Looking at the Teaching in Higher Ed website analytics recently got easier for me for some reasons I won’t write much about here, lest I bore you. Since I can look at the data without as much friction, I check it more often and am often surprised by which posts from both long ago and recently got the most traction from readers.

Below are the posts that you may have missed that were particularly popular with Teaching in Higher Ed blog readers (in order):

1. Heads Up Game is a Lively EdTech Tool – it still continues to be the case, four years later. And is the most accessed blog post I have ever written. If only I had known that would be the case, in advance, I would have taken more time with it.
2. Active Learning Resources – A colleague is trying to build more of a culture of active learning so I curated some resources for her from the Teaching in Higher Ed site. Anyone interested in pursuing this aim should also read Josh Eyler’s post: Active Learning Has Become a Buzzword (and Why That Matters)
3. How to Make a Seemingly Boring Topic Come Alive – Like the post I wrote on the Heads Up Game (#1), this 2014 post keeps coming up at the top of the analytics. If only the marshmallow study had held up as well. Sigh.
4. How to Respond When Students Give Wrong Answers – I have regularly been told I do this well. I’ll take it, since there are so many other aspects of my teaching that I’m continually hard on myself about.
5. Ways to Use Screencasting in Your Teaching – It has been fun to see the posts about creating content get some traction. We need to continually be working on doing this better.
6. Surprises in the Classroom – This one sat on my blog post ideas for a long, long while. We don’t all have to be extroverted in our teaching or feel the pressure to be entertainers. However, regularly seeking ways to ignite curiosity in ourselves and our students is a vital practice, from my perspective.
7. Listener Question: Essential Reading on Pedagogy – It is hard for me to ever write lists, for fear of all that I will leave out. But, this was my best attempt at the time to capture books that have transformed my teaching.
8. Digital Reading – I continue to become more and more of a digital reader and have such a hard time ever committing the time to reading a physical copy of a book. This post outlines why that is…
9. How to Create a Pencast – I haven’t been creating quite as many pencasts these days, but when I do – my workflow is still the same as what is described in this post and video.
10. How to Create a Video for a Class – Speaking of videos, this post with advice on how to create these elements for our students attempted to break the process down into practical steps.

The most popular pages on the site, as a whole, continue to be:

• Episodes – the searchable, browsable list of all the past podcast episodes
• About – a newly redesigned about page with my bio, info about the podcast and my speaking, FAQs, and pictures.
• Blog – The browsable blog page with all the posts I have ever written for Teaching in Higher Ed.
• Recommendations – a recent website redesign has us working on pulling out all the recommendations that have ever been made at the end of each episode into a browsable list with categories such as music, books, ideas, and technology. We aren’t finished yet, but what is there does make for some good inspiration.

I'm honored to get to be part of your professional development through the Teaching in Higher Ed community. I trust this post has given you an opportunity to catch up on some of the blog posts and web pages you may have missed.

Each year, Jane Hart compiles her Top Tools for Learning. You’re invited to participate in the voting either by filling out a form, blogging about your choices or sharing via Twitter.

My votes are not in order of priority, though most people who write about this topic do a ranked list. Recently, Jane Hart started having us categorize how we use the tools:

• For our own personal and professional learning
• In the workplace
• In education

I will include how I use each tool, along with each vote. Also, I will share those tools that have been on my list for many years at this point.

Twitter (personal/professional learning)

This social network has been on my list for four years now. I’m able to connect with people who are (as Peter Newbury recommended on episode #53) “like me and who are not like me.” Twitter is a microblogging service, which means people share short thoughts and interact with each other by replying to others’ messages. For something that won’t fit as a short message a lot of people link to other resources on the internet, like articles, videos, or websites.

Overcast (personal/professional learning)

This is the best iOS app I have found for listening to podcasts (which have been on my list for all four years now. I can subscribe to podcasts and have them all come into one app for me to listen to them when I’m ready. I listen to podcasts at double speed and Overcast takes care of removing silence. More learning in less time… My 2018 Podcast Greats post gives an idea of what I am listening to these days.

Feedly (personal/professional learning)

I was thinking about how much I dislike Apple News the other day. The reason why is directly related to why Feedly is on my top ten list. With a service like Apple News, you get what they generally think you might like, based on some not very intelligent algorithms. Using an RSS reader like Feedly, you pick exactly what websites you want to “feed” into your news feed and don’t have to rely on what technology thinks you may like. I’m seriously considering switching to Inoreader, which Laura Gibbs regularly shares ab out how to get it to integrate with the LMS my institution uses: Canvas.

