Current Trends
Flipping Your Classroom
Flipping the classroom involves the use of a blended learning teaching model, where technology is used to provide students with the learning materialoutside of class, so that classroom time can be spent on interactive exercises and activities. Some phrase this as “lecture at home, practice at school.” Screencasting is one way to easily create video lecture material.
Pedagogical Applications of Mobile Devices
Mobile devices are becoming more and more common, so it is only natural to to begin asking how these technologies can be used to improve student learning. The term m-learning is often used to refer to using mobile technologies to facilitate learning. Incorporating mobile learning into your class can be both challenging and rewarding. This document provides some recommendations to keep in mind when you consider incorporating m-learning to your classroom.
Tips for Managing Large Enrollment Classes
Many faculty struggle with how to manage workloads and meaningfully engage with students in large enrollment classes. This document provides some tips on how to use technology to help engage students, streamline workflow, and even successfully increase enrollments for large classes.
Apps for Education
There are far too many educational apps available to download for me to list them all. This link is simply takes you to a list of the apps I have personally tried and found useful. Some are free and some cost a small amount. If you know of other apps you think would be beneficial to your colleagues, please email me the info and I’ll add them to the list!
Open Educational Resources (OER)
Open Educational Resources (OER) are free resources that can supplement teaching and learning needs. OER can include many different kinds of content, including lesson plans, learning modules, videos, and interactive experiences. As the cost of traditional textbooks continues to rise, UNCG and in particular University Libraries encourage instructors to explore both using existing and creating new open educational resources as alternatives to traditional textbooks.
Presentation Software
There are many software options for students who need to create presentations for class. Some of these tools create screencasts (recordings of your computer screen), some are app based from your mobile device, but all provide students with a way to create a multimedia rich experience for the viewer.
Online, asynchronous presentations can be more difficult to design because you are not there to interact in person with the students. Your content and design must allow for this lack of spontaneous interaction. If you would like to learn more about easy ways to create a more effective online presentation, see:
10 Tips for an Effective Online Presentation
Streaming Media
This ITS website provides you with information on how to produce streaming media for the Web. With streaming video, you are encouraged to go the route of streaming through YouTube via iSpartan, described at the bottom of the above linked page. Further instructions can be found here: http://its.uncg.edu/iSpartan/YouTube/
Blogs
Blogs are typically more informal personal websites people use to post their opinions on topics or themes, similar to a journal but more public in nature. There are many free blog sites, but the two most common are WordPress and Blogger (part of Google). Most blog sites allow you to control your privacy settings, however please still keep in mind student FERPA considerations should you consider incorporating a blog assignment into your class.
ArtStor
ArtStor is a nonprofit digital library with database of “over 1.6 million digital images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences with an accessible suite of software tools for teaching and research.” Faculty can create and share image groups from the existing database, and/or upload their own images to the UNCG instituiton catalog area. Here is a link to a brief overview of how to use ArtStor: Brief Tutorial of ArtStor
Interactive Timelines
Interactive timelines can be a great way to present a lot of individual facts and data in a visual, unified way that can help students make connections to larger themes and movements. Timelines can help in the understanding of chronology, cause and effect, and how events in different areas overlap and affect each other. Timeline JS, from Northwestern University, is a free online tool that helps you (and/or your students) create interactive timelines using a Google spreadsheet. Note: You need to be familiar with how to use Google Drive before using this tool.
