Dr. Maria Yon:  Hello this is Dr. Maria Yon from the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Welcome to Teaching and Learning Matters. Today we have a special guest. Dr. Drew Polly from the College of Education uses various technologies in his teaching. In this episode, he’s going to talk to us about the use of social bookmarking. Thanks for joining us Dr. Polly.

Dr. Drew Polly: Thank you, it’s great to be here.

Maria: First, tell us what is social bookmarking.

Drew: Social bookmarking is a series of Web 2.0 tools that are free and they are on the Internet. One is Diigo, D-i-i-g-o dot com and the other one is Delicious, like food is delicious dot com. And both of those tools allow users, whether they be college students or faculty or people in the workforce, to bookmark and add favorites to not only their personal, private computer but add favorites to a website that is public and can be shared among other people. So that you are literally sharing your bookmarks and your favorite websites and most useful websites with everyone else in the world that you happen to connect with.

Maria: Sounds pretty awesome.

Drew: It can be an incredibly powerful tool.

Maria: Tell us how you’ve used social bookmarking in your courses.

Drew:  So, in all of my courses we use it to some extent. In my math course, we studied a number of different math concepts, specifically that they tackle as elementary school teachers and they work together in groups of two or three and they are responsible for finding websites and resources that are on the Internet that can be used in schools with kids. So everything is real world, authentic, and practical. But the way that this gets done is, they go off on their own and they bookmark them and by joining a site like Diigo or Delicious, they have access to the hundreds of thousands of websites that have already been bookmarked by other people in the world and that have been also labeled with keywords and have also been tagged with sort of a detailed one to two sentence annotation. So just by logging on and getting access to a Diigo account or a Delicious account, they have a wealth of information resources at their fingertips. So, the big job for them after that is to filter the information and really evaluate and analyze which of the resources they find are more or most helpful for them, for the assignment? Or in the case of an engineer, what will give you the information you need to do your job or in the case of a biologist or chemist, what are the resources or information that you find that will help you either in your college course or in the real world when you get a job in the profession?

Maria: Do you find the students are ever overwhelmed by trying to negotiate all those thousands of bookmarks?

Drew: Definitely, and I think it’s the same sensation that someone gets when they Google for the first time. So if you’ve googled a common search word and you ended up with millions of sites, typically the most popular or the most useful come up first but you still have, in some cases, hundreds of thousands or millions of websites. The same thing happens here. So a lot of the time that we spend with social bookmarking tends to be information literacy skills in which we work with students on, "Alright you’ve found this resource. Is this a valid and true resource, is the information on it accurate, who’s published it, how can it be used and is this really helpful to you?" So not to have them just bookmarking and consolidating resources for the sake of having them but it’s really what are the best resources you have there that are accurate, they're  put out there by reputable people whether they are national organizations or other people in the field. And, really, how they can be used to make sure they are valuable to the students.

Maria: So I can see that those are skills that we need to learn anyway, for the amount of information that we’re always looking at on the Internet.

Drew: These are skills that I believe you and I probably learned with the card catalog and the Dewey Decimal system way back in the day when we looked at books that we got out the library and we said, “Alright, so out of the information in the book, what are the main parts or what are the main focal points that we need to use whether it’s a research paper or a lab report or some other project that we had to do in school?" Those literacy skills that we used with books and print media is the same type of skills here with web-based, Internet-based media in many, many ways.

Maria: That’s a good analogy, I never thought about it that way. Sort of like going up to the stacks and walking up and down the aisle of books. Then choosing the right book and finding the information that you need within the book.

Drew: Definitely.

Maria: I like that analogy, very good. How do you feel social bookmarking has enhanced student learning besides this sort of evaluation part?

Drew:  It’s opened their eyes to what’s out there in the world and it’s helped them more with the idea of adapting and modifying skills. So with my population of students that are in preparation to be elementary school teachers, a lot of the time that we spend tends to be what does a good lesson look like? What do good activities look like? What do useful resources look like? So instead of having to create everything from scratch, we do a good bit of that in our course but the social bookmarking aspects have  really given us the opportunity to say “This is what’s already out there, this is what’s in existence. And because it’s in existence already, what do we now need to do in order to modify it to meet the needs of our students and the job that we have to do at hand?"

Maria: What’s been the reaction of the students?

