Instruction

Time for the learning to happen! Your students show up for the first day of class. You walk in and…?

What are your strategies for making the most of your time with students for their learning? A somewhat unsettling thought is that all your efforts could be for naught – your teaching efforts don’t always mean learning is happening. Often, there are strategies we can employ that actually help our students learn well. 

We want to help you employ these strategies by helping you build your toolbox, consider different ways to deliver teaching, figure out useful questions tactics to promote thinking, how to establish your presence, how to make the most of the first day of class and get to know your students, how to connect your course to place, a tool for preventing plagiarism and how to leverage technology to support learning.

Educational Developers Cookbook

Digital RecipeThis is a collection of practical ideas offered for use by the educational development community.  Based on the notion of a cook book.  Offering Starters (icebreakers), Main Courses (ideas for workshops and events) and Desserts (ways to obtain feedback or evaluation).

How about an icebreaker using coins? Or a stoplight assessment to check comprehension? Would you like to speed date your syllabus? Who wouldn't?  There are dozens of active learning strategies explained here to support CMTN's mission to create adventurous pathways to transform lives. Happy Cooking!

Credit to York University and other contributors from the educational development community for this excellent resource.

 

unsplash-logo Annie Spratt

 

Technology and teaching

Technology is always evolving. Consider these quotes:

"Students today can’t prepare bark to calculate their problems. They depend on their slates which are more expensive. What will they do when their slate is dropped and it breaks? They will be unable to write!”
Teachers Conference, 1703
"Students today depend upon paper too much. They don’t know how to write on slate without chalk dust all over themselves. They can’t clean a slate properly. What will they do when they run out of paper?”
Principal’s Association, 1815
"Students today depend too much upon ink. They don’t know how to use a pen knife to sharpen a pencil. Pen and ink will never replace the pencil.”
National Association of Teachers, 1907

Source: whiteboardblog.co.uk/2008/01/why-change/


These make us chuckle because we can see how slate then paper then pens didn’t ruin learning, but do we ever respond the same way when a new piece of technology is presented to us? When teaching, technology is never the point (using tech for tech’s sake), rather learning is the point and we must ask how the technology can help us, as instructors, help our students learn and we must be willing to expand our comfort zones and learn to make a friend out of technology for learning.

Some of the tools we have available to us today, such as touchscreen projectors, document readers, Brightspace (D2L), video conferencing, virtual reality, and smart phones are avenues to create interest, communication and learning. We want to help you find some ways to make this possible in your classroom.

Resources