Volume XXXIX, No. 13 | April 13, 2017 Technology in the Classroom? Instructional Technology Certification Program Increases Engagement When I began teaching, which was initially in K-12, my school was not rich in resources. More times than not, I had to purchase copies of handouts for my English classes, and occasionally also purchase [...]
Volume XXXIX, No. 5 | February 16, 2017 Building Technology That Works for Teachers, Not the Other Way Around In the early 2000s, my job as an IT professional in higher education was to support the technology needs of the faculty, staff, and administrators on my campus. Time and again, I saw that the [...]
Volume XXXVIII, No. 22 | October 7, 2016 Creating a Culture of Evidence With Course-Level Dashboards At many community colleges, faculty and administrators have a long list of unmet data needs. In order to submit a data request to a typically small, overworked Institutional Research (IR) department, faculty and administrators often need to [...]
Volume XXXVIII, No. 16 | August 26, 2016 Transforming Classrooms Into Active Learning Zones While student response systems (SRS) have been around well over a decade, it was not until recently that I began to take advantage of their pedagogical benefits. In the span of time since my first implementation of SRS-associated peer-instruction [...]
Volume XXXVIII, No. 10 | April 1, 2016 If You Can’t Beat It, Integrate It: Using Smartphones and Polling Software to Create an Interactive Learning Environment A common complaint among educators is the number of distracted students in their classes. Many of us bemoan students in our classes engrossed in their smartphones instead [...]
Volume XXXVIII, No. 8 | March 11, 2016 Using Badges in an Online Class: How Gamification Can Improve Student Learning Several years ago, I learned about gamification and started thinking about how I could apply it to my online courses. I decided that using badges would be a good way to introduce these [...]
Volume XXXVIII, No. 4 | February 12, 2016 Pathway to a SMILE In today’s classroom, the standard lecture-notes-quiz model gets low grades in the face of new demands for student interactivity and engagement. Our latest challenge, Generation Z, has grown up with 4G, virtual reality, streaming, and the cloud. Consequently, they expect more [...]
Volume XXXVII, No. 22 | October 9, 2015 Using QR Codes as Communication and Documentation Tools in Higher Education Lehigh Carbon Community College’s (LCCC) Teacher Education department recently started using QR codes to address some specific marketing and instructional needs. Because the department includes more than six major programs taught in various formats, [...]
Volume XXXVI, No. 25 | October 31, 2014 Online Classroom Engagement: A Science An online presence for students is a task in and of itself. From the very beginning of my online teaching experience, keeping students engaged and eager to learn has been an uphill battle. How is it possible to provide an [...]
Volume XXXVI, No. 20 | September 26, 2014 Supporting At-Risk Students With BYOD Applications Developmental education and first-year sequence programs are common offerings at community and technical colleges. According to Bailey (2009), approximately 60 percent of incoming community college students are required to take at least one developmental course. These students often [...]