Drew: Students have enjoyed it once they get through the overwhelming part. At first, typically the first 15 to 20 minutes of this assignment as we go through it in class, and we set up accounts and start logging on and looking at the resources, they tend to get overwhelmed. After having some time to really explore the tool and explore how to bookmark websites and how to annotate and evaluate resources, they’re very, very savvy and it’s not a very difficult skill. But I think at first is the idea of “I’ve got all this information, how am I going to sift through it and how am I going to organize it?" They’ve also liked the fact that most of the stuff that I look at in my course are free resources. So you’re not having to pay for them and with our population of students that will be first and second year teachers, a big thing for them is “What can I have that I can use in my classroom that’s not going to cost me a lot of money?" And this would be the case because everything is free and it’s Internet-based.

Maria: What suggestions could you offer someone about using social bookmarking tools?

Drew: I think for a university/college instructor, some of the big suggestions and some of the big things to focus on would be, one, making sure that you have an end goal in mind. So, I’m always one that you know starts with the rubric, starts with the assessment, and starts with what I like to call “the end” or the culminating performance. What do I want students to be able to do with the content, the contents or the concepts they’re learning, and then how do I get there? So social bookmarking, because it’s a tool to organize resources, I think one of the things that I’ve had to wrap my head around is “What do I want them to find and organize resources about?” Because if I don’t put constraints on that, the Internet is a vast, vast world of cyberspace and we really need to constrain that. So giving them a topic or giving them set parameters to sort of constrain them so they’re not meandering all over the web is important. Yet at the same time, leaving it open with enough flexibility that they can choose something that is relevant and applicable to what they do. So in my case, my students typically will choose resources that match up to their internship or field experiences because they’re things that they can use right away in the schools. So within the parameters I give them, if it doesn’t fit, I typically have a conversation with them and say “If you want to do something outside these parameters, that’s okay, but just make sure you’re aware of the rubric and you’re aware of the evaluation." So, that’s really it from an instructor perspective. From a social bookmarking perspective, you can be really organized if you take the time to provide the annotation and to describe these in the social bookmarking tool. If you don’t annotate them and if you don’t describe them, you have a list of websites without descriptions and that can be very messy. So investing the time and putting thoughtful and well-detailed descriptions can go a long way in the long term.

Maria: What barriers have you encountered with social bookmarks in your course?

Drew: Some of them were the ones that I had just talked about -- being too open-ended. I think one of the other things to think about is making sure students are clear with the expectations.

Maria: This is where just being very clear about the expectations and having a very  clear rubric, a clear and specific rubric, is so important because students need to know what the target is. If they don’t know the target, they can’t hit the target. So it’s definitely worth an instructor’s time in developing a really good rubric that students understand and reminding them about it.

Drew: Definitely and I have examples and models from previous semesters and I have examples that I’ve done myself and that’s been very helpful for them to go through the process. A lot of modeling goes on early on, on how to use the website and how to provide a detailed description and really explicitly unpacking the description to say what are the components of a good description that will let someone else, whether they happen to be in Raleigh or in Phoenix, Arizona, or even connected with people from Germany and Europe on some of these math resources, what would they need to know in order to figure out whether or not this is a resource worth checking out? So really what a good description looks like.

Maria: Very good point because it’s not an annotation just for you; it’s an annotation for anybody’s who’s going to be looking at it. Thanks for joining us Dr. Polly. This has been really useful, what a useful tool for the students to have at their fingertips. It’s easy to see why they would enjoy using social bookmarking. Please join us again and remember, teaching and learning matters.

 

Dr. Maria Yon: Hello, this is Dr. Maria Yon from the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Thanks for joining us here at Teaching and Learning Matters. Today we have a special guest. Dr. Drew Polly from the College of Education uses various technologies in his teaching. In this episode, he’s going to talk to us about wikis. Thanks for joining us, Dr. Polly.

Dr. Drew Polly: Thank you for having me. It’s good to be here.

Maria: First, can you tell us what a wiki is?

Drew: A wiki in its basic form is really just a website. It’s a website that is termed a collaborative workspace because multiple people can get usernames and can get access to this workspace to collaborate. So if we looked at this in the context of a college or university course, we would have students sharing on a group project or a group task and they all would have access to this website or collaborative workspace to store documents, upload hyperlinks from websites and also type information and content in there to either compile drafts of a project or create a final version of a project to turn in for a grade.

Maria: So, this is a really good way for the instructor to determine how much work each student has done on a group project.

Drew: You can definitely do that with a wiki. The way the functionality works, if I’m part of a group, I would sign in with my username and it would keep track of all of the content that I’ve actually uploaded and contributed to the wiki. So if you had a group of three, you could track how much group member one, two, and three each did just simply by using the tools on the wiki.

Maria: I know you teach a technology course and this is part of the technology course, piece of technology the students have to learn, but it seems it would be really easy for an instructor for any academic discipline to use a wiki to help students learn.

