. The student would type in a question, and if we had programmed in an answer for it, she would explain it to them. We used the idea of a Graduate Assistant, but you could design an avatar that's YOU answering their questions, and thus be available for your students 24/7! Instead of masking as someone or something different for Mardi Gras, here you would be creating a "virtual you" who can keep working as you try to sleep or grade or research. Sound intriguing? If so, contact me and let's talk avatars!
