Week One, Fall 2019

An Icebreaker Challenge

We have a challenge for you as you kick off your courses this week. Have a look at the Twitter thread below. Especially check out a few of the example responses to this seemingly innocuous icebreaker idea.

Favorite new first-class ice breaker: “Share a boring fact about yourself.”

Students loved it and we laughed a lot. They came up with impressively boring facts too. Some all-star examples below: (1/n)

— Rachel E. Brenner, PhD (@drrachelbrenner) August 29, 2019

Many icebreakers cause anxiety to those less inclined to be the centre of attention. With this one the pressure is off to “be interesting” and the results might bring some more joy to the beginning of your course. So our challenge to you is, if you use this icebreaker, to report back some of your all-star levels of boring facts about your students!

Contacting your students

The first email was sent about 48 years ago, so we’re strictly in the realm of trailing-edge technology here, but it is still a very central way to get information out to all of your students at once. We recommend that you use your Faculty Centre, found in the myCampus portal, to send that email out (replies will come to your Outlook inbox). At the bottom of your class roster, there is the option to “notify all students”. They are all then loaded up into the BCC field (protecting the privacy of your students’ information) and then you can create your message and send it. For more information on how to use your Faculty Centre, see these How-To Guides on the Academic Operations website. Now that we have that out of the way, do you think that first email was also the first email chain letter?

Accessible Education Services

You’ve heard of a help me/help you situation before, right? Well, this is a help us/help students/which also helps you situation. Accessible Education Services helps students with unique needs meet their goals while here at the college. They need your help letting students know how to access their services. In fact, they even have an entire page on their site (with a guide book!) to help you help them, which also helps you.

HR’s New Employee Page

It’s a new academic year; we have shiny new paint in the hallways, shiny new students toting hopefully shiny, but not-too-expensive textbooks. Perhaps you yourself are a new employee? If so, here is a page for you from our friends in HR that we hope you haven’t missed: The New Employees page is full of info to help orient you to the college. We hope it helps lead you to a long and fruitful time here!

Teaching & Learning Boot Camp Resources

Past professional learning opportunities can also be future learning opportunities if people leave resources behind. And we did just that last week! The Learning Design & Support Team hosted Teaching & Learning Boot Camps and Get it Together Sessions at Frost and Sutherland last week, offering some help with things like planning your first class activities, course outline preparation, D2L set up, and so on. All of the resources we used can be found here. AND GUESS WHAT? We’re always here for you. Check out those contact details below and get in touch. We love to chat about this stuff. Stay tuned as next week we will go back to the future with our PD suggestions.