Learning Technologies
Getting Started in Blackboard (Mr. Paul Heydenburg)
By Appointment
This one-hour
individualized session will introduce you to the Blackboard instructor
control panel and give you the “hands-on” experience needed to get started
with your own Blackboard course, including working with content, discussion
forums and course management. Please contact 442-4467 to make an
appointment.
Blackboard Intensive Academy (Dr. Anthony Piña)
Friday, Sept. 14, 9am-4pm
OR Friday Oct. 12. 9am-4pm
We have taken Blackboard’s 18-hour $975.00
training and have distilled it into in a one day (free) intensive academy.
You will gain a thorough knowledge of the features of the Blackboard
Learning System and how to enhance your course with these online tools.
Topics to be covered include the following: Copying content between courses;
Working with multimedia content; Creating and managing groups; Managing the
grade book; Using asynchronous & synchronous communication tools; Creating
and deploying tests, surveys & test item pools; Viewing course statistics &
tracking student activity; Exporting, importing, and archiving your course.
Hybrid Course
Development
(Dr. Anthony
Piña)
Tuesday & Thursday,
November 5 & 7, 1:00-4:30pm
In
a “hybrid” course, a significant percentage of a course’s class sessions
occur online, not in a classroom. This workshop is for those who wish to
develop online class sessions for hybrid courses. Participants will engage
in a number of hands-on activities, including: how to determine which
session(s) to put online; how to structure an online session; strategies for
teaching online; using un-graded Blackboard tests for student practice and
feedback; creating narrated PowerPoint and other multimedia materials;
facilitating student interaction and how to keep from getting “buried”.
Participants are to be experienced Blackboard users, as advanced Blackboard
features will be covered.
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Curriculum and Teaching
What does Critical Thinking mean in your Course?
(Dr. Edmund Hansen)
Wednesday, Sept. 12,
1:30-3:00pm – Library, Room 310
Every faculty member teaches students to
think critically. Critical thinking is part of the nature of academic
work, and yet it is also one of the more difficult concepts to define.
Theorists on critical thinking claim that the concept is inherently
discipline-specific, which explains why so many people say, “I know it
when I see it.” This workshop will build on what its participants bring
to the meeting. We will compare what each one of you considers to be
critical thinking in your class and discipline. Then we will talk about
some of the more generic structures of critical thinking and how you can
use them to be more focused in your pursuit of it in your own classes.
Orientation for New and Old Instructors
(Drs. Kate Hahn, Edmund Hansen, & Anthony Piņa)
Saturday, Sep. 15,
10-11:30 a.m., or Tuesday, Sep. 18, 5:30-7:00 p.m. – Library, Room 310
You
will receive a binder with instructor resources for your teaching duties
at NEIU, including information about how to do things on campus and
short handouts with teaching tips on many classroom tasks. We will
describe key characteristics of our new and continuing students. The
workshop ends with a question-and-answer session on technology issues
and anything else you always wanted to ask.
Creating
Informal Writing Activities
(Dr. Kate Hahn)
Wednesday, September 26,
2:00-3:30pm – Library, Room 310
Would you like to
help students improve their writing without increasing your grading load?
One way to do that includes a short burst of writing on a topic that will be
covered that day in class to get the juices flowing and/or check for
understanding of assigned readings. Another possibility is to require guided
journal entries to be done outside of class. Such entries can be assigned
regularly but collected randomly. Students write for about fifteen minutes
once or twice a week by responding to prompts such as "Describe the pH-scale
in a way that your grandmother would understand." This forces them to think
and write about topics in their own words. - Workshop participants will
learn more about these activities and explore several more ideas that are
adaptable to virtually any class.
Helping Students
to Interact with Assigned Readings
(Dr. Kate Hahn)
Thursday, October 11, 2:00-3:30pm –
Library, Room 310
A
common frustration among faculty is the difficulty in getting students to
complete assigned course readings.
We can help
students to interact with the assigned readings and better understand the
content with a number of different activities. A few tips from the workshop:
Require your students to write their own multiple-choice quiz questions for
each chapter or section to compel them to interact with the content on a
deeper level. Ask your students to put away their highlighters and instead
write why they wanted to highlight a selection of text. - Workshop
participants will hear the details on these and other activities that can be
tailored to various types of reading assignments.
Assignment-centered Teaching
(Dr. Edmund Hansen)
Tuesday, Oct. 16,
1:30-3:00pm – Library, Room
310
Most of us learn by doing. Therefore
effective teaching depends less on polished presentations than on actively
engaging students with the material. Assignment-centered teaching plans the
major learning opportunities of the course around carefully sequenced tasks
on which students work over the course of the semester. Given a course you
are teaching, you will learn to design building block assignments through
which students will gradually become more proficient in the complex
intellectual tasks that characterize authentic performance in your
discipline.
Responding to
Student Writing (Dr.
Kate Hahn)
Tuesday, November 6, 2:00-3:30pm –
Library, Room 310
You
assign a stack of writing tasks to help your students interact with course
content and improve their writing, and you end up stuck with a pile of
papers. What to do? Create a glossary of the notes and symbols that you
commonly use on student papers and distribute the glossary to students. You
can then use this mutual shorthand to efficiently respond to student work.
Write your initial feedback as a reader and not as an instructor. Ask
questions about the content or make suggestions about the organization of
students' drafts rather than comment on or correct all aspects of their
work. - Workshop participants will explore ways to efficiently respond to
various types of writing assignments.
Defining the Key Themes of Your Course
(Dr. Edmund Hansen)
Friday, Nov. 16,
1:30-3:00pm – Library, Room
310
Students feel often overwhelmed by the
quantity and sheer detail of the material to be learned in a given course.
The amount of information available in the textbook can make it difficult to
see the larger picture and focus on learning that will stay with the student
long after the course has ended. Workshop participants will take one of
their courses and identify a few core themes under which students can
organize the course content. You will be led through a systematic process
that allows you to focus your course on the conceptual understandings that
students need in order to build a framework of the discipline. This will
streamline your course planning and increase student learning.
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