The Tribe of Late-Night Wanderers
In Sherman Alexie's novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, the main character at one point lists all the tribes he belongs to including the Spokane Indian tribe, the tribe of basketball players, the tribe of small-town kids, the tribe of...
9x9x25 #5: Flexible and Organized
This past week has been been a challenging one. At times I didn’t know if I was up or down. These two words FLEXIBLE and ORGANIZED are ringing true for my work as an educator, and for my students in…
Blending the Blended – 9x9x25 Challenge #6
This past week I had a student come to me within issue. Let’s call her “Jane”. Jane was not going to be able to make class today and wanted to find out what she was going to miss. Jane’s …
Do I have enough content in my course?
Now there is a question I would guess many people have either asked or been asked. For blended and online developments in particular I have this conversation time and time again. Of course there is a particular pedagogical paradigm and …
Can We Treat Our Students Like Adults?
For many of us, our students are first-time college students which means they are first time adults. For many of these students this means this is the first time they are given the chance to choose for themselves. Their whole lives someone has been making all of the...
Never Give Them Zeros for a Grade
You may have seen the headline, “Teacher Fired for Giving Students Zeros for not Turning in Assignments”. Certainly great click-bait from a publisher’s standpoint, but what is this really about. At a conference roundtable I attended many years ago, we discussed this...
Would You Please Start Arguing Part 2 of 4
Welcome back to my serial piece--I’ll pick up where I left off last week, on the idea that it is difficult to abandon old techniques and move toward new ones, argumentatively. Something that exacerbates the comment-section mentality is that we’re experiencing...
Quests are King
Well, at least many students think they are very cool. I have slowly moved my courses to a quest-based assignment system. I have taken my regular assignments and tests and broken them up over the semester so students are doing many small things rather than a few big...
(Free) Affordable Community College for All
Free Affordable Community College for All Making college more affordable is a hot topic right now. Student loan debt is soaring into the trillions of dollars and 4.7 million borrowers are in default on their student loans. We all know that the cost of college today is...
Gradeless – part 2
My last post was about going gradeless for part of a communications class. The experience was rewarding. Needs tweaking, but valuable.
Here are some further thoughts on the process and results:
1. Having students self-assess does not mean less work. …