Cell phone?

What do you all think about including your cell phone number on the syllabus?

Sources for class on teaching students with disabilities

Enjoy!

Attempt to Broaden Disabilities Act Concerns Some College Officials
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i40/40a02301.htm

Teaching College Students with Disabilities
http://cte.udel.edu/disabilities.htm

Disability Law and Higher Education
http://www.northwestern.edu/disability/law.html

UF Disability Resource Center
http://www.dso.ufl.edu/drc/

UF Disability Resource Center Resources for Instructors
http://www.dso.ufl.edu/drc/faculty.php

Teaching Students with Disabilities: A Proactive Approach
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=2132

A few last suggestions about your syllabus project

I'm signing off of e-mail and blogging for the evening, as I have to finish getting ready for my conference trip -- the Journalism Education Association/National Scholastic Press Association convention in St. Louis. 

As we've talked about in class, university faculty jobs have three components -- teaching, research and service. The amount of time allocated to each depends on your university and your specific job. At UF, those with the greatest service components typically are in outreach programs, like extension work. One part of my service work is with scholastic journalism -- high school and middle school journalism students and teachers. 

I haven't received any e-mails or seen any postings on our blog in terms of questions about the syllabus project. As I won't have Internet access for the rest of the week, I'd suggest that you talk with classmates if you do have questions.

A few last thoughts:

• Big picture - Be sure you think about Bloom's Taxonomy as you develop your class assignments, tests and activities. We want students to be performing up the scale, not just at the knowledge level.
  
• Extra credit - Kara made several good points about extra credit, including not letting extra credit make a significant change in a student's grade or be on work not directly related to course goals.
  
• Grading for class participation - Jen provided a rubric for evaluating discussion participation. That may be more detailed than what you would provide students. Keep in mind that a class participation grade is more appropriate for a smaller class than a large class -- unless you are giving attendance-related quizzes.
  
• Your bio - I haven't included bio in my own syllabi but will starting next semester. I like that suggestion. A short bio helps establish your background. You could start with the 100-word bio you wrote for our class and revise as appropriate.
• Lesson plans - As I noted on the handout, you don't want to write a script but do need to provide more than a list of topics you would cover. If you plan a PowerPoint presentation, please include a handout or the slides. You do not need to identify and embed links to specific examples, such as a news clip. You can note the kind of story you would want to show.

Your syllabus project -- due Monday

The syllabus project is the big assignment for MMC 6930 -- much like the big research paper for other graduate courses. Based on comments I've heard from you...

- Many of you hadn't started on the project until this weekend and were prompted to start by the requirement of bringing progress on the syllabus to class yesterday. Even if we didn't have as much time to discuss the project (in part because we spent about 10 minutes locating a DVD that would work for Jennifer's recording), we did have some discussion, and everyone has more completed on the project than you otherwise would have.

- Developing the syllabus and the other components of the project requires much more time than you had thought it would. That's a good learning reminder. Almost any new learning activity takes more time than you had thought -- writing a lit review, conducting interviews for your first story, writing code for a Web page, reading academic research articles...and developing a course syllabus.

- Figuring out the logistics is challenging:

• How many weeks? - Go with the UF Spring 2009 schedule. The number of weeks or number of classes will depend on the day(s) of the week  your class meets. For example, UF will be closed on a Monday for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. No classes on Thursday and Friday of the last week of classes -- those are Reading Days.
  
• Must you use UF's grading scale? My advice is YES! If you determine your own grading scale (such as giving minus grades when UF doesn't award minus grades -- until summer semester) or not awarding pluses, students may complain, and you might have to change your grades then. Better to follow the grading scale so that won't be a debatable issue.
  
• How many different assignments should you give? Good idea to have low-stakes and high-stakes assignments -- a quiz before an exam, a small paper before a larger paper. But remember, for every assignment you make, you have to keep up with the grading.
  

A reminder that students may call you Professor -- as more do now thanks to Harry Potter and Hogwarts -- but you aren't a professor in terms of your actual title. On your syllabus, you can list yourself as Instructor or Teacher. We talked about the academic titles, and professor is part of the tenure-track rankings.

I'd said that I would be available to answer questions about the syllabus project today on our blog. Tomorrow I'll be going to St. Louis and the convention with 5,000 high school journalism students and teachers -- and probably no Internet access. So I'll check back later today to see if anyone has questions.