Drew: A wiki really could be used and is currently being used around the world in various content courses, whether it’s in Engineering or in Nursing or Chemistry or Biology. The whole purpose and the whole benefit of a wiki is really a collaborative web-based space for them to share documents and to store information. And create a product or an artifact of their own understanding.

Maria: So students could even work with students across the world.

Drew: They could. I know teachers in public schools that are currently in Charlotte and they’re collaborating on a wiki with students in Asheville, on something regarding North Carolina history and geography because you have people here in the Piedmont also working with people in the mountains and together they’re collaborating about climate geography and the history of the regions in which they live. So faculty and instructors here could definitely get partner institutions elsewhere in the world and collaborate on wikis as well.

Maria: That’s very exciting.

Drew: Definitely.

Maria: What’s been the reaction of your students?

Drew: My students like it for a number of different reasons. One of the main reasons that they like it is the convenience of it. We tend to spend time in class establishing groups and give them time in the group to actually get started and delegate information, but a lot of the projects that are wiki-based in my courses tend to be projects that they finish and work on, on their own time. And because it’s a collaborative workspace what you have is, you don’t have the case of a student working on it for a little while and then sending a Word document or a PowerPoint to another student to then contribute and then to another student to contribute and then to another student and so on and so forth. Instead because it’s collaborative webspace and everything’s stored on the internet students can log on at their own time when it’s convenient for them and they can contribute. So it’s really convenient and it’s a flexible way for them to work on a group project or collaborative effort. The second is the ease of use. So on the wiki there are two main buttons, one is edit, you click that and you can type information and put hyperlinks in and upload Word documents and PowerPoints into the wiki. And the other button is save and the functionality and the tools look very much like a Microsoft Word toolbar so students have not had any trouble at all learning how to use this technology because it’s something that they’re very familiar with in terms of the basic elements. Really a lot of the learning has just taken place in terms of the group dynamics and trying to organize logistically who’s going to do what aspect of the project in terms of the content but not regarding the technology.

Maria: One of the reasons I can see this as being useful is that our students are very busy. Some of them work 20 or 30 hours a week, many of them have families besides taking a full load of courses. So, just the fact that they can get on at different times to do their work is very helpful to them.

Drew: Definitely. I almost see it sort of as an asynchronous learning opportunity. Kind of like an online course is at times where the task is assigned and students are given a certain timeline to finish it. And the wiki allows them to work on this group project on their own time when it’s convenient but still be able to get the work done at a high level of rigor and depth.

Maria: How do you think the use of wikis has helped them learn?

Drew: The wikis have been very effective at getting them to store and consolidate and organize resources. And if we think about things on a Bloom’s Taxonomy level of learning, it’s really that idea of knowledge or comprehension, the lower levels where they’re able to identify and recognize and gather the information and it’s been very effective at that. In order to hit the higher levels, in my courses they’ve used the wiki to organize and gather information and then as part of the project, or the task, or the assignment that they have to complete for me, there is a reflection or synthesis or analysis part that is done at the end after they’ve gathered all their resources in which they take in what they’ve found and what they’ve organized and then they apply that in the context of what life would be like as an elementary school teacher which is the population of students that I’m working with.

Maria: Very good. Because I’ve heard in the past one of the issues has been students are really good at gathering knowledge but then they don’t really know what to do with it. So, it’s really up to the instructor to think about now that they have it, how do I want them to think about it. Whether it’s to apply it or synthesize it or to evaluate it in some way. So that’s just great. Have you encountered any barriers with using wikis in your classroom?

Drew: There are a couple barriers or problems. One is the point that you just raised terms of in getting them to think at a higher level, so a lot of time is spent in the course looking at a rubric that I give them for each assignment and on the rubric it details out the expectations for them in terms of the gathering of the resources in terms of quantity, amount, topic but it also details out specifically what I’m looking for in terms of the final product in terms of the synthesis, evaluation and analysis. And spending class-time on what the expectations are for the students on a wiki-assignment or an assignment that uses the wiki is definitely something that’s needed. From a technology standpoint, my groups tend to be two, three, or four students and they tend to work on them on different times. My first semester I had all 25 students on the same wiki at one time and there was a technological issue with capacity. And people were typing things and saving and it was overriding and erasing what the other people were in the midst of typing, so it became a train wreck so to speak. So, from a technology standpoint keeping it at two or three or four students and also making sure that you’re not all on there exactly at the same time on the same part of the wiki, that definitely is a barrier that I’ve encountered.

Maria: That’s probably not real likely anymore the way the students work at all times of day and night.

Drew: No, it only happens in a course when the instructor decides to pull it up and put 25 people on one website to have them edit it.

Maria: Anything else you can think of that we need to know about?

