Group items tagged

The idea of "project-based learning" is appealing to many people, but open-ended group inquiry also carries a number of risks. This article makes a number of suggestions for ways PBL can be improved.

A new iOS app designed by faculty at Bryn Mawr and Notre Dame integrates the text of The Tempest with critical commentary, different actors' interpretations of critical scenes, and class discussions. The "book app" seems to be diverging in important ways from the "e-book."

What are your opinions on grading group work? How do you balance formative and summative comments, group and individual grades, your grading and intra-group feedback?

Interested in tools that make course content more accessible to students with visual and cognitive challenges? Two free Microsoft products features their Immersive Reader tool, which reads aloud text for users.

This article does not address the reasons why faculty restrict access to technology in the classroom, such as distraction or the confusion of dictation for note taking, but it does present an interesting model for how technology could be used better to create a backchannel for a course through student collaboration.

HASTAC's Pedagogy Project is a website collecting syllabi and course projects which use digital tools or highly collaborative approaches. If you're wondering how to use new forms of communication in assignments, or if you've got a great example to share, this will be a great resource!

The student who isn't pulling their weight (and even the fear of that student) can be a major obstacle for group work. This article has some concrete tips for reducing the ability of a group member to coast. I particularly like the options which encourage you to prioritize and teach group process.

The Open Access movement encompasses a number of initiatives that encourage more affordable course materials for students, shared resources among teachers, and collaboration among scholars. Here are some simple ways of contributing to Open Access in your research and teaching practices.

4 great questions to ask when you consider team-teaching a course, with 4 great lessons drawn from the authors' experience.

The author says "information that is best determined collaboratively with students, should not be prescribed by the professor on day 1." What do you think of his examples?

Structured reflection with a trustworthy friend is a great way to improve your teaching, and can make it easier to conduct a project in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL).

"It wasn't until a professor assigned a research project that required collective thinking - and actually showed us how much better our work could be with multiple minds put to a task - that I became convinced that collaboration is a fundamental and teachable humanities skill." Danica Savonic describes a project to have essays from her introductory college writing course published in a pedagogy journal.

I don't necessarily agree with every last example in this article, but even where I might quibble, the suggestions are useful in illuminating the ways and reasons we meet. This might be as useful to our students when we assign group work, as it could be for ourselves and our colleagues.

A set of principles which apply not only to science labs but any collaboration, department, and scholarly organization. The rules are, of course, not "simple" to do at all, but they are clearly stated and explained.