As the semester is upon us, being prepared to teach on Zoom is essential. The synchronous time you spend in Zoom with your students should be reconsidered to provide the best learning experience possible. We encourage you to do so! This week we hosted our first Teach Talk webinar for the Fall 2020 semester, presented by School of Life Sciences Instructional Designers, Lenora Ott and Sarah Prosory .  We discussed the process of teaching using Zoom, by focusing more specifically on using Google Slides and its features, live captioning, as well as creating activities for students to do during the synchronous session within breakout rooms in Zoom. The key take-away is to plan for what the students need to do before , during , and after the synchronous sessions, and that will guide you in the preparation for your class meetings too.  The Process Before Class: Share on Canvas any links that students will need for the sync session. Pre-assign breakout rooms if needed, otherwise ro...

One of the great things about a project-based course is that students can bring fresh, creative angles to the standard topics in a field. Unfortunately, their contributions often don’t have a lifespan beyond the semester or a good way to reach a broader audience. Google recently revamped its aging Google Sites service, and I found it to offer an effective solution for this challenge in my course this semester, especially in combination with the rest of Google’s cloud services .  If you’re interested in sharing student projects on a public-facing site, I also found some licensing tools from Creative Commons nicely address some important concerns about credit and reuse. Engaging Students As a philosopher teaching in ASU’s School of Life Sciences, I’m always looking for creative ways to engage students with philosophy as an activity – something we can do together as a group -- rather than a bunch of theories disconnected from what they’re studying. I’ve been teaching an upper-level ...

Our current synchronous classroom space is Zoom, and this creates new opportunities for engagement with students. Additionally when you have a large amount of students per class, it is often recommended to break them into small groups for discussions, sharing ideas, or working on an activity together. One way we've managed this in our new classroom environment is through the use of Breakout Rooms in Zoom. We may be discouraged from group gatherings, but virtually it is encouraged! What is a Breakout Room? As the host of the Zoom meeting, you can enable a feature that allows for smaller meetings to be conducted that are connected but separate from the main meeting. The best part is that while the rooms are separate, with their own chat space, shared screens, and recording options, the host and co-hosts can move between rooms and the host can be called to join a room via the Ask for Help button.  Check out these Zoom Guides about Breakout Rooms: Getting Started with Breakou...

Last year Arizona State University switched to Canvas in order to leverage a cloud-based system that is available 24x7. In that same spirit of innovation, we explore using Google's cloud-based tools in our classes. Our first Teach T@lk webinar of 2020 tried to go interstellar with a presentation titled “Gravitate Toward Google in the Classroom”. Lucy Wolski , Instructional Design Specialist for the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, shared an overview of G Suite for Education and Course kit, practical applications for workflow efficiency, and classroom engagement examples using Google products. Cloud Based Tools G Suite for Education is a suite of communication, production, and collaboration tools for learning anywhere, anytime, on any device. G Suite for Education is available to all students, faculty, and staff at https://drive.google.com ! Course kit is a set of tools that enhances Canvas LMS to help instructors collect, assess, and analyze coursework wi...

This week's webinar focused on some great new features in Canvas! Jason Neenos from UTO, shared a number of features that make life easier for both faculty and students. He started with a discussion about best practices for taking attendance, and showed the Attendance Button in Canvas. We also talked about how Canvas did a great job of integrating Google Docs , Spreadsheets and Slides into the coursepage. When faculty embed these types of documents, they can easily update them, so they are always current. This is especially helpful with a syllabus. After a short discussion on accepting late work, we learned about how Canvas easily allows instructors to add different due dates for individuals and sections. He also demonstrated how easy it is to have a late policy integrated into any assignment. For example, after the instructor is done grading, Canvas can automatically deduct points for missed deadlines. He wrapped up with the "What IF?" feature that allows st...

image link Traditionally, active learning has been associated with the face-to-face classroom, and many online courses focus on more traditional activities like watching videos and taking online quizzes. However, with the push for an online biology degree at the ASU School of Life Sciences , it is vital that techniques that focus on student-centered learning and collaborative/peer engagement be integrated into our new online courses. This webinar focused on taking activities that are used in a traditional classroom, and translating them into online activities with the use of web apps and some restructuring.  One of the examples shared included changing a typical minute paper written before students left a class, into an interactive video post, asking students to answer a prompt with their own videos using FlipGrid. Another example showed participants how Google slides and Padlet could replace post-it note activities that allow students to group, categorize and make conn...