Drew: In terms of these assignments, one of the things that I’ve definitely come to know is the idea of the structure and the open-endedness. You want to give students the freedom and flexibility to put resources on there that they find relevant, that they’re interested in, that are really kind of authentic in terms of the context and the course that you’re in the midst of teaching. Yet, you need to provide them with guidance. I’ve talked earlier about the rubric. The other thing in terms of structure is really sort of giving them an example or a model saying this is the, these are the parts of the wiki that you need to do. And from a group accountability standpoint I’ve really found that you need to say that each group member will contribute this amount. And then also have details about how much the whole group will participate in. I started that this semester and had a lot of success with it. In the past, just saying the whole group had to do this much, there definitely seemed to be an unequal proportion of work being done. Other information about wikis: pbworks.com is a website that hosts wikis, wikispaces.net and then wetpaint.com. All three of them are the most popular wiki sites in which you can get on there and you can create a collaborative workspace for yourself as an instructor or you can help students through that process to do it for a class work assignment.

Maria: So your suggestion is jump in there and try those three and see what you like.

Drew: Definitely, have fearless curiosity and get your hands dirty.

Maria: Well, thank you very much for joining us, Dr. Polly. This has been very helpful and interesting. And it’s easy to see how students might use this tool to enhance learning as they collaborate with others. Please join us again and remember, teaching and learning matters.

Hello. This is Dr. Maria Yon from the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Welcome to Teaching and Learning Matters. This is the last of a four-part series on using PowerPoint to improve learning. This episode offers suggestions for using PowerPoint to end a class session.

It’s somewhat typical that class just ends with no conclusion or transition. We sometimes run out of time, teaching until the last minute in our rush to get it all in. The result is that we don’t conclude a lesson effectively. Or perhaps, we think that a conclusion is not important.

The end of a lesson is valuable. It’s when we summarize, assess student learning, remind them of homework, or answer questions. The few minutes we take to do so impacts students’ learning. It also provides a smoother transition for the next class session.

So, how might PowerPoint assist us in ending a class session? First, as we plan our lecture, we consciously think about our PowerPoint slides. Besides planning for the content, we think about when and how to use the slides to impact learning at this point. As I mentioned in the earlier episodes, the slides help us to slow down and purposefully think about how we might involve students in learning rather than simply plowing through the content.

Here are a few ideas. Use the last slide as a note check. This is a strategy in which the students are asked to partner with someone nearby to compare their notes. They are to focus on key information or identify misconceptions. The slide contains the following directions: “Take a few minutes to compare notes with your partner. Identify anything you are unclear about.”

Students are not giving each other their notes in this exercise, but working to fill in their gaps in understanding. This exercise also helps them with note-taking skills. Alternatively, the slide might direct them to summarize the most important information from the day’s lecture. It could be done in a few sentences or in 140 characters like Twitter. This exercise teaches them to be clear, focused, and succinct.

Instead, the slide might contain a short answer question or a set of objective items like true-false, multiple choice or fill in the black. These might be answered using a student response system. Or you might prefer to take up these short assessments and grade them yourself.

Now, one final example. A strategy called “Questions and Answer Pairs” helps student to focus on content, identify relevant questions, and assess their partner’s answer. The slide reads, “Take a minute to come up with one question. See if you can stump your partner.”

They pair up for this exercise. Each student takes a minute to prepare a question then poses it to their partner. Then roles are reversed. You might ask for a sampling of the questions. Highlight some of the particularly good questions and work with them on phrasing questions. Students become very good at formulating questions over time.

You might see that each of these activities helps students to focus on what was most important in the lecture and identify where their understandings are weak. It helps you to assess their learning as well so that you can reteach if necessary.

A question that comes up is finding the time to do a good conclusion to a lesson. First, none of these activities take long. Most can be done in about 10 minutes. Secondly, they are powerful exercises for reinforcing learning. Third, they provide a quick overall assessment of student learning.

I hope that you have found these episodes on the use of Powerpoint to Improve Learning helpful. Try some of the ideas out. I like them because the slides are reminders to slow down and remember to engage the students before class, at the beginning of class, during the lecture, and at the end of class. Thanks for tuning in and remember -- Teaching and Learning Matters.

Hello.  This is Dr. Maria Yon from the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.  Welcome to Teaching and Learning Matters.  This is the third of a four-part series on using Powerpoint to improve learning.  The first episode suggested ideas for helping students prepare for class and the second, how to use PowerPoint at the beginning of class.  This episode offers suggestions for using PowerPoint during your lecture.

