Today's Guest Blogger is Christian Wright, an instructional professional in the School of Life Sciences as ASU. He has a Master’s in Education and a Ph.D. in Biology where he studied the interaction between physiological condition, environment, and foraging behavior of Gila monsters in Dr. Dale DeNardo’s lab in the School of Life Sciences at ASU. Additionally, he was a postdoctoral research scholar in Dr. Sara Brownel l ’s lab in the School of Life Sciences at ASU. His current research is a continuation and extension of research he worked on with Dr. Brownell in her lab and focuses specifically on 1) generating a validated general biology programmatic assessment, 2) exploring potential biases in undergraduate biology classrooms as well as examining mechanisms and interventions that may explain and alleviate said biases, 3) evaluating assessments used by undergraduate biology instructors and by biology education researchers to determine if these measurement tools are indeed...

How do you feel now that the semester is almost over?  Our final TeachT@lk Webinar for 2015 was a terrific way to wrap up the year. So often we are overwhelmed with grading, and just submit grades and walk away, never thinking about the course until we teach again. This is not an effective way to end the semester, and loses some great opportunities to reflect on your course and make improvements for the next time you teach. Dr. Peter van Leusen shared 7 Action Tips for wrapping up the semester.  They included: Collect student feedback Get student permissions for exemplary work Archive important information on your course Document the experiences from student interactions and reactions to assignments Get additional feedback from peers, TAs and Instructional Designers Prioritize and make a plan for any changes Take action now to prepare for next semester Participants went through this worksheet , and took time to write comments about their courses for each of ...

Dr. Sarah Dalrymple ran an exercise in her BIO530 Scientific Teaching course, that had some excellent tips for all our ASU instructors. Below is her summary of that activity. This semester in the graduate-level Scientific Teaching course (BIO 530), we have talked a lot about active learning pedagogies and how to successfully implement them in the classroom. In a recent class, the graduate students considered hypothetical classroom scenarios involving challenges that often come up when instructors try to implement active learning. For this post, I chose one scenario and presented the notes from our class discussion about possible solutions to the challenge. Davis Blasini, Latoya Campbell, Keith Crenshaw, Ryan Davila, and Tiffany Lewis came up with and compiled most of the ideas listed below. Scenario: You know that it is important to check for understanding at multiple times during a class period, but every time you ask if anyone in the class has questions, no one ever says anyt...

Writing strong objectives for your course can help you : plan better assignments assess students easier communicate clearly to students Strong objectives can help students : understand what they are learning why they are learning it how to meet the requirements of the course Finally, objectives help align institution, program and courses to meet the learning needs of the community. During our webinar, we discussed the steps to writing objectives , including choosing verbs from Bloom's Taxonomy . We demonstrated a couple of  technologies to help you write them like ASU's Objective Builder. We also took time to practice evaluating and writing our own objectives. Below are some of the resources that were shared. Resources: PowerPoint Slides Video recording of Webinar Technologies   ASU's Objective Builder Easy Generator The Padagogy Wheel Other Resources: Writing Measurable Learning Objectives Course Objectives and Learning Outcomes  ABCD M...

Today's Guest Blogger is Katelyn Cooper. Katey is a PhD student in Sara Brownell's Biology Education Research lab studying ways to promote equity in undergraduate biology education. Specifically she is interested in how different social identities impact student experiences in biology. Katey is also an Academic Success Coordinator in the School of Life Sciences National recommendations call for college biology instructors to create active learning environments for all students (AAAS, 2011), but can all students afford to learn this way? Active learning has been shown to increase student learning and decrease the failure rate (Freeman et al., 2014), yet the student economic challenges associated with active learning are often hidden. The economic costs to students of doing active learning While active learning can be done in a low cost way (e.g. students drawing on the whiteboard), several new technologies have been developed to aid instructors in implementing act...

