Today, I’m experimenting with video blogs. Click the arrow below to watch.
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The Centre for Teaching Excellence welcomes contributions to its blog. If you are a faculty member, staff member, or student at the University of Waterloo (or beyond!) and would like contribute a posting about some aspect of teaching or learning, please contact Mark Morton or Trevor Holmes.
The teaching practicum for UW’s Certificate in University Teaching (CUT) helped me enhance several of my teaching skills. Through this course, I got the chance to practice lecturing, receive feedback on my teaching skills, and become more self-aware and critically reflective of my teaching style. However, what made my experience special was the opportunity to work with a faculty member who is an award-winning teacher. Professor Alex Penlidis was my observer and mentor Continue reading What I’ve Learned by Working with an Award-winning Teacher – Afsaneh Nabifar
A few weeks ago, I gave a presentation on new educational technologies at Concordia University in Montreal. About 150 faculty members and graduate students turned out for the presentation, an impressive number considering that the presentation took place early on a Friday morning. The number of attendees attests, though, to a growing conviction at universities that new educational technologies can enhance three things:
With regard to the first of these, many new educational technologies — especially Web 2.0 ones such as Twitter, blogs, wikis, VoiceThread, and Google Wave, to name only a few Continue reading Enhancing Learning, Assessment, and Efficiency via New Educational Technologies – Mark Morton
In a previous post, I mentioned the recent creation of a CTE Tip Sheet devoted to Faculty Mentoring. I think it might be timely to follow up that post with some “testimonials” about the impact of mentors, ones that were submitted to the contest component of the 2010 Loving to Learn Day. That contest had four categories: UW students, staff, and faculty; students in Grades 1 to 8; students in Grades 9 to 12; and everyone else. The mentors that people wrote about for that contest about were diverse: parents, grandparents, spouses, colleagues, children, elementary school teachers, fictional characters, aunts, baby-sitters, brothers-in-law, hockey players, strangers in a nursing home, veterans, graduate supervisors, pets, and more. Continue reading Shed the Light of the Sun – Mark Morton
The original Mentor was an aged advisor in The Odyssey. The guidance that Mentor provided to his young ward, Telemachus, was apparently so superb that in the seventeenth century his name became synonymous with sage counsel. Examples of famous mentoring relationships abound: Haydn mentored Beethoven, Freud mentored Jung, Ezra Pound mentored T.S. Eliot, and Lawren Harris mentored Emily Carr. Continue reading Mentoring Faculty – Mark Morton
I’m in Austin, Texas this week at the annual conference of the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI). Today was a long and full day (and two more days of conference are to come) so I’ll probabaly need some time to reflect and sift the various things that I’ve learned or heard about so far. Two things, though, stand out from today. Continue reading Live from Austin, Texas — Mark Morton
Over many years, CTE has developed almost a hundred evidence-based “tip sheets.” Most of these tip sheets explore different ways of enhancing one’s teaching (such as “Activities for Large Classes”); a handful of others aim to provide guidance on career-related issues (such as, “The Academic Job Interview”); and a few others offer advice to students about strategies for effective learning (such as “Building Your Note-Taking and Study Skills”). I’ve pasted an alphabetical list of our tip sheets at the end of this blog entry, but you might find it more useful to look at the list on our website, where we present them in thematic categories. Our ongoing challenge Continue reading CTE’s Teaching Tip Sheets