I was walking across campus a couple of weeks ago when I overheard two students talking.  As I passed, I heard one student say to the other, “She just reads straight from the PowerPoint and anything she adds is useless.”  We often hear students complain about what is often called “death by PowerPoint”.  This we want to avoid!

Take a moment to think about your PowerPoint slides.  Are they helping students learn?  Pay attention?  Engage in the content?  Think?  Can your slides be put to better use?  Would you change anything about them?  Font size?  Color?  Number of words on a slide?  Or better yet, how the slides are used during your lecture?

A good lecture involves some think-time for students to process the content or ask questions.  The nice thing about PowerPoint is that you can plan breaks for these activities ahead of time.  PowerPoint can actually help us slow down and give students a chance to catch their breaths and reflect on the material.  It’s a time when we are reminded to step back from the material and interact with students.

We can easily forget to do that when we are frantically trying to get through a lecture or are caught up in the excitement of our own lecture.  Students’ minds are less likely to wander when there is a question break or other activity planned about every fifteen minutes.  They’ll be more motivated to pay attention if they come to expect times when they are asked to do something more than just listen or take notes.

So, what might one of these PowerPoint slides look like?  You have been lecturing, going through your slides, and all of a sudden students see that the next slide is blank!  First, it gets students’ attention.  How might you use this blank slide?  It’s up to you to make the best use of it.

Here are some ideas.  Ask students what the slide might contain: What content? What question about the previous lecture material? What visual might be helpful?  Instead of a blank, the slide might be a question that you pose about the content.  Or the slide might ask students to write a summary of the preceding lecture.  It might be a photo or a graph that they are to interpret as it relates to the lecture. Discussion time follows before going on with the lecture.

The slide might direct students to engage in some type of active learning strategies that can be used as transition points in the lecture.  These strategies give students an opportunity to think about and work with material just presented before moving on with new information.  They help gauge how well students have understood the content, perhaps shaping what is going to happen the rest of the class period.  Finally, put questions on PowerPoint slides if you’re using a student response system.  It’s a great way to review and clarify when followed by a discussion.

When you plan your next lecture, think beyond PowerPoint for presentation of content.  Insert slides at critical points to engage students in learning.  Review your old PowerPoint slides now and kick them up a notch. Tune in to Episode Four, Using PowerPoint to End a Lecture, because Teaching and Learning Matters.

 

Hello. This is Dr. Maria Yon from the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Welcome to Teaching and Learning Matters. You might have tuned in to the previous session on how to use PowerPoint to help students prepare for class. This is the second of the four-part series on using PowerPoint.

This episode offers suggestions for using PowerPoint at the beginning of class. The beginning of class is a critical point in any class session. It’s the time when we get students’ attention and prepare them for the remainder of the class period. Several things should occur when we begin class. First, we get students’ attention by focusing on the topic and the objectives for the class session. Then, we help them understand the relevance of the content and the learning activities in which they’ll be involved. Finally, we elicit their prior knowledge about the topic or ask them to identify questions that they would like to have answered by the end of the session.

So, how might PowerPoint help us to do that? Here are a few suggestions. The opening of a lecture should facilitate the connections that students make between what they already know and the new content. One strategy is to open the lecture with a question on a PowerPoint slide. Give students a minute or two to think about their response.

Then, ask a few members of the class for the answers. The opening question might be one that was given to them previously in preparation for class. This strategy effectively focuses students’ attention on the day’s topic. It also provides the instructor with useful feedback on what students know and don’t know about the material being presented.

Instead, you might do an introductory think-pair-share activity. It consists of three steps. First, use PowerPoint to pose a prepared question and ask student to think or write about it individually. Then, students pair up with someone sitting near them and share their answers. Finally, choose a few pairs to share their ideas with the entire class. This strategy can help students organize their prior knowledge and brainstorm questions.

Another strategy is focused listing. It’s an activity in which students recall what they know about a subject by creating a list of terms or ideas related to it. The topic is presented on a PowerPoint slide. Students are given two or three minutes to make their lists. You might move around the room and look at lists as they write and share a summary of what you noted. Or you might have students randomly share the content of their lists before moving on with the lecture.

Finally, your PowerPoint slide might contain a short list of true-false statements to which students are to respond. You might have them pair up with another student to compare responses and discuss differences. Then open a discussion with the entire class about their responses. Tell them that the answers to these questions will be addressed during the lecture. This helps them to focus on the material to be presented. You might have the students answer the questions again at the end of the lecture and discuss new understandings.

So, there are a few ideas for how to use PowerPoint at the beginning of a class session to engage students with the material. These strategies work well with classes of various sizes and can be completed in two or three minutes.

Join me for the third episode in this series — Using PowerPoint during a lecture. See you then. And remember Teaching and Learning Matters.