Unread (personal/professional learning)

Think of Feedly as working behind the scenes to pull together all the stuff I might want to read into one place and to mark things as read, once I have either decided I don’t want to check them out, or once I have read them. Feedly also has a website and apps that can be used for actually consuming the content. However, my absolute favorite tool to use for reading my Feedly content is Unread (on the iPad). I do most of my RSS reading in bed. Unread allows me to easily mark a bunch of articles as read without having to move my hand around the screen hardly at all. It is hard to explain until you try it, but they definitely live up to their claim that, “Reading should not feel like work.”

WordPress (personal/professional learning)

I had the opportunity to interview Harold Jarche for the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast recently (episode 213). It was like talking to one of my learning heroes. He’s an expert in personal knowledge mastery and emphasizes the value of “working out loud.” As I blog, I am sense-making. WordPress is the most widely used blogging tool in the world and it helps me both make sense of what I am learning and share it with anyone who visits my website. There’s a free version of WordPress that lets people get started with it. Those who want to extend its use a self-hosted WordPress site, which allows for greater customization. Reclaim Hosting is a company that offers self-hosted WordPress sites (among other things) for primarily an educational audience. Their website explains that they help people: “Take control of your digital identify. Reclaim Hosting provides educators and institutions with an easy way to offer their students domains and web hosting that they own and control.”

Poll Everywhere (education)

This polling system has been on my list for all four years now and shows no sign of stopping. I am a big fan of using retrieval practice in my teaching to help students retain more and achieve deeper learning in my classes. Poll Everywhere helps me do that and encourage students to pull their phones out, instead of telling them to put them away. I can use Poll Everywhere within PowerPoint on my Mac and never have to leave PowerPoint when I am using it. On the other end of the spectrum, I can use Poll Everywhere on my iPad and never involve a computer or projector at all.

Quizlet (education)

I mentioned making use of retrieval practice in much of my teaching when describing why I use PollEverywhere. That tool is used more in my teaching, but when I want to encourage students to take the learning with them, I highly recommend Quizlet. Flash cards have been shown to be great study tools. They are a form of retrieval practice. Quizlet takes flashcards to the digital world. I can create flashcards in Quizlet and share them with my students, or they can create them and share them with the rest of the class. In the classroom, I love using their Quizlet Live game. I’ve written about this experience on my blog and also Sierra Smith talked about how it helped her get to know other students in a class in a more authentic way on episode 199.

Glisser (workplace)

I use Glisser almost exclusively in my keynote speaking and workshops these days. Glisser is an audience response system. It lets me: Present my slides on the web (so I don’t have to worry about whether or not a computer is going to have the font I need or my slides might be formatted differently when I present them on someone else’s computer), poll an audience, share videos during a presentation, have people ask questions while I’m presenting and queue them up when I’m ready to address them, and even let people tweet out my slides as I’m presenting them.

Kindle app (personal/professional learning)

I enjoy reading on my iPad via the Kindle app and have documented my reasons for doing digital with my reading in the past. Being able to save my highlights and have them in one place well after finishing a book is wonderful. I also appreciate the integration with Goodreads, so I can keep track of what I have read and connect with friends who also use the service and provide good recommendations for what other books I might want to check out.

Zoom (education)

I have been using web conferencing systems of one kind oranother for decades. Sadly, they have mostly become bloated systems that make it difficult to share with an audience, but easy to bore that audience to tears. Zoom is different. If I want to share something. Anything. A slide deck, a video, an application, a picture, even my entire computer screen… I can do that in just a couple of clicks. It is seamless. That’s nice. What’s even nicer is that any person who is with me on Zoom may also do the same (unless I have a need to restrict that capability for some reason – I usually don’t, but there are certainly instances like with larger groups of people coming together where it does make sense to turn that setting off). Doug McKee has written about how he uses Zoom with Duet Display and PDF Expert in his econometrics classes. That actually represents another thing I love about Zoom. You can use just a few of its features and get started simply. But there’s a lot of additional features you can make use of to make it do some amazing things. I really enjoyed Andy Traub’s Master Zoom class which made me see more of what is possible using Zoom.

Past Top Ten Tools for Learning Votes

Here are my Top Tools for Learning blog posts from recent years:

• Top Tools 2017
• Top Tools 2016
• Top Tools 2015

This year, I was inspired by Harold Jarche’s Top Ten Tools for Learning post to create a graphic of my year-by-year votes.

