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Presentation Objectives are to: 1) Educate faculty on the pedagogical uses of avatars in the online classroom, 2)Provide an opportunity for participants to practice developing their own avatar and 3)Promote interest and improve confidence in using avatars as part of established learning activities and spark generation of new ideas. Presentation Audience: Faculty who desire to see improvement in the richness of their students’ online experiences will find this presentation interesting and beneficial. Faculty who have never considered using or developed their own avatars will find practical assistance. Presentation Activities: In this highly interactive session, participants with laptop computers will have the opportunity to create and publish an avatar, which can be posted on their faculty webpage or other Web 2.0 forum. The facilitator will also present avatars developed by undergraduate students as part of a class project and will invite participants to generate ways that they can use this medium in own classrooms. Description: Avatars have typically been associated with gaming, recreation and entertainment, and most recently were the central characters in a hugely successful blockbuster movie. Their use in learning environments is much less popular, although it is growing. A central definition has not emerged, although the following are generally accepted: “a digital representation

Online instructors lament some of the same problems expressed by their students, not the least of which is the feeling of disconnection in the learning environmen

Allmendinger, K. (2010). Social presence in synchronous virtual learning situations: the role of nonverbal signals displayed by avatars. Educational Psychology Review, 22(1), 41-56

Student Self-AssessmentIntentionally involving your students in the assessment process helps students to become lifelong learners.  Peter Senge (2000) says, “A cornerstone of lifelong learning is the capacity for objective self-assessment – the ability to judge for yourself how well you are doing.”  Similarly, William McKeachie (2011) relates the importance of helping students become lifelong learners to faculty members who intentionally involve students in self-assessment:“After the course is over, students will not be able to depend on you to assess the quality of their learning.  If one of your goals is the development of lifelong learning skills, students need practice in self-assessment.

To encourage students to learn from past tests, faculty can assign a worksheet that asks students to look at more than the grade on the returned exam.  “Exam wrappers direct students to review and analyze their performance (and the instructor’s feedback) with an eye toward adapting their future learning” (Ambrose, et al, 2010).

Questions on an exam wrapper for a physics course might include the following:

A learning style is: "A complexus of related characteristics in which the whole is greater than its parts. Learning style is a gestalt combining internal and external operations derived from the individual's neurobiology, personality and development, and reflected in learner behaviour" (Keefe & Ferrell 1990, p. 16).

general tendency towards a particular learning approach displayed by an individual.

Riding & Cheema (1991), from an extensive review of the literature, conclude there are only two principal styles "families", the holist-analytic, and the verbaliser-imager. These two broad groupings relate to the type of cognitive activities normally ascribed to the two hemispheres of the brain. Curry (1983) suggests there are three different perspectives on styles: those relating to a preference for a particular instructional approach, those relating to the individual's intellectual approach to assimilating information independently of the environment, and those relating to the individual's intellectual approach to assimilating information with the environment.