Hello.  This is Dr. Maria Yon in the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.  Welcome to Teaching and Learning Matters.  This episode is the first in a four-part series on using PowerPoint to improve students’ learning. 

We will be looking at four instructional points where PowerPoint can be useful:  student preparation for class, the beginning of class, during a lecture, and ending class.  The purpose of this episode is to show how to use PowerPoint to improve students’ learning as they prepare for class.  If they prepare ahead of time, not only will they be more engaged in class, but learning will be enhanced.

As teachers we know how important it is for students to come to class prepared.  We also know how often they are not, especially if they're asked simply to read.  You can use PowerPoint to help them actively prepare for class.  Here are a few ideas that you can try or adapt to your particular situation. In any case, ahead of time provide the PowerPoint slides that students need to prepare for class.  They can be distributed either in hard-copy, or even better, on-line.   Clearly set the expectation that the preparation is to be done before class so that they can be full participants in learning.

A common use of PowerPoint is to provide an outline of the lecture content.  Obviously, if you give them PowerPoint slides that duplicate your lecture, students feel that they don’t need to come to class, especially if the lecture provides no added benefit. Instead, you might leave some subtopics blank and they are to fill them in from their reading assignment.

Then, during the lecture, you might ask for volunteers to suggest the next subtopic.  Or perhaps, rather than a subtopic, they are to fill in examples that reflects their understanding of the reading assignment.  As you can see, students must come to class to get the details of the lecture outline.  Additionally, they participate in creating it.

Another idea is that the first PowerPoint slide might be a brainstorming question or one that that stimulates prior knowledge about a topic.  Some examples are: “Tell three things you know about X.”  “Have you ever used X?”  “What do you want to know about X?”  “Write as many characteristics of X as you can.”  This slide can initiate a good discussion at the beginning of class before getting into the meat of the content. 

The first few slides can be a set of questions that build on each other.  The questions begin with accessing the content knowledge, moving to applying the content, then to evaluating some part of it, for example.  This set of questions might be something like this:  What does the author (or video) say about X?”  “Can we apply that to society today?”  “Do you think it's useful?”  After all, we want to get students to think, not just memorize information.

You might set up math problems that are partially worked out.  Students complete the problem or perhaps explain the problem on the PowerPoint slides.  When they come to class, you show your slides with the correct answers or ask them to do so.

Rather than just using text, a PowerPoint might contain a short video, a diagram, ora photo to which students must respond in some way.  Next might be a question or set of questions to which they respond about the content on the PowerPoint slide.

So, there are a few ideas. Please join me next time for the next episode,  "Using PowerPoint to Involve Students at the Beginning of Class."  See you then. And remember – Teaching and Learning Matters.

Welcome to Teaching and Learning Matters, and thank you for listening. I am Dr. Garvey Pyke, and our topic this time is Continuity Planning (Or “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Swine Flu”). Did I just lose everyone under 30?

As you may know, the H1N1 influenza has been a topic of much conversation over the past several months. However, pandemic planning is nothing new. We planned for SARS and Bird Flu before this one, and something else will inevitably come along sooner or later after H1N1 disappears.

The question is, are you ready for a disruption of instruction? I don’t mean, “Do you have a nuclear bunker with wifi and all your textbooks?” but I do mean, “Have you thought through how your instruction could be impacted if the university closed down suddenly, and have you prepared your students for this possibility?”

I would like to run down a series of questions, a checklist, that is appropriate for helping you do some preliminary planning. This checklist also appears in the UNC Charlotte Continuity Planning for Disruption of Instruction, which can be found on our website at teaching.uncc.edu/continuity.

O.K. Question 1: Have you communicated to your students how the class would continue in the case of a pandemic, major disaster, or other emergency? Not only do you need to let them know that, yes, you will continue to function as a class during a possible shutdown, you also need to let them know what methods you will use to still hold class. Moodle? Wimba? Email? Wikis? Blogs? Phone calls? A combination?

Question 2: Have you asked your students to supply you with alternate email addresses and contact information? Put this information together now, for safekeeping. It is easier to collect this information now, while we are still open for business as usual, rather than trying to wrangle it out of them once we are all dispersed.

Question 3: Have you added pandemic information to your syllabus by creating an appendix? I realize that your course syllabus was likely distributed weeks ago with little or no mention of a pandemic. No time like the present to amend it. Give students as much information as you can.

Question 4: Have you considered an attendance policy for your course that allows for “self-isolation of residential students with flu-like illness.” Under normal circumstances, attendance policies are a good thing. We want students to come and be active participants in class. However, we do not want students who have H1N1 to come to class and risk infecting others, just for the attendance points.

