EHHP Operations and Accreditation






         CofC Weblog for EHHP Faculty

August 31, 2010

Hurricane Preparedness Plan

Filed under: Safety — daviss @ 11:14 am

If you are a student or parent of a student, here is the site for the College’s hurricane and tropical storm preparedness plan:

http://emergency.cofc.edu/hurricane/index.php

If you are a faculty or staff member in the School of Education, Health, and Human Performance, here’s the plan for our offices and buildings:

EHHP Hurricane and Tropical Storm Preparedness Plan

Just for you: Amazing

Filed under: For your enjoyment — daviss @ 9:43 am

August 30, 2010

SNAG Learning: Documentaries for Schools

Filed under: Curriculum,Learning strategies,Resources for teaching,Teaching ideas,Technology — daviss @ 12:27 pm

From Free Technology for Teachers: Snag Films, a provider of high quality documentaries for online viewing, has now launched Snag Learning. Snag Learning offers access to most of the same films available on Snag Films. Snag Learning categorizes documentaries by grade level and content area. Additionally, Snag Learning offers a series of guiding questions for each film. You can embed previews of each video into your blog, but you have to watch the full-length versions on Snag Learning.

Applications for Education
If you can live with the pre-roll advertisement on the films, Snag Learning could be a good resource for teachers who want to use documentaries in their classrooms, but don’t have the funds for purchasing DVDs. Snag Learning is planning to add lesson plans to accompany the guiding questions attached to the films they host.

140 Things to Try from Free Technology for Teachers

Filed under: Curriculum,Learners,Learning games,Learning strategies,Social media,Teaching ideas,Technology — daviss @ 12:01 pm

Solutions for Student Incivility

Filed under: Civility and professionalism,Curriculum,Learners,Learning strategies,Teaching ideas,Uncategorized — daviss @ 11:51 am
This article was interesting to me because it says so much about professionalism for our teacher education candidates.
Written by: Christy Price in The Teaching Professor, August 1, 2010

In my workshops and presentations to faculty on engaging Millennial learners, I have been surprised how frequently the topic turns to student incivility. It seems everyone can tell a story of flagrant student disrespect. I have trouble relating to these experiences. In any given semester, I have approximately 200 students, and the vast majority of them are extremely cooperative, conscientious, and excited about their learning. In my 18 years of teaching, I have experienced what I would describe as uncivil student behavior in class on only two occasions.
Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but perhaps not? What if there were a formula for preventing or at least minimizing student incivility? Well, pull out your highlighter because, in my research on Millennial learners, I think I may have stumbled upon some answers.
Step 1: Shift your paradigm to prevention.
The first tip: don’t take these behaviors personally. One of my colleagues has suggested the word incivility implies a specific choice or intention on the part of the student. Perhaps it would behoove us to describe these behaviors as “unproductive to the learning environment,” since students often cluelessly exhibit them without realizing how their behavior is perceived and impacts the learning environment. In addition, many faculty are concerned with very specific student types such as the belligerent student, the Neanderthal who makes offensive comments, the know-it-all, the verbal dominator, the class-skipper, the perpetually late, the early leaver, the talker, the texter, the sleeper, the newspaper reader, the Web-surfer, the unprepared, or the student who demands special treatment. We may find ways to successfully respond to and alter each specific behavior, but if we really wish to create a learning environment, we need to focus on holistic measures as opposed to fragmented reactions to specific infractions.
Step 2: Practice verbal judo—producing closeness as opposed to distance.
Recently a colleague relayed a story in which she asked her students to define multicultural education. One student replied, “It is a Marxist plot to undermine public education.” Many of us might be quick to attack this perspective; however, we need to practice what I call “verbal judo.” We need our body language, tone, and words to send a message that de-escalates conflict. The Millennial learners I interview regularly describe antagonistic professorial responses to what they perceive as accidental or minor infractions. There’s a lesson to learn here: never be defensive, reactionary, or express a strongly negative emotional tone with a student. I frequently hear professors describe with bravado interactions in which they criticize, humiliate, deride, and belittle the very people they are charged to teach, develop, and inspire. Every interaction we have with students produces either closeness or distance. The more we engage in distance-producing interactions with students, the more we can expect noncompliance and unproductive student behaviors in return. We may win small battles, but we set ourselves up for losing the war as we lessen our overall ability to assist students in achieving the intended learning outcomes of our courses.
Step 3: Clearly communicate course policies and assignments with rationales and consistently administer consequences.
An ounce of prevention will avert a ton of student angst if we provide rationales and consequences for assignments and policies. If we don’t want students to challenge our grading procedures, a detailed rubric along with the reason for each assignment will clarify what students need to do and go a long way toward preventing student grade challenges after the fact. For example, if we have a policy that students lose points for late assignments, we should provide a policy rationale like this on the course syllabus and assignment rubric: “In order to be fair to students who work to turn in assignments on time, late papers will lose 5 percent for each class day they are late.”
Step 4: Design courses and utilize methods with the prevention of incivility in mind.
I have encountered professors who exhibit a wide range of attitudes and responses regarding specific behaviors such as texting in class. On one end of the spectrum are professors who don’t care if students text and successfully ignore such behaviors; on the other end are those who are disturbed beyond belief, who respond to texting with extremely punitive methods.
It has become painfully apparent to me that our methods play a powerful role in contributing to or averting unproductive student behaviors in the classroom. For example, I recently used my clicker response system to gather feedback from students regarding texting. Of the 77 students polled, 18 percent said they never text in their classes. This was a shockingly low number from my perspective. As for the 63 texters, 87 percent strongly agreed or agreed with this statement: “I text more in classes in which the professor’s main method is lecture and less in those classes where the professor uses a variety of methods such as discussion, group work, cases, and video or multimedia.”
Conclusion
If you peruse the literature on college student incivility, you will find a great deal of evidence that supports these recommendations. Communicating clearly and providing a rationale for class policies, creating closeness as opposed to distance when interacting with students, and using engaging methods will not only lessen student incivility, but will help us achieve our ultimate goal of helping student learn while they are in college.
A condensed version of this article was previously published as an E-xcellence in Teaching column on the PsychTeacher listserv coordinated by the Society for the Teaching of Psychology.  It will appear in a collection of essay that maybe found at http://teachpsych.org/resources/e-books/e-books.php.
Contact Christy Price at cprice@daltonstate.edu.

