Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Instructional Tuesday - Daily Experts

An instructional tool called Daily Experts utilizes students in your class as experts for a day.  These experts are used to review content from the previous class session, ask opinions about content, and give students a chance to share their relevant experiences.

Read about one instructors experience and success in using Daily Experts:

"I get to know my students' names and I am more likely to remember them outside of class as well. Indirectly, my use of daily experts encourages class attendance. Students want to be there when their name appears on the PowerPoint. They don't want to hear from their classmates, "You missed being a daily expert today" or have me say, "I missed you in class today; you were one of my daily experts." I also benefit because using daily experts forces me to teach in another way—a way that gets me focused on individuals. "
 
http://www.magnapubs.com/blog/teaching-and-learning/daily-experts-a-technique-to-encourage-student-participation/?track=email&utm_source=cheetah&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Mar%2026%20TP%20Content%20Based

Monday, March 26, 2012

Moodle Monday - ION Resource

Today's Moodle Monday is a resource of activities from the Illinois Online Network (ION).
http://www.ion.uillinois.edu/resources/otai/

On this page you will find a plethora of activities with examples to use in your online or enhanced courses.    Explore the site for ideas to engage and motivate your learners.

Some examples:
Hypothetical Discussions -  students are posed a hypothetical situation to analyze
KWL - Ask students what they Know/What to Know/ and have Learned
Wikis - Group collaboration on a document

Monday, March 19, 2012

Upcoming Events Block - Moodle Monday

The Upcoming Events block will show your students any upcoming events you have in your calender.   This is one simple way to help your students be organized and manage their work load in an online course.

To turn the block on: turn course editing on, go to the add blocks block, select 'upcoming events'.

Adjust the settings:  The default for this block is to show the next 20 upcoming events.  This may be too long a list or too many events for a user to focus on to be helpful.   To change this setting go to your calender settings.  (click on calendar in your course menu or click "go to calendar' in the Upcoming Events block)  Once you are there click on preferences.  On this screen you can adjust the maximum upcoming events.   We suggest five to seven events.

The upcoming events block showing the next five events.

Click on the Preferences to adjust settings for the upcoming events block.

Change this setting to five or seven.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Linky Thursday


It’s once again time for Linky Thursday.

Do you ever use snippets from popular movies in your classes? teachwithmovies.org provides lesson plans and discussion guides for a wide variety of movies.

Visual imagery is an important tool of communication. Create graphs and charts easily at hohli.com

Connexions is an open source repository for instructor created modules. Explore the site at:

Merlot is another source for peer reviewed teaching and learning materials, sorted by discipline.

One more repository of learning objects can be found at http://www.wisc-online.com/listobjects.aspx

Monday, March 12, 2012

Finishing Strong - the last 8 weeks

Coming back from a break in the middle of the semester it is sometimes hard to switch gears into school mode again, so much more so for our learners.   Reminding students of your course objectives can help them focus their learning and motivate them to stongly finish the semester.  Having a short discussion with students about what they have learned and what they are expecting to learn can help you focus your instructional time.

A few ideas to help your students jump back into the class and finish the last eight weeks well are:
  1.  If you started your semester with an Syllabus quiz, give the quiz again, or modify it slightly to focus on the last half of the semester. 
  2. Show a PowerPoint slideshow as students enter the room with course objectives and upcoming due dates. 
  3. Take a few minutes at the start of your next class to review objectives. 
  4. Remind students of the successes they have accomplished so far, then discuss your expectations for the rest of the semester.  
  5. Use a discussion forum as a litmus test to gain an understanding of how well students are meeting your objectives by asking broad content questions.  
  6. Have a class discussion asking broad questions about content already covered can help you understand what they have learned.   Questions related to future objectives will help you plan for the last half of your semester. Which may save you class time.
  7. Create a concept web of content covered so far.