As I said on the handout, approach this assignment as if you are going to send these materials as a teaching portfolio that's part of a university teaching application. Every year, I have former students from MMC 6930 tell me that they've done just that -- send their MMC 6930 syllabus project -- and that they are really glad to have those materials ready to go for the job search.

Grading discussion

This Web site provides a great rubric for grading discussion. We'll discuss this, and other strategies, tomorrow.

Jennifer

For next Monday: Teaching students with disabilities

Dear classmates,

Next Monday I will be teaching about teaching students with disabilities. In preparation for class, I hope you can take the time to read the short article from the Chronicle of Higher education that I link to here.

Also, I think it would be very useful for us to start thinking about what are some of the issues that we face when having a student, or several students, with disabilities in the classroom. To help each other with this, I would appreciate it if you can provide a short anecdote about your previous experiences teaching students with disabilities using the comment section of the blog. Please remember not to include names or any of the student's personal information.

Thank you in advance and see you next Monday.

Discipline Problems Links

I already posted the link for the Learning Center on campus but I wanted to post some links for counseling resources on campus as well.

Look under Faculty and Staff Resources:

UF Counseling Center

UF Mental Health Center

These links could help you in the future if you ever had a student in need of help.

Came across this

I was looking for news stories on craigslist for my reporting class when I came across this:

http://gainesville.craigslist.org/edu/894787005.html

I am curious, how would you respond if this happened in your class? I'd probably just laugh along with the students as long as it didnt last too long.

Cya tomorrow.

Dan

Teaching with Technology

Resources

RSS Feeds

· Google Reader – http://www.google.com/reader

· CommonCraft video, RSS in Plain English – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU

Atom Feeds

· Introduction to Atom - http://www.atomenabled.org/

Bookmarking Sites

· Delicious – http://www.delicious.com

· About.com, overview of social bookmarking sites – http://websearch.about.com/od/bestwebsites/tp/freebookmarks.htm

Slideshows

· Tips for PowerPoint – http://www.ellenfinkelstein.com/powerpoint_tip.html

· Tips for Keynote – http://www.keynoteuser.com/tips/

· Tips for a Better Presentation – http://www.microsoft.com/atwork/getworkdone/presentations.mspx

Weblogs (Blogs)

· Rob’s Megaphone, example used in class – http://robertstevenson.wordpress.com/

· Cybergator, example used in class – http://www.cybergator.tumblr.com

· Tumblr – http://www.tumblr.com

· Blogger – http://www.blogger.com

· Wordpress – http://www.wordpress.org

Videologs (Vlogs)

· One Teacher’s Vlog, example used in class – http://paulrallison.livejournal.com/

· Skype, video conferencing – http://www.skype.com

· YouTube – http://www.youtube.com

Podcasts and Profcasts

· iTunes Podcast Directory – http://www.apple.com/itunes/whatson/podcasts/

· Podcast.com – http://podcast.com/

· Learnoutloud.com podcast directory – http://www.learnoutloud.com/Podcast-Directory

· Podcast Free America, podcasting tutorials/articles – http://www.podcastfreeamerica.com/

· Audacity – http://audacity.sourceforge.net

· PowerPoint into Podcast – http://www.maniactive.com/states/2007/01/podcasting-from-powerpoint-in-2007.html

e-Learning

· UF’s e-Learning site – http://lss.at.ufl.edu

· UF’s Center for Instructional Technology and Training – http://www.citt.ufl.edu/

Collaboration Tools

· Dropbox – http://getdropbox.com

· Wiggio – http://wiggio.com

· Wetpaint, Higher-ed Wikis – http://wikisineducation.wetpaint.com/?t=anon

· Word, Track Changes Tutorial – http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/trackchanges/HowTrackChangesWorks.html

· Creating Wikis - http://pbwiki.com/academic-district.wiki

Student Response Systems

· Clickers at Ohio State – http://telr.osu.edu/clickers/

· Classroom Clickers – http://www.classroomclickers.com/

References

· Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk (2005)

· New Class(room) War: Teacher v. Technology – http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/education/07education.html

· Podcasting in Education - http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/TheresSomethingintheAirPo/40587?time=1225049232

· Teachnology blog – http://powertolearn.typepad.com/teacher_tech_blog/

· Teaching with Technology podcast – http://powertolearn.typepad.com/teaching_with_technology/

Syllabus Project -- Glad to provide feedback

The Syllabus Project is due on Nov. 17. That's a month from today.