Question 5: Have you considered the ways that your usual course activities would be disrupted by a pandemic and begun planning how you could continue instruction via online methods? For example, do you value classroom discussions as a regular part of your course? Perhaps lectures or even student presentations play a big role? How could you adapt these for online? What tools fit these strategies? And what changes would you need to make? Once you have done this kind of brainstorming and planning, do you know how to use the appropriate online tools to accomplish these course goals?

Question 6: Have you taken the time to review the UNC Charlotte Continuity Plan for the Disruption of Instruction? Go to http://teaching.uncc.edu/continuity. It is far more in-depth than this podcast, needless to say. Please review it as soon as possible.

Question 7: Did you conduct any or all of the “practice drills” listed in the Continuity Plan, which will help you prepare to access all vital university systems from home? You can get to your university email and your electronic files from home, plus other applications. Caveats and best practices are listed in the Continuity Plan.

Question 8: Did you prepare a draft of the letter you plan to send to your students when university closure is imminent? If we do close, you will have your hands full. Drafting a quick letter now will save you time later and will be reusable for the future.

And finally, Question 9: Have you encouraged your students that class will continue and they are expected to keep up with the course work? This will be a trying time for everyone. Students need some motivational encouragement from you, their course instructor. It will be appreciated, and it should increase student success.

OK, that may sound like quite a lot to do, but it really should not take long at all to work through that checklist. Much of it will be reusable from course section to section, too, which will help save some time. It will certainly pay off in the long run.

And even if we do not have to close school, these exercises can be considered an excellent professional development exercise: it is truly an opportunity to engage in some reflective practice and examine your teaching, and your students needs’, through a different lens.

That’s it for now. Thanks for listening, and please tune in next time. Until then, so long, and remember: teaching and learning matters.

Hello.  This is Dr. Maria Yon in the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.  Welcome to Teaching and Learning Matters.  The purpose of this episode is to give you some ideas for creating interesting assignments that will motivate and engage your students and improve their performance.  Good assignments also help develop self-confidence in students.

The first step in course planning is to start with a list of course goals and objectives.  Clear goals and objectives are critical because all other aspects of the course are derived from this list, not the least of which is the assignments. As you identify goals and objectives for your syllabus, you are probably automatically thinking about class activities and assignments for students.

So here are a few ideas that you might find useful.  Give a brief assignment early in the semester that builds on knowledge and skills acquired in previous courses—something they can master easily to increase self-confidence and provide a relaxed, non-threatening atmosphere for the course.

Frequent short assignments throughout the semester give students a chance to demonstrate what they know or highlight what they need to work on.  It might be as simple as posing a question based on a reading that develops analytical skills and communication skills.

We’re aware that students have different learning styles.  One idea is to give students assignments that consist of three or four options for meeting the same learning objective.  For example, students might write or perform a dramatic presentation, create a visual presentation, or work in a group to create a performance or a product.  It may be a little more work on your part, but when students have some choice in the manner that they show you what they have learned, the results can be spectacular.

Students like to hear what their peers have to say.  How about setting up a situation that is student-led?  Students select the topic and the date of the presentation.  They meet outside of class to select the format they wish for their presentation.  It might be a debate, a skit or simply lead a discussion.

They should also be required to be knowledgeable enough to answer questions from you or their classmates.  This is good leadership training and increases communication skills, both of which are required in the workplaces for which we’re preparing them.

I highly recommend the use of case studies and simulations.  Today’s students seek authenticity and relevance.  Give students a real world problem to solve, maybe ones that you or your colleagues have encountered.  The purpose is to give them the experience of solving the type of practical problems they will encounter as professionals.  And it gives them the chance to measure their problem-solving skills against others, including you, an expert in the field.

These are just a few ideas.  But the last thing I want to add is that these ideas can be adapted for either face-to-face classes, on-line learning, or a blended environment. 
So, try a few of these.  Create your own.  If they don’t work well the first time, try them again with another class making any necessary adjustments.

Today’s students learn best by doing rather than sitting passively and they like to be challenged if it’s interesting.  So, give them a chance to do powerful assignments that challenge and interest them.  Good luck with your planning of interesting assignments.

Thanks for tuning in.  And remember—Teaching and Learning Matters.

Welcome to this episode of Teaching and Learning Matters. I’m Maria Yon, faculty member at UNC Charlotte. In this episode, Setting the Tone: The First Day of Class, we’re going to talk about some of the important things that need to happen on that very first class session in the semester.

