Author: Terry

The C.A.T.s Came Back

In honour of Fred Penner‘s recent appearance at the Peterborough Folk Fest, it’s time for the C.A.T.s to come back to The Teaching Hub. Classroom Assessment Techniques (C.A.T.s) help you to find out if what you are doing in your class is working. We have a nice little collection of C.A.T.s and other ideas on these active learning cards. You can print them or go pick up the nice, shiny laminated versions from the library (they are in the reserve section. Just ask). They should give you lots of ideas as you plan your upcoming lessons. Now that we have that out of the way, do you think it’s weird that Fred Penner seemed perplexed when asked if he would approve of a heavy metal cover band called Shred Penner?

Attendance?

Our learning technology tip of the week is about how to use the D2L Attendance Tool. But before telling you how to use something, we always like to be annoying and ask you why you want to use it. Maybe you are required to take attendance. Maybe not. Either way, we think that having a little think about why or why not to take attendance is a chance to help you form a little bit more of your own personal teaching philosophy. What an opportunity! Once you’ve decided, you can choose to go here to learn to use the attendance tool OR you can go here where you will not learn how to use the D2L attendance tool.

Class Absence Procedure

Speaking of attendance, please take the following steps as a way to familiarize yourself with the Fleming College Class Absence Operating Procedure.

1. Watch the 1986 Film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
2. Review the procedure.
3. Turn to your partner and discuss whether you think Ferris’s absence was Sanctioned, Planned, or Unexpected.
4. Be prepared for any Ferris Bueller reference you make in class to return the same blank stares you see in the video above as most of your students will not have seen the film.

Serve up an ACE

If you were to let your students know about this week’s Trickle Down thing, you just might become associated in their brains with snacks, prizes, and success. All very good things. So please go ahead and let them know about the Ace It event hosted by the library. While snacking and winning prizes, students will hear tell of the things that have helped past students be successful at college. You can direct students to this page to register for the event which takes place on Tuesday, September 10th from 4-6 p.m. at Sutherland. Stay tuned for the Frost version in a few weeks.

An Inclusive Offer!

Local rock star Joanna Hodge has shared an open learning opportunity with us that she is excited about. It’s a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) called Basics of Inclusive Design for Online Education from Coursera. We are all interested in providing instruction to as wide a range of abilities as possible so, if you have room on your plate, here is a chance to learn some inclusive design strategies. You are invited to audit the course for free. They hit you up for payment only if you want a shiny certificate of your learning at the end. If you join the course, keep us posted on what you learn!

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.

Welcome back for the Fall 2019 semester and also to our new home! The Hub is still focused on doling out short & sweet tips, ideas, stuff, and maybe even tricks that may help you in your teaching throughout the semester. As always, we are open to your ideas for what to include in future posts. You can find contact info at the bottom. Now let’s get to it.

Last week, we welcomed nine new full-time faculty members to the college by putting them through the ringer during the intensive week of the New Faculty Experience. We asked each of them to leave us with a little nugget in the form of #4WordPedagogy. This practice was kicked off a couple years back with the classic “Start by trusting students“. The task is to put an important nugget of our teaching philosophy into just four words. See their responses below and Let us know yours!

If Learning Technology were a tool shed, D2L/Brightspace would be a big, juicy toolbox in that shed. Sure it has some tools in it that we never use and don’t even know what they are for, but that’s okay. We just want to use the tools most useful for us and our students. This week, The LDS Team is running a couple of Teaching & Learning/D2L Bootcamps at Frost & Sutherland campuses to dig in to those tools and help you choose which ones you want to focus on. See the details here.

If you are like us and enjoy both student success and top ten lists, then this link is for you! Check out the Top Ten Tips for College Success that the Fleming Student Success Navigation Team promotes to our students. And, if you feel like being a conduit for such successes to happen, pass these tips along to your students next week!

This week, The Learning Design & Support Team (hey, that’s us!) will host a couple of get-togethers known as the Get It Together sessions for faculty. We invite all kinds of departments to hang out and then we sit there and wait for you to come and tell us what you need to get done to start your semester on a good note. We can help if there is anything you need help with like Course Outlines, D2L course copying, accessibility or [insert other thing here]. If it’s not in our jurisdiction, we point fingers in the right direction. See the details here.

Are you interested in destroying barriers to learning? If so, then you may be interested in Universal Design for Learning (UDL). On Tuesday, August 27th at 3:00 p.m., join the UDL Higher Education Network to discuss how to spread the word about UDL during September start-up. It’s an online Zoom meeting that you can join here. The meeting includes fellow UDL-ers from around the world and focuses only on higher education. It’s delightfully awesome. Contact jodie.black@flemingcollege.ca for more info.

See details here of a couple other great opportunities that are also offered on Tuesday August the 27th: Teaching English Language Learners, and Cultural Competency for Educators.