Resources for teaching 6-24-8

This week we mourn the passing of George Carlin, Counter-Culture’s comedian of the 70’s and 80’s and a prolific writer more recently. He created one of the best ways to teach both comparison contrast and the use of metaphor in language through multimedia available free online in a routine called, “Football vs. Baseball.” Find the text and audio , and you can also see video via several sites on YouTube . See him perform the monologue and /or an interesting slide montage. I'll try embedding a video somewhere. The slide montage might really work with Non-native English speakers.

Also a shout out to Janice McIntyre and those who have been using www.freerice.com to build and reinforce vocabulary. She says her students wouldn’t leave class one day because they were so engaged. Designed by a computer programmer who wanted to boost his children’s SAT scores, not only will the game make you smarter, every correct answer feeds the hungry worldwide through the U.N. World Food Programme. There’s a great audio program (with text) from NPR.

NPR provides some great resources. Today they mentioned the Wallace Foundation as a resource for teachers. The site bills itself as high quality source for learning and enrichment activities. They also sponsor grants.

The Chronicle of Higher Education this week praised one of my favorite sites, Open Culture, for teaching resources and for personal enlightenment/ entertainment/ etc. The Chronicle discusses the great online courses available free, but I download audio books and audio short stories. Open Culture also sifts through the morass of YouTube and finds teaching and educational stuff actually worth viewing (it’s out there – really!) And, Open Culture updates frequently. Another collection of redeemable YouTube videos can be found at their smart youtube viewing collection.

2008 Summer Institute

The Value of Goals

Judging from initial feedback, the 2008 Summer Institute on Course Redesign succeeded rousingly, and expectations were high due to faculty interest in pedagogy and the renown of the speakers (see Team-based Learning website and books published).

Dr. Dee Fink challenged us to imagine our ideal class: bright, engaged and motivated. What would you want these students to be able to do after the class-in life? At the right we have the aggregated responses.

They asserted that curriculum design won’t work if you don’t know your outcome, what you want students to do at the end of the course. This allows for backwards design and makes choosing learning activities easier. This likewise facilitates the assessment of learning.

I wonder how past and present colleagues (particularly in the humanities) feel about setting goals and measuring our own success in promoting student learning (individually – not in any comparative sense. Let’s not digress into NCLB. Please take a minute and do the survey to the right - a quick and anonymous assessment itself).

Some think of teaching as an art and resist the idea of intentionality in creation. My mother, the artist and art history teacher, used to point out that great artists were well-trained. Also, the Latin root for "art" gives us also artifice, artificial, etc. Artists make the difficult look deceptively easy.

A final note: the conclusions of recent empirical research on Latino Students published in Excelencia in Education call for "short-term measures of academic progress to guide improvement in curricula instruction, and support services for Latino students."
The study notes that their conclusions would serve any student population.

For more online resources on assessment see our Bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/gdixon/assessment

SMARTboards: pedagogy and technology

Ways to Use SMARTboards

(The following are taken and adapted from the IT dept. at Wichita Public Schools

• Save lessons to present to students who were absent
• Have students create e-folios including samples of their work and narration
• Teach whole group computer or keyboarding skills
• Brainstorming
• Take notes directly into PowerPoint presentations
• Reinforce skills by using on-line interactive web sites
• Teach editing skills using editing marks
• Use in the 6 trait writing process
• Use highlighter tool to highlight nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.
• Use it with Inspiration
• Teaching students how to navigate the Internet
• Illustrate and write a book as a class. Use the record feature to narrate the text.
• Diagramming activities
• Teaching steps to a math problem.
• Graphics and charts with ESL learners and special ed students.
• Teaching vocabulary
• Create video files to teach a software application, a lesson, or as a review to be posted to the server or web. Example- How to create a graph in Excel or how to burn a projects to cds
• Use the built in maps to teach continents, oceans, countries, or states and capitals.
• Show presentations created by student or teacher
• Digital storytelling

How To: Resources available online

• 2 minute tutorials by SMART Technologies Inc. Animated
  

• Brief and broad overview from an educational blogger. Text-based.
  

• Discussion board.
  

• Podcast – regular and engaging, but each audio episode runs 30 minutes to over an hour

All these sites and more are bookmarked at : http://del.icio.us/gdixon/smartboard

We’ve also tried our own hand at some ultrabasic, quick and dirty videos on using the specific equipment here on KCKCC campus. See our wiki .

Welcome to our new site!

KCKCC Faculty Support blog

When we first started the The KCKCC faculty support blog on edublog, considerable time was spent offering support and research that showed why and how blogging can be good for educators. There weren't too many posts and they tended to be long. Since then I’ve used several other blog services, and used blogging extensively with a class.

My writing style and approach has changed to fit this medium, and we’ve migrating to Blogger® to take advantage of some fun and useful features.

Less is sometimes more. Readers prefer shorter but more frequent posts. There’s also got to be something in it for the reader – some pay off. This forum will be used to share resources (lesson plans or activities/ research/ etc) gathered through various journals, feeds, blogs and list servs.

Here are some links to previous posts on the old site. I can revisit these topics if there’s interest.

• What’s in the KCKCC faculty support blog for you: our purpose and audience.
• The adolescent nature of the web: why scatological metaphors are so appropriate. (this has links to interesting audio and text from NPR)
  
• There are also articles about icebreakers and brain-based learning.