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"After you create your syllabus, go back to and take a closer look at your learning outcomes for the course. As you read through the outcomes, write a discussion question related to each outcome. For example, suppose you teach a political science course and one of your learning outcomes is, "Students will be able to discuss current issues in political science informed by popular media and scholarly evidence." Now take that learning outcome and write a discussion question. "

Create a short audio message and then generate a QRcode for it that will play back on the device with which scanned it.

"The author of the best-selling What the Best College Teachers Do is back with more humane, doable, and inspiring help, this time for students who want to get the most out of college-and every other educational enterprise, too. The first thing they should do? Think beyond the transcript. The creative, successful people profiled in this book-college graduates who went on to change the world we live in-aimed higher than straight A's. They used their four years to cultivate habits of thought that would enable them to grow and adapt throughout their lives. Combining academic research on learning and motivation with insights drawn from interviews with people who have won Nobel Prizes, Emmys, fame, or the admiration of people in their field, Ken Bain identifies the key attitudes that distinguished the best college students from their peers. These individuals started out with the belief that intelligence and ability are expandable, not fixed. This led them to make connections across disciplines, to develop a "meta-cognitive" understanding of their own ways of thinking, and to find ways to negotiate ill-structured problems rather than simply looking for right answers. Intrinsically motivated by their own sense of purpose, they were not demoralized by failure nor overly impressed with conventional notions of success. These movers and shakers didn't achieve success by making success their goal. For them, it was a byproduct of following their intellectual curiosity, solving useful problems, and taking risks in order to learn and grow."

"A month or so before back-to-school season begins in earnest, Amazon has jumped into the lucrative college textbook market with Kindle Textbook Rental. Amazon claims students can save as much as 80% off textbook list prices by renting from the Kindle Store. The company is offering tens of thousands of textbooks, which students can rent for periods ranging from 30 to 360 days. Amazon has also extended its Whispersnyc technology so that students can access all their notes and highlighted content in the Amazon Cloud, even after the rental agreement is over."

Textbook rentals at up to 80% off the hard copy price. Wow!

"The wait is almost over. A weeklong exercise in withdrawal from social media usage will end for the campus community at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology shortly. The Pennsylvania university, which performed a similar move last year, has been blocking network access to 10 popular sites, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5, Twitxr, and Plurk, as well as texting outlets. This year's activity has been dubbed, "Back to Blackout." The intent of the blackout is to inspire thinking about how, when, and where people use and abuse social media, according to Eric Darr, executive vice president and provost. "We believe that technology is not inherently good or bad. Rather, technology becomes useful or destructive in the hands of users. This exercise is an attempt to better understand an important technology, social media, that clearly impacts how we live and work. It might inspire students, faculty, and staff to think more about their social media habits and to further raise awareness about the impact that social media has on daily life and work.""

Copyright law is back on the table