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Using Flipgrid for Critical THinking Discussions: An Engaging Alternative to Discussion Boards

4/13/2020

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Color photo of a girl holding a black smartphone out and looking into it. Photo by Julia m Cameron, downloaded from Pexels.com

​Below are the instructions I share for what I call Critical Thinking Discussions on Flipgrid. I host three of these formal Flipgrid discussions every quarter/semester. Students serve as Discussion Starters for one of the three discussions and Deep Thinkers for the other two. I use Canvas groups to randomly assign students to the Discussion Starter and Deep Thinker roles across the three discussions.

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My Favorite Things w/Dr. Bob #2

3/4/2019

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​Despite having to spend considerable time adjusting my curriculum and course schedules for five classes to fit the rare closure of our campus six days this wintery spring 2019 semester in Wisconsin, I still managed to discover some new lifelong learning gems this February. Here it goes…

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Guest Post: Gamifying My Class (Part 1)

2/4/2019

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​“The sun is setting, and the meadow is thick with fog, or smoke; roll a perception check” your friend tells you and others around the table." 
If this sounds unfamiliar, then you haven’t spent time as an Elf Ranger, Dwarf Wizard, or Dragonborn Barbarian—i.e., you haven’t played Dungeon and Dragons (DnD). It was one-part my enjoyment of DnD and one-part my continued efforts to increase engagement and motivation in my classes that led me to experiment with gamifying one of my spring classes after reading this piece from my colleague and Sport Psychology Teaching Aficionado Dr. Amber Shipherd. Put briefly, gamifying a class is done by incorporating common elements of gaming such as competition and earning rewards. This approach has been studied in different contexts and has been found to have positive effects on engagement as well as learning. I hope that by adopting gaming elements throughout the course my students will have similar positive outcomes this semester. In the remainder of this post, I will discuss some of the strategies I am utilizing; I will follow-up again at the end of the semester with an update on how things went and lessons for others who might want to experiment with similar approaches.

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New Year, New Goals: Professional Development

8/10/2018

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​Here at The Novice Professor (and everywhere else) academics are heading into a new school year. As "this" year comes to a close we are reflecting on the past year and setting goals for the upcoming year. To inspire you, and help hold ourselves accountable, we are sharing our goals with you in this week's posts, spanning several topics of academic life. 
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Since the Novice Professor is all about bettering ourselves as academics, it's no surprise that three of us have big goals centered on Professional Development.


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The Parsing of Grade and Assessment Processes for Faculty Member Continuous Improvement

7/19/2018

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This week, we asked guest contributor Eric Landrum about using grade information for faculty assessment purposes. Below, he gives informative examples about how he utilizes detailed rubrics as a form of assessment for faculty improvement. 

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Effectiveness of Online Textbook Platforms

7/6/2018

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Traditional textbooks now come with some really cool online supplements. The goal for many who use these supplements in their courses is to increase student learning. While supplements vary in their offerings, most include some kind of quizzing component based on learning and memory principles like spacing and testing effects. Principles that we know can be effective for learning and retaining information. The purpose of these textbook supplements is great, but they often come with a pretty hefty price tag; especially when students need to buy the accompanying textbook new in order to get the access code. I am a passionate supporter of the trend in higher-ed toward cheaper (or free) textbook options, so I have wondered about the utility of these supplements in the face of the high price tag that often accompanies them. ​

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SoTL Digest: "Practice What We Teach"

6/22/2018

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Researchers in psychology know that learning isn’t simple. Learning and memory have been researched extensively throughout psychology’s evolution. They are complex topics that have spawned more than 100 years of research. Despite this, when it comes to teaching psychology, we seem to fall short in extending what we understand about the mind by applying it to those minds that are trying to learn in our classroom. To this end, Chew and colleagues (2018) discuss how we need to “Practice What We Teach” in an article published this month in Teaching of Psychology. In the article, the authors highlight numerous points (9 total) that need to be addressed in our field in order to promote teaching and learning in psychology. The article itself is fairly short (about 5 pages of text, excluding references), so I strongly encourage folks to read their concise review of how we can improve teaching in our field.

I won’t review each point they raised, but there were a couple key themes that really struck home for me. [read more below]


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Using Podcasts for Content

5/17/2018

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Podcasts are one of the main ways that I keep up-to-date on news and research in psychology. They give me a chance to learn about topics outside my field, all while keeping me hands free. This allows me to learn about the world around me while commuting to school, working on monotonous data tasks, or doing chores around the house.
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After Ciara’s post on using YouTube videos in the classroom, I thought about putting together a list of podcasts for the classroom. Podcasts could be used as a tool for students, to help them make the most of students’ increasingly busy schedules.

[Read on for more podcast resources!]

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