August 2009

Enriching the intellectual life of teachers

August 27, 2009

This post is based on ideas from a presentation by Rachel Scherr of the University of Maryland and Seattle Pacific University. Teachers, Rachel says, are disenfranchised.  Just as students who have no voice in what and how they learn in the classroom, professional development is often inflicted upon teachers who have no voice in the [...]

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Engineers Make Art: Visualizing Fluid Flow

August 20, 2009

Our most famous fluids tend to be transparent — air and water, for example.  This makes it hard for us to imagine how fluids are moving as members of the general public, but also poses an interesting problem for budding engineers.  They need to know how to make fluids do what they want them to [...]

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Email management (#coltt2009)

August 13, 2009

I’m in a session by Sean Myers on email management and triage.  While this isn’t directly related to science education, it’s a piece of technology that we all use.  How to use it more efficiently can help our productivity as educators (or whatever we do).  This was a really great session, and I got a [...]

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Podcasting in the University Classroom (#coltt2009)

August 13, 2009

The University of Colorado at Colorado Springs has been experimenting with using podcasts in their nursing courses, though it was four years ago so things might have changed.  They discovered several things along the way: Students needed to be educated that they could listen to podcasts on any MP3 player or on their computer (and [...]

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Say what? Promoting discussion in online courses (#coltt2009)

August 12, 2009

Blogging from the Colorado Teaching and Learning with Technology (COLTT) conference.  This session, from Joni Dunlap, how to promote discussion in online courses. How can we get learners to talk in online discussions, and how can we get the chatty students to shut up?  The results have been pretty disappointing so far.  Most instructors set [...]

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Scholarship in the digital age #coltt2009

August 12, 2009

I’m blogging today from another conference — the Colorado Learning and Teaching with Technology (COLTT) conference. The keynote speaker is Richard Katz, the VP of Educause. It’s an old story by now that digital technology has completely changed how we access media — nobody under 30 reads newspapers, and newspapers haven’t responded with a new [...]

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