• Syllabus -- As you would distribute to the students in the class.
  
• Class-by-class plan -- Brief description of each class meeting with learning objectives and that day's activities.
  
• Two lesson plans -- Select two classes and develop a lesson plan for each. If you are teaching in a 3-hour block, you need to develop only one lesson plan. Do not choose the first or last day of class, test days or days when you'd have a guest speaker. 
  
• Exam with answer key or project description and grading rubric

As I said today, I'd be glad to go over parts of the syllabus project with you -- to help you be sure you're on the right track and to help encourage you to be working on the project. 

The best approach is to bring the material with you to meet with me. We can go through the syllabus or lesson plan together. My office hours are:

Tuesday - 4th and 7th

Thursday - 4th

I'm available at other times if we schedule an appointment.

I find creating these materials like putting together a puzzle -- determining what to include and then determining the teaching strategies and the timing. Don't wait until the week before the project is due to begin.

Multiple Choice Testing Presentation Citations

Here are the main sources that I used for my presentation. Most of the information presented can be found within. Glad the lecture was helpful to everyone.

1) UF Handbook on Testing and Grading
2) How to Prepare Better Multiple-Choice Test Items: Guidelines for University Faculty
3) Writing Multiple Choice Questions That Demand Critical Thinking
4) Test and Item Analysis
5) Point-biserial Correlation Coefficients


-Mark

Apology and Plea

I just got back the feedback for my presentation and I was curious as to why Dr. Dodd thought the last video that I showed was wildly inappropriate.

After rewatching the video, I quickly learned that I showed everyone a video game where cars drive over people and bodies explode. I did not do this on purpose, I don't think I ever watched the entire video. This behavior on my part while not a huge shock perhaps to some is not appropriate. If I had been a professor showing this type of video, I would have been in a great deal of trouble.

Again, let me reiterate that I apologize for not being aware of what I was showing and that I hope I didn't offend anyone. That being said, if anyone could switch their presentations with me, I would truly appreciate it. I will be presenting on Dec. 1st. I have another major presentation for a different class the same day.

-Dan

Teaching Lineup

Each of you will be teaching a 50-minute class on a topic related to effective teaching. You also will be responsible for critiquing two of your classmates -- helping lead a brief discussion of their teaching immediately after they teach and then completing a written evaluation.

Here's our lineup:

Oct. 20

Mark: Multiple-choice Testing / Vanessa and Dan

Amy: Classroom Discipline Problems /Kara and Mark

* In the remaining time: the project assignment for your syllabus

Oct. 27 

Paige: Teaching with Technology / Jooyun and Vanessa

Patrick: Adjunct Faculty Teaching / Ed and Jooyun

* In the remaining time: negotiating a faculty job offer

Nov. 3

Kearston: Sexual Harassment in Higher Ed / Linda and Mark

Kara: Grading / Paige and Kearston

Nov. 10

Maria: Students with Disabilities / Linda and Wendy

Jen: Incorporating Discussion / Wendy and Dan

Nov. 17

Jooyun: Teaching Large Lecture Classes / Jen and Kearston

Linda: Teaching Writing Coruses / Maria and Kara

Nov. 24

Vanessa: Diversity in the Classroom / Patrick and Ed

Ed: Teaching Visual Courses / Patrick and Maria

Dec. 1

Dan: Academic Honesty / Paige and Amy

Wendy: Using Groups / Jen and Amy

Please be sure to meet with me prior to teaching class to discuss your lesson plan and goals for the class. 

I'm looking forward to seeing each of you in action. Please let me know if I can be of any assistance as you get ready for your teaching. Also, let me know what topics/issues you'd like for us to include in our end-of-class time each week.

Reasons for TAing

This is from phdcomics.com. If you click on it, its easier to read.

Enjoy!

Discipline Problems Classroom Experience

Hi Everyone:

I will also be presenting on Monday, not about multiple choice tests but discipline problems. According to Dr. Dodd, this topic is one of the most concerning in the class. With that in mind I'd like you all to submit to me at least one example of discipline issues you've encountered either as a teacher or as a student. You can e-mail me your examples at acmart@gmail.com by Sunday evening.

As always, please do not name names or refer to specific classes.

I have a lot of interesting things in store for Monday, but I don't want to ruin any surprises! But please come prepared to discuss these issues in greater detail.

Have a great weekend!