Categories of Teaching Resources  In our latest TeachT@lk Webinar (Sept. 1), we highlighted several useful teaching and learning resources available to instructors at ASU. Heidi Blair, Ph.D. , College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, and Rene Tanner, ASU Libraries, showcased services and technologies that are available for free. Furthermore, we showed exemplary resources to stay informed about pedagogy and developments across the university. Please take a moment to review the webinar recording and PowerPoint to see a full demonstration. Teaching with CLAS Hub (email CLAS-IDT@asu.edu for further information) ASU Libraries Streaming Video Lib Guides UTO Training for Blackboard ASU Help Desk Live Chat in Blackboard (how to add it to your courses) TeachOnline Quality Matters at ASU Twitter: ASU Outages TeachOnline If you have a favorite resources that you would like to share, please add them by commenting on this post. Resources: Recording of Webinar...

Our guest blogger today is Rene Tanner ASU librarian, who specializes in biology, life sciences and environmental resources, and will be regularly sharing tips and tricks through our TeachTech Blog. In her post below, she shares how to set up an alert, and a great app called BrowZine that may be helpful for your classes and research. APP:  BrowZine Do you remember coming to the library and browsing the periodicals to see what was new in your research area? BrowZine is an app designed for browsing recent issues of scholarly journals on your iPad, iPhone or Android tablet. As the name implies, BrowZine is unlike many traditional research tools in that it emphasizes browsing over focused research and searching. Many journals develop issues around a research theme and having a tool that displays articles in the larger content of a journal issue can produce serendipitous discovers. In BrowZine you can create a bookshelf of favorite journals, browse a collection of jo...

Developing online courses can be an overwhelming experience, but Kathleen Pigg and Brenton Scott wrote a blog post that gives you some insight into their transition from traditional to online courses. Our adventures in the transition to digital format.  - Kathleen B. Pigg and Brenton D. Scott, SoLS Plants & Civilization (PLB 302) is a course that explores the wide range of how we grow, eat, build with, discover, exploit, modify and imitate synthetically the plants and plant products that are essential to our world and our survival. The course has always lent itself to a lot of in-class activities, e.g., "activity days" when we bring in real things (tropical fruit juices to test, herbs and spices to identify, chocolate of varying % cocoa, knitting needles, crochet hooks and yarn, drop spindles), group projects (e.g., "create a farm", "create a menu") and guest lectures (e.g., on herbal medicinal tea, xeriscaping, coffee roasting, etc.) As the...

Sometimes we get a group of students that just do a fantastic job on a project. They go above and beyond our expectations, and remind us how great it is to be a teacher. Scott Cloutier, PhD taught an online course on the Biology of Happiness this summer, and just had to share the final project from his students. His assignment was open-ended, and allowed students the freedom to create something meaningful and creative. Below is his blog post. "Have you ever wondered why we feel the way we do in the spaces we occupy? How about connections between relationships and our happiness? We live in an overwhelming world of endless choices and options, yet, we are driven by biological factors to survive and reproduce. I recently asked my online students to develop interventions to help people realize the connections between their own happiness and some of these biological factors. You can see my assignment guidelines by clicking here.  I want to share one website in particular -...

Field Trips are a great way to motivate students, get them excited about content and create memories. But often the locations are too expensive, or would be geographically impossible to get to during class times. One option is to create a virtual field trip! Our TeachT@lk Webinar on August 4, focused on how instructors can create virtual "experiences" for students that include location videos, images, interactions with experts in the field and guided discussions between students and their peers about their Dr. Jim Elser's Drone Video experiences. We shared 3 experiences by ASU Faculty: Jim Elser's Drone Tours (sample clip) Mike Angilletta's Expert Interviews with Robbie Wilson using Vidyo "Live" synchronous field trip at the ASU Natural History Collection with Liz Makings using Adobe Connect Finally, we talked about using existing resources like the wildlife webcams, and having students create their own virtual fieldtrips as a final clas...