Here are a few items of note I found when looking through the lists:

• I am still a huge fan of Canvas LMS, even though it didn’t make it on to this year’s list. There have been a lot of conversations going on about teaching outside the LMS. Yet, there are also reasons whey remaining inside the “walls” of an LMS are preferred. I have never seen an LMS as mobile-friendly, easy to use, and then easy to grow with as you learn more as Canvas LMS. They also have a wonderful community online that contributes to my learning about Canvas on a weekly basis.
• I’m surprised Pinboard didn’t make it on my list this time, since I use it daily. It is still the best bookmarking tool I have used and integrates well with Unread, which did make it on the list this year.
• I also still use SnagIt on a daily basis. Probably on an hourly basis, anytime I’m sitting in front of my computer. I think I probably think of it less as a learning tool than maybe I used to, but it is integral to all the kinds of work I do and I’m grateful for its continued improvement year after year for decades now.
• Clarify sadly went out of business. I haven’t found anything affordable that is anything remotely as good as it was. Planbook (Helmansoft) also stopped being supported / actively developed and I haven’t found anything remotely as good, especially given that I can do most of my class planning within Canvas.
• iTunes podcasts is now called Apple Podcasts. There’s a free app that comes on iOS devices called Podcasts that is a good place to get started with podcasts, but I still find Overcast to be superior. Google recently announced their new app: Google Podcasts for Android devices that looks like it is worth a look.
• I left my LiveScribe smartpens back in 2015. I do all my pencasting now using an Apple Pencil and my iPad Pro.
• Attendance 2 is still going strong and is my preferred method for taking attendance. However, other tools pushed it down a bit to have it make the top ten tools specifically for learning.
• I chuckled a bit at my mentions of Plickers and GoAnimate, as they really turned out to be more aspirational than ones I actually used on a regular basis.

Your Turn

Consider voting on Jane Hart’s 2018 Top Ten Tools, or commenting below if there’s a tool you think should have been on my list that I may want to know about.

As I mentioned on episode #210 with James Lang, I wasn’t expecting to enjoy reading Teaching the Literature Survey Course as much as I was some of the other books in the West Virginia University Press Teaching and Learning in Higher Education series. Teaching the Literature Survey Course was thought of  as “eating my veggies” and as part of my obligation as part of West Virginia University Press' overall sponsorship of the Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts project.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Teaching the Literature Survey Course addresses two key challenges, which are often characteristics of general survey courses:

• “Too much” to adequately “cover” in a single course
• Lack of opportunities for deeper learning

In each of the classes I've taught in my career, I can’t ever recall a time when I didn’t feel at least some tension around wishing I could “cover” more. At the same time, my greatest desire in my teaching is that students would experience learning that would stay with them for the long haul and would be of great relevance in their lives.

If you also find yourself feeling like you have too much to cover in a given class, or you want to find ways to have your students experience deeper learning, it is worth picking up a copy of:

Teaching the Literature Survey Course, Edited by Gwynn Dujardin, James M. Lang, and John A. Staunton

While the examples they provide are specific to literature classes, they are wide-ranging enough to have it be likely that you might find inspiration for teaching in a different discipline.

Leveraging Maps in Your Teaching

One area that really inspired me was involving using maps in our teaching. This is an approach I have never experimented with before, but have found myself regularly thinking about since I read Teaching the Literature Survey Course.

Two related tools that I regularly see people reference when talking about using maps in their teaching are Google Maps and Google Earth. I was confused about the difference between them, but found this explanation on Quora that cleared it up for me:

“Google Maps contains all of the navigation, lightweight mapping power and points of interest with just a small hint of satellite imagery, while Google Earth has complete 3D satellite data and just a small subset of information on places, without any point-to-point navigation.”

Todd Gardiner described them as related products. He advised that we think of them as a suite of products, like we would Microsoft Office.

Within that suite of products is Tour Builder (a Google Earth experiment), where you can “put your story on the map.” Instead of only seeing a map that was composed by others, we can add to an existing map points of interest, the way we might give someone a tour of our neighborhood. Google suggests that you:

“See how people are using Tour Builder on the site – From a nonprofit documenting its global missions, to a teacher transforming American history.”

While maps might at first seem primarily useful to those who teach history or other social sciences, Tom Barrett decided to use Google Maps to teach math. While his example comes from K-12, it provides us with enough inspiration to get us started thinking…

If you do teach history, there are plenty of sites that are great examples of ways to leverage Google maps in your teaching. Other disciplines will find inspiration on how to: “Pin point a book’s setting, use detective skills, measure distances” and more from Jessica Sanders. The Google Earth example categories are: history, science, space science, math, and geography, yet Teaching the Literature