Encouraging Substantive Discussion of Course Content by Getting Personal

Filed under: Curriculum,Learning strategies,Teaching ideas — daviss @ 11:27 am

by Maryellen Weimer in Teaching Strategies:

“Why are teachers afraid of sentences that begin with ‘I feel’ or that draw on personal experience?” Margaret Mott asks, repeating a question she read in an essay early in her career.

Most faculty don’t encourage students to use personal experience because it is seen as too subjective and without much intellectual substance. Mott has students in her political theory course write three personal essays. Her motivation derives partly from the need to “displace the preponderance of passivity I find in their essays.” (p. 207) Not only does the academy object to the personal, but students themselves have been trained to stay out of their writing. “High school students know from experience that the more they talk about themselves, the more will be taken away.” (p. 207)

Mott’s carefully designed writing assignments creatively weave the first-person voice and personal experience into explorations of the political theorists being read in the course. Here’s her second five-page essay assignment:

“Begin by describing a situation in which you felt at odds with a professional (a doctor, a lawyer, a therapist, a teacher, a social worker). Show us (don’t tell us) how your experience of the event differed from that of the professional. Let the details of the story convey all the confusions of this experience. Stop and breathe. In the subsequent section, use one or two passages from Montaigne to analyze this experience, to unpack the confusion, and to lay out the terms of power. Finally, what did you learn about yourself as a result of this essay? (p. 209)

“The beauty of this method is that it allows a layering of experience, first descriptive, and then analytical, so that the writer becomes both participant and judge. First the writer explores the fullness of experience and then she reflects back on it using theory.” (p. 209) All three of Mott’s essay assignments are designed so that students cannot write about just their feelings or personal experiences. The personal writing becomes a vehicle for substantive discussion of course content. The article contains excerpts from student essays, and these show how effectively this approach enables students to confront personal experience with political theories that can explain more deeply or challenge what they may have come to believe about those experiences.

This article is not particularly easy reading, as Mott describes the writing assignments in terms of very specific discipline-based content. What the article does show clearly is how powerful carefully designed writing explorations like these can be. They allow students to take what they know and what they have experienced and hold that knowledge against a light that significantly illuminates their understanding.

Excerpted from Use Personal Essay Assignments to Encourage Substantive Discussion of Course Content, The Teaching Professor, vol. 23, no. 3.

Permalink: http://www.facultyfocus.com?p=14903

Reference: Mott, M. (2008). Passing our lives through the fire of thought: The personal essay in the political theory classroom. PS, Political Science and Politics, 41 (1), 207-211.

August 24, 2010

Make your own free personal chat room

Filed under: Paperless teaching,Social media,Social networking,Teaching ideas,Technology — daviss @ 2:23 pm

Another wonderful idea from one of my faves, MakeUseOf: six free online programs to create your own personal chat room. These are options for those of us who want to chat with a group but everyone in the group doesn’t use the same chat program and doesn’t want to sign up for several. Here are several very brief previews to show you what is out there to explore:

TinyChat supports voice, webcam, whiteboard, and desktop sharing.

Chatterous is password protected and you can even chat via SMS on your cell phone, too.

Anologue is a simple, clean chat program without lots of bells and whistles.

BabelWithMe allows you to chat with others who don’t speak your language; chats are converted to your language of choice.

BoostCam is a simple one-on-one video chat room with no sign up requirement.

And, finally, ChatRide is similar to BoostCam with the added feature of chat.

Just in case you haven’t tried Tiny URL

Filed under: Teaching ideas,Technology,Tiny URL — daviss @ 11:16 am

http://tiny.cc/

Tiny URL is a site that will transfigure your reeeeeeeeeeally long URL into a very short one that isn’t so susceptible to typing error. Also, you can create your own custom URL for a site, too. What a great tool for URLs you wish to share with your students!

Ideas for the first 3 weeks of class

Filed under: Teaching ideas — daviss @ 11:11 am

From one of my favorite sources of great teaching ideas comes this easily-to-skim list of 101 ideas for the first three weeks of classes. You’ll probably find some things you haven’t tried yet as well as some ideas you haven’t thought about using in a long time. Have a great beginning to your semester!

http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/101thing.htm

Convert your ebooks

Filed under: Technology — daviss @ 11:06 am

What if your ebook reader doesn’t support a book you want to read? Easy fix: Calibre is  free, open source software that converts ebooks for different readers!

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