Full of specific and practical suggestions, Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes (Jossey-Bass, 2019), by Flower Darby with James M. Lang, is a book I wish I had had when I first started teaching online. I’ve read…
Author: Traci Gardner
White Paper Assignment Series
I just updated a series of assignments related to writing a white paper, in response to a colleague’s request. The series includes a series of four assignments, which are listed and linked at the bottom of the Overview page. Students…
Do You Know Where To Find The Answers?
Students are accustomed to the campus classroom, where the teacher is available regularly to remind them how to find the resources that they need to complete activities in a course. Instructure’s Trenton Goble suggests the five questions on this infographic…
How to Restore Deleted Files in Canvas
My favorite hidden feature in Canvas is the ability to restore files and other resources that you have deleted. Warnings: The tool is not 100% effective, so be cautious when you remove information from your course. The tool only restores…
Weekly Work Logs
Background and Goals To support the anti-racist assessment system in my course, I am using Weekly Work Logs, where students track the work that they have done. The idea for these logs as they are used in anti-racist assessment comes…
Making Memes to Protest Racism
Artist Daniel Rarela created a series of memes that juxtapose quotations from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s text with images of King from the time period and with contemporary images. Rarela’s goal, as explained in a January 2017 News.Mic article,…
Preparing to Explore Racism
Before discussing racism, we must prepare students to ensure the classroom offers an inclusive and safe environment to explore these issues. We have to be prepared to guide students through fair but honest discussions in ways that avoid emotional or…
Class Discussion about Tolerance
One effective, but simple, way to explore tolerance is to look at the ways people talk about the concept and then produce projects that share their exploration with others on campus. Here’s one way to accomplish that goal through in-class…
Ten Ways to Improve Educational Videos
The move to online courses has many of us working to create videos that replace the explanations of concepts and demonstrations of skills that we would customarily do in the campus classroom. The strategies below help make those videos more…
Using Google Forms to Jump Start Your Video
Now that everyone is teaching online, active learning strategies like minute papers and muddiest point are hard to manage spontaneously. In a campus classroom, you can ask everyone to share responses out loud or on a piece of paper. In…