Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching Effectiveness

The 10 High Impact Educational Practices are excellent filters to run when you are assessing your programs.

"Excerpt from High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter By George D. Kuh A Brief Overview The following teaching and learning practices have been widely tested and have been shown to be beneficial for college students from many backgrounds. These practices take many different forms, depending on learner characteristics and on institutional priorities and contexts. On many campuses, assessment of student involvement in active learning practices such as these has made it possible to assess the practices' contribution to students' cumulative learning. However, on almost all campuses, utilization of active learning practices is unsystematic, to the detriment of student learning. Presented below are brief descriptions of high-impact practices that educational research suggests increase rates of student retention and student engagement. "

Great video filled with ideas of how and reasons why to use technology in teaching and learning.

"I am hoping to create a directory, listed by school division (or other organization), of Saskatchewan educators on Twitter. If you are a Saskatchewan educator, please help by listing yourself, colleagues, or others that you know that are on Twitter."

Scroll to near the bottom for lists from the University of Saskatchewan, University of Regina and pre-service teachers.

Nice short video introducing ways to make use of the discussion forums in an LMS like BBLearn. There appears to be other useful videos in this series. Thanks to Mark Morton at Waterloo for pointing this out.

"Welcome to a "flipped classroom" at Byron High School--where the lectures are homework, and problem solving with the teacher is class time." Great article about how one school flipped their math program.

Brand new article that just came out in the Higher Education Research and Development journal. It features researchers from La Trobe University in Australia, but may be of interest to people at the U of S.

This website, maintained by Mick Flanagan at University College London, is the most comprehensive online site gathering information, references, videos, and articles about threshold concepts. It includes overviews about threshold concepts, as well as an alphabetical listing of threshold concepts discussed in the literature across the disciplines.

"Before we can own failure as an educational opportunity, we have to disown it as an individual identity." - (Thanks to Erin D from the ULC for passing this along)

Journal devoted to Community Service-Learning Research. PDFs of articles can be downloaded for free and full journals can be purchased from this site

"Tagxedo turns words -- famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters -- into a visually stunning word cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text." Thanks for Erika for pointing this out to me.

"Short video explains how to use Diigo to collaborate with students, colleagues, friends and family."

"Making sense of methodologies: A paradigm framework for the novice researcher" - Article introducing different methodologies for research on teaching and learning (and other social sciences)

Article - "Development and Use of the Approaches to Teaching Inventory " by Keith Trigwell and Michael Prosser - explores faculty conceptions of teaching (from transmission oriented/teaching focused to conceptual change oriented/student focused).

Kahneman's TED Talk about experience, memory, and attention. Kahneman's work has been a regular feature of our GSR 984 class on Critical Thinking and Professional Skills for graduate students.

"Pinterest is taking the social media world by storm, and it isn't just popular with individual users. Businesses, nonprofits, and even libraries are sharing ideas and information through the site as well, connecting with people from around the country and around the globe." While these are specific examples from libraries, I think that educators might find this interesting and possibly even useful.

"This short video highlights several reasons why having an e-portfolio is a good decision whether you are a student, faculty, or staff." From Penn State. Thanks to Mark Morton at Waterloo for pointing this out.

Nice post about the writing application Scrivener on the ProfHacker blog on The Chronicle of Higher Education site. This is the main application that I use for writing anything longer than an email. Since this was written, a Windows version of Scrivener was released.

"Medical Education is a group for individuals involved in medical education, nursing education and other health professions education. It's a place to share resources, ideas and best practice and get connected with others working in this field. This group is NOT for promoting products or services, the focus is on sharing bookmarks about education, medical education, Web 2.0, resources which would be helpful to students and teachers to support learning and teaching in medicine and the health professions."

"A growing literature suggests that there is a disjuncture between the instructional practices of the education system and the student body it is expected to serve, particularly with respect to the roles of digital technologies. Based on surveys and focus group interviews of first-year students at a primarily undergraduate Canadian university and focus group interviews of professors at the same institution, this study explores the gaps and intersections between students' uses and expectations for digital technologies while learning inside the classroom and socializing outside the classroom, and the instructional uses, expectations and concerns of their professors. It concludes with recommendations for uses of digital technologies that go beyond information transmission, the need for extended pedagogical discussions to harness the learning potentials of digital technologies, and for pedagogies that embrace the social construction of knowledge as well as individual acquisition."