Often I read Science Daily as a way of keeping up on many different areas of science. Lately, one topic that keeps popping up is creativity and how we can promote creativity in our lives. For me, the creative process and teaching have a lot of overlap. As instructors we try to be creative in the ways that we engage our students. Continue reading Creativity in a Nutshell – Martin Smith
Month: January 2012
Blogs and Eportfolios in Waterloo’s LEARN — Marlene Griffith Wrubel
Waterloo LEARN is the new online learning system. It was introduced in the Spring of 2011 and has been fully integrated in on-campus blended courses since January 2012. There are many activities that faculty can use in this system to increase the learning experience for their students. Continue reading Blogs and Eportfolios in Waterloo’s LEARN — Marlene Griffith Wrubel
Piazza – web-based discussion forums for university courses — Paul Kates
Piazza.com offers students and professors a smart-looking , easy-to-use discussion forum for question & answer communication in university and college courses. It is free to use and free of advertising. and is proving popular enough to use at some of the technical schools in the USA (e.g. Stanford, Berkeley, Georgia Tech) and Canada (e.g. University of Waterloo, University of British Columbia, University of Toronto). Continue reading Piazza – web-based discussion forums for university courses — Paul Kates
Relating Through Examples — Julia Woodhall
With the beginning of the winter term well under way, many instructors are thinking about course material and how to relate concepts and material to students. As a young instructor, this has always been a concern of mine. Continue reading Relating Through Examples — Julia Woodhall
Nyuk, Nyuk, Nyuk: Humour as a Teaching Tool — Mark Morton
Humour can be an effective pedagogical tool. This is borne out by a study that I undertook, five years ago, of about a thousand comments that were posted by students to RateMyProfessors.com: a good sense of humour turned out to be among the top five characteristics that undergraduates appreciated in an instructor (the other attributes in the top five were being approachable; Continue reading Nyuk, Nyuk, Nyuk: Humour as a Teaching Tool — Mark Morton
Enhancing Integrity at uWaterloo — Bruce Mitchell & Faye Schultz
The Academic Integrity Office is coordinating a collaborative approach to enhance integrity as a core value at the University of Waterloo for students, staff, and faculty. Various academic support units in cooperation with faculty and student representatives created an “Academic Integrity Fact Sheet for Students” that was distributed at the start of the academic term in September 2011. In October, a set of four posters and associated videos were created Continue reading Enhancing Integrity at uWaterloo — Bruce Mitchell & Faye Schultz
“StickKing” with It: Self and Peer Motivation — Mark Morton
Today is January 3, which means that about 30% of all resolutions that were made two days ago have now been abandoned. Whatever motivation we had to strive for self-improvement on New Year’s Day has vanished in a puff of snow. I’m curious as to why this is the case. Every person that I know has, I think, loads of motivation and perseverance for some tasks and goals: my son, for example, will spend hours putting together a complicated Lego set, even missing meals in the process unless we remind him to eat. Continue reading “StickKing” with It: Self and Peer Motivation — Mark Morton