Center for Teaching & Learning

Join us for a session that fosters creative reflection and planning regarding the ways we’re adjusting our teaching in response to our experiences of living and working through a pandemic. 

Yellowdig is an alternative to Blackboard's discussion board tool. In form and substance, it works much like social media platforms, supporting text and video posts as well as allowing participants to use likes or emojis to react to posts and comments. It provides flexible ways for the class community to interact and can be integrated into Blackboard.

Knowing how to “do college” is part of the “hidden curriculum.” Some students are savvy to the habits and behaviors that lead to academic success and others are not. At the classroom level, interventions to address these inequities include teaching the hidden curriculum and structuring the course to support development of these skills and habits.

Join Graduate Program Coordinator, Holly Buckland Parker and CTL Faculty Associate, Lizzy Pope to share ideas from your lessons learned during the past 2020 and 2021 semesters. We envision using these lessons to create thoughtful, reflective practices for the Spring 2022 semester. We will structure our time to discuss and brainstorm useful ways to manage research time, grading, and teaching this Spring.

During this workshop, you’ll have an opportunity to clarify questions and refine your knowledge of Screencast-O-Matic for producing effective videos for your students. We can review any step along the way from planning to recording to editing to sharing.

Perusall is a collaborative annotation tool that integrates with Blackboard (meaning no separate login is needed). Perusall has been shown to increase pre-class reading significantly (greater than 90% of students consistently complete readings in classes using this tool). Students—in small groups up to 20—can collectively mark up readings with threaded questions and comments.

This short "tech soundbite" session will introduce you to a simple, flexible digital bulletin board, useful for working with students to brainstorm, organize, and reflect. Padlet allows users to post text, links, images, videos, and weblinks. This workshop be structured with time for hands-on experimentation as well as suggestions for using Padlet for various teaching activities.

This pandemic has impacted our lives, our work, and our classrooms. As we start a new semester, it can be helpful to reflect on experiences and lessons we’ve learned from past semesters. Come join us for a roundtable discussion with student services staff from across the University to discuss issues impacting our students and to think about ways to make this semester manageable and sustainable for ourselves and our students.

Students come to college with widely varying academic skills, approaches to learning, and motivation levels. Faculty often lament that students are focused on achieving high grades, but are not willing to invest much time or effort in learning. This session will focus on the importance of helping students acquire simple, but effective, learning strategies based on cognitive science principles.

All STEM students who are admitted to the institution have the ability to succeed in STEM courses. However, most do not have effective learning strategies and resort to memorizing information just before tests. This interactive workshop will introduce faculty to cognitive science research-based learning strategies that will help all students experience meaningful, transferable learning.

Motivating today’s students to actively engage in learning activities proves challenging for most faculty. Very often Gen Z students do not respond as did students in the past to extrinsic motivators such as bonus quizzes and extra credit assignments. This workshop will engage faculty in a discussion about addressing student needs for autonomy, competence, relatedness, self-esteem, and enjoyment in order to significantly increase student motivation.