Office Chat: Universal Design for Instruction

Dr. Christofer Foss, Associate Professor of English, took a few minutes the other day to talk with me about Universal Design for Instruction (UDI). He has been incorporating this philosophy of course design in his classes. This spring, Chris will be developing a course in Disabilities in Literature, sponsored in part by the UMW Teaching Center.

There is a wealth of information on UDI available on the Internet but what appeals to me in these office chats is to see how a particular professor interprets and applies a teaching concept in their own courses. Here, Chris tells how he has developed an interest in accessibility and studied to be able to improve his ability to reach out to students of all learning styles.

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Online Course Evaluations

One of the interesting and innovative uses of technology that I saw at our recent UMW Faculty Academy wasa combination of RSS feeds and Google Custom Search. I can’t remember who demonstrated this and I would surely love to give them credit – so please let me know, if you know.

So, I have experimented with this and offer this service to the community. I have created two pages here as follows:

• Online Course Evaluation Sites, and
• Online Course Evaluation Database Search

The first is a page containing a Delicious feed for sites containing course evaluation instruments, rubrics, or comprehensive information about course evaluations. The second is a search page which is constrained to just those sites listed. The site list is fairly shoprt right now and I would appreciate any forwarded links to evaluations or information about evaluations. Because the search is done on a page formed by dynamically generated list (via rss), the search becomes more exhaustive as more sites are tagged.

Reflective Online Activities

The following is an outline for a talk given at Germanna Community College on May 15, 2009.

From John Dewey in How We Think:

Active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends, constitutes reflective thought.

Further consideration at once reveals certain subprocesses which are involved in every reflective operation. These are: (a) a state of perplexity, hesitation, doubt; and (b) an act of search or investigation directed toward bringing to light further facts which serve to corroborate or to nullify the suggested belief.

Links:

1. Jane Hart, Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009
2. Jane Hart, 25 Tools Every Learning Professional Should Have in Their Toolbox
3. Gliffy
4. Gliffy, Cause and Effect Storyboard
5. Gliffy, The Bee and Jupiter
6. Gliffy, Red Pentagons
7. Twitter
8. Twitter Settings
9. Twitter Hashtags
10. Twitter Search
11. Twitter, Collective Notetaking
12. Twitterfall
13. Twitter Ideas
14. Google Docs
15. Google Docs, Forms (in or out of Bb)
16. iGoogle
17. SproutBuilder
18. Wordpress Multi-User Blogs
19. Glogster
20. Jing
21. DimDim

Presentation Take-aways:

• Introduce multiple small, low-threshold activities in your online (or traditional) class to promote reflective thought.

Office Chat: Culturally Responsive Teaching

I had the pleasure of talking with Dr. Kavatus Newell today about Culturally Responsive Teaching. In this interview Dr. Newell explains that culturally responsive teaching is a method for differentiating our instruction to facilitate learning for students of differing cultural backgrounds.  Just as we can enhance learning by incorporating visuals for visual learners and multimedia for auditory learners, we can assist students from diverse cultures by creating an inviting environment in which to learn.

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Office Chat: Strategy Instruction

In this office chat, Dr. Norah Hooper describes two systems of visual organizers in use in her field of special education. Again, as I have mentioned before, the topics covered in these office chats have application to online instruction as well. If we listen with our minds open, Dr. Hooper is describing a deliberate and methodical approach to learning and teaching that may be leveraged as part of our teaching tool set.

The first system of graphic organizers which Hooper discusses are “Thinking Maps” as developed by David Hyerle and published in his 1995 book, Thinking Maps: Tools for Learning. She mentions that such meta-cognitive tools are helpful in working with students with learning difficulties. One thing that makes these maps work is that they are constructed by the learner rather than “hand-outs” from the teacher.

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Personality Type Considerations for Online Courses

I was engaged the other day in a wonderfully philosophical conversation with Dr. George (Bob) Greene here at the College of Graduate and Professional Studies of the University of Mary Washington. We were discussing the application of personality styles to the formation of small project teams in one of his management classes.

His first class session devotes a portion to developing the theory and then having his students self select themselves into small groups based on their self identification of personality style. Surely an excellent illustration of applying a theory into practice. Bob pointed me to a wonderfully accessible book on the subject, Personality Puzzle by Littauer & Littauer.

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