Writing Across the Curriculum

A collection of tech resources, tutorials, and guides, especially for teaching English. You can download all of these documents free of charge or read them online.

Assessing the work produced by teams, however, presents a significant challenge, and this difficulty is especially prominent in online environments.

Children love to learn, but at some point they lose that and become adults that don't like formal learning. Let's explore why "play" has gotten such a bad rap and figure out how to get it back in education.

I am getting more an more convinced that in high school it is imperative for teachers who want to 'get into blogging' to understand the under pinning nature of 'writing communities'.

You don't have to know much about the psychology of learning to realise that a series of once-only, delivered lectures is pedagogic nonsense. We learn next to nothing from once-only experiences like unrecorded lectures. Indeed, everything we know about learning shows that repeated access to content is necessary for learning.

David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut -- and it may just change the way we see the world.

The question we are faced with, then, is this: how do we prepare our students to write effectively in environments that don't yet exist? While I'm sure there is more to add to this list, I suggest that there are three domains of literacy that, if students become aware of them, will prepare them for new digital writing environments. Namely, students should be aware of the speed of digital communications and the types of interactions that speed encourages, the ways in which digital writing environments preserve and provide access to data, and how writing technologies manage the divide between public and private.

If business happens through networking, then what should I be doing to help my students understand both why, and how, to network? Do I have an obligation to teach the importance of networking to students in my English courses, or can I safely leave that lesson to my colleagues in the business department?

Students don't write mathematics correctly. They throw down a mess of symbols with the answer underlined at the bottom and rely on the examiner's intelligence to get the marks. Teaching them to write in a more orderly and logical way has numerous advantages: it makes marking easier; allows students to demonstrate understanding (or not); forces an improvement in their thinking skills. Expressing their ideas clearly and correctly is a valuable skill for graduates in further study, employment and life in general.

PLC = Professional Learning Community

Don't depend on someone else's interpretation of a document. Read it yourself and draw your own conclusions. Listen to speeches and hear for yourself, who said what. Document based questions (DBQs) are a major focus in schools today. To be answered correctly, students must be adept at analyzing and synthesizing the information provided. They must be able to write coherent and logical essays. This site is meant to provide students with resources to develop the skills needed to effectively respond to DBQs.

Gary Flake demos Pivot, a new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on breakthrough Seadragon technology, it enables spectacular zooms in and out of web databases, and the discovery of patterns and links invisible in standard web browsing.

In short, [an eportfolio] is an online space from which to manage your life, learning and goals.

Here are some crucial tips for refining your Googling, as well as some other great places to hunt down that last study you need for your thesis.

Empirical studies suggest that efforts to teach critical thinking must include "strategies for building intellectual character rather than relying exclusively on strengthening cognitive skills."

The "Flipped Classroom" is a term that has recently taken root in education.  Much information and misinformation currently surrounds the conversation.  We, as outspoken advocates for the "Flipped Classroom" concept, believe the following:

Filtering is what helps us deal with the vast amount of information available to us. We try to filter information so that we end up with something that is relevant to us - it helps us learn something, it helps us solve a problem, it helps us develop a new hypothesis about the world around us. These are all connections - and this is what really drives value creation. However, we can't connect without some filtering going on.

This looks like something the Economic & Business professors may want to follow. How will this new social networking affect businesses?

As its name suggests, flipping describes the inversion of expectations in the traditional college lecture. It takes many forms, including interactive engagement, just-in-time teaching (in which students respond to Web-based questions before class, and the professor uses this feedback to inform his or her teaching), and peer instruction. But the techniques all share the same underlying imperative: Students cannot passively receive material in class, which is one reason some students dislike flipping. Instead they gather the information largely outside of class, by reading, watching recorded lectures, or listening to podcasts.