For most of us whether we are experienced instructors or not, the first day of class can be both exciting and anxiety producing — maybe it’s a new course, a new format, you are going to try out a new strategy — and of course all the new faces. It’s the same for students. They are wondering what to expect — what is the teacher like? What will be expected of me? Can I handle it? Will it be interesting? They are waiting in anticipation — and they’re sizing you up on that first day. So first impressions count!

What you do on your first day of class will affect your students for the rest of the term. So, think in advance what behaviors and expectations you want to establish in your classroom. No doubt you want to establish a serious, professional classroom atmosphere where learning will take place. You can communicate this in several ways:

First is to have a comprehensive, well-structure syllabus ready to distribute. It tells the class that you have planned ahead — you’ve thought carefully about the goals of the course, about course content, about assessments, and about grading policies. The syllabus should also address expectations for behavior such as attendance, tardiness, missed assignments, class participation, use of cell phones and other expectations of in-class conduct that you feel are necessary to address.

A comprehensive syllabus shows that you are conscientious, well-organized and serious about teaching and learning. Go over the syllabus carefully on the first day highlighting the points you want to elaborate or emphasize. Answer any questions that students might have about the course or about the syllabus.

Second is to motivate students about the course. This can be done in two ways. First is to show your enthusiasm about the course and about teaching. Enthusiasm is contagious and will motivate your students’ interest in learning the subject matter. And sometimes, just because of your enthusiasm, some students might be inspired to pursue the field as a career! That would be a nice tribute to you.

A second way to motivate students about the course is to make it relevant. Explain to them how the course fits into their program of study—whether it is a course in their major or a general education requirement. How is this course relevant to their program, and even more importantly, how is this course relevant to their lives today? Plan some real-life, current examples to share on that first day. And students love to hear personal stories, too, about how your work in the field applies to their lives.

Finally, make good use of the entire class period on that first day. Don’t treat it as a throw away day or dismiss it early. Only if you treat class time as a precious commodity will students see it in that way. In reality, by the time you cover your syllabus, introduce the class with a motivating presentation, answer students’ questions, have them introduce themselves to each other, the class time has been filled.

One last note, good planning is the key to effective teaching, even on day one — plan this first day as carefully as you would plan for any other class session.

I hope this has been helpful. Have a great semester. Thanks for listening and tune in again for the next Teaching and Learning Matters.

Hello.  I’m Dr. Maria Yon from the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.  Welcome to Teaching and Learning Matters and to this timely episode, Revising Your Course:  Questions to Ask Yourself.

At the end of each semester we often ask ourselves, “How can this course be improved?”  The following are some questions to ask yourself about changes that may  be necessary to the content, the sequence, activities and assignments, or administrative tasks.  So, here goes.

Question #1.  Have I packed too much content into this course?  Sometimes we feel that we should impart everything we know about a topic to our students to the extent that there is no time for teaching anything in depth.  Are there any topics that should be taught in more depth than others, requiring more time?   If so, there may be topics that will need to be cut or shortened.  Which ones?

Question #2.  Do I need to revise the topics?  Would experts agree that these are the most important or appropriate topics for the course?  Are there topics that might be switched out for more current or more relevant ones?  In making your decision, analyze topics to make sure they fit your department’s curriculum.

Question #3.  Is the required textbook or materials the best for meeting the goals of the course?  Are students using them?  Review current textbooks and supplemental materials carefully, including materials on the web.  Analyze them for readability and for appeal.  Students often are choosing to do without textbooks due to the expense.  So, consider the value that students will get from the textbook as well as the expense.  If you choose to use a textbook, it needs to be an important component of the course.

Question #4.  Do I need to revise the arrangement of the course content?  Is it in a logical sequence either by topic or category, arranged chronologically, increasing level of complexity, by major concepts and relationships, or by other schemes?  Is there a topic that should be introduced first as a way to motivate and engage the student about the course?

Question #5.  Are there new technologies that might be included to enhance learning in the course?  Today’s students are tech savvy and they expect their teachers to be.  So, explore current technologies and keep abreast of the trends and their impact on student learning.  Select the ones that you’re comfortable with and complement the goals of the course.

Question #6.  Are the graded assignments and assessments reflective of student learning?  Whether you give an objective test, an essay test, or have students to develop products, ask yourself if these are the best measures for determining what students have learned.  Maybe there’s a better method.  Additionally, have you given the appropriate number and types of assignments so that the final grade is a good indication of learning?

Try these questions out soon after the semester ends while you’re thinking about the course is still fresh. Get a jump on the next semester by making the changes.  Or at the very least, jot down some notes about what to think about later when you begin to revise your syllabus.

I hope you have found these guiding questions helpful as you think about revising your course.  Thanks for listening.  Tune in again and remember teaching and learning matters.