I have some tried-and-true class activities that I do every semester, because I know they work well and/or students really enjoy them. But with hybrid teaching, it’s really hard to get students engaged in class activities. I might have a handful of students in the classroom itself, and then the rest are online, with no webcam on. Silence is a bit too prevalent an event in my class sessions. So, I decided to let my students design the class periods for our third and final unit. Find out how this works and how it went in today’s blog post.
Continue readingCategory: Assignment Examples (Page 2 of 4)
Student choice is one of the topics I covered in my video on how to increase student engagement in virtual learning. In today’s blog post, I want to cover a variety of possible approaches to giving students choices and empowering them in your classroom. A lot of these are inspired by the fact that I teaching writing and literature courses, but plenty can be tweaked for any course topic you are teaching.
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Whether you’re going fully online this semester or doing some form of hybrid teaching, creating online class discussion designs that differ from one another can help increase student engagement and interest in your course. So, I’ve listed seven different discussion design ideas that can work well in your classroom (two of them are combined together on this list, just FYI). They require the use of different tools, but these tools are very user friendly and are free for teachers and students. Let’s take a look…
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I’ve talked about icebreakers as part of my “Successful Start: Designing Your First Week of Class” blog post and video series. But, not all of them work well in an online context. If you’re teaching an online college course and are swamped by lesson planning, here’s a video and post about five icebreakers for online college courses that you can make your own. Plus, a second video with five more online icebreaker activity ideas that can help students better understand how to use Zoom and your LMS class website. [More interested in online class discussion activities? Here’s a video with seven online discussion designs.] And if you want to see more of my online teaching tips after you read this post, check out my full list of resources.
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Today’s blog post is intended to help you design a group project that your students will not only learn a lot from, but also one that students actually enjoy. If you’ve assigned one before, I’m sure you are familiar with the frustration many students feel when completing a good project. I believe this assignment type is essential, though, so I’m not willing to give up using it in my courses. If you’re looking for ready-made group project examples, I already have a post on my literary analysis project and one on my multimodal genre remediation project. The first assignment is the one I mention throughout the video included in today’s post. If you’re unsure about how to grade a group project that involves different elements, you can also watch my video on using weighted unit grading. But, let’s turn our focus onto assignment design.
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We are more than halfway through the semester, so hopefully you’ve been able to get most of your students speaking up during class discussions. If you’ve done a Midterm Chat, then you also have a good idea of what students consider to be stronger and weaker elements of your teaching style. But, there are probably still some shy students that you are having trouble getting to speak up in class. They sit quietly in their seats and seem to be listening to your lectures and the class discussions, but you have no idea what their voices sound like. In today’s post, I go over three strategies for communicating with shy students, or those who are just too self-conscious to ask questions in class. If you’d rather see a video version of these strategies, that’s an option for you, too.
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