I've been reviewing and cleaning up my Evernote notes the past few days. Yesterday I stumbled across my outline for a short microteaching workshop I gave to my fellow subject librarians on December 4, 2019. The topic ---- Teaching with Teams. At the time, I imagine that many of my colleagues questioned how/when/if they would... Continue Reading →
Teaching remotely with Microsoft Teams
This week I had the new experience of teaching with Microsoft Teams. While I have given webinars on many occasions to both student and librarian audiences, this was the first time I taught an instruction session to 120 students across three on-campus classrooms simultaneously from my office. Background The Business Cluster is the core educational... Continue Reading →
Wake Up and Get to Work: How to Engage Large Classes with Active Learning Exercises and TopHat
A few months ago I wrote a post about how I use TopHat to better engage students in my large classes. Last week I presented on the topic during one of our library's "Impact Through Action" workshops. The video below is a recording of my presentation.
I made my students 49% smarter and I can prove it
"Well looky there, you learned something! You're 49% smarter than you were 5 minutes ago!" This aha! moment occurred while teaching over 400 business students this fall. Using Tophat in my business research instruction sessions, I was able to assess that my students did in fact learn something through my teaching. The Challenge Each semester... Continue Reading →
Teaching a one-shot library instruction session with TopHat
This spring I used Tophat to shake up the delivery of my large research sessions. This is one example of how I have used Tophat to enhance my library research instruction. The scenario Each spring I am invited to give a one-shot, hour-long orientation to approximately 125 students who are part of the Global Consulting... Continue Reading →
Get your knowledge out of your inbox and on the web
In his book, Trust Agents, Chris Brogan describes how people can become experts by sharing their answers on the web with more people. I believe librarians should be doing this as often as they can in order to showcase their expertise, and it's something I try to do whenever practical. Brogan describes the process as... Continue Reading →
How I make instructional library web videos and screencasts and how you can too
Making videos for my library patrons have saved me time, allowed me to better serve my them, and enabled them to quickly find answers to their questions. I first started using web video for library instruction over 6 years ago and have learned a lot along the way. My hope is that the information... Continue Reading →
An exercise in evaluating web page bias
The screenshot below was taken from this article about Floyd Landis on 5/20/10. In the article, Landis admits to illegal use of steroids and blood doping, after denying it for the past 4 years. In the article, Landis also states that Lance Armstrong and other teammates were guilty of cheating as well. ... Continue Reading →
YouTube and Fox News for an evaluation exercise
I've been doing an evaluation exercise with many of my English 151 classes for the last couple of years. It works pretty well, and I've had several instructors request that I repeat it again for their future classes. Many of my colleagues have been asked about this exercise, so I thought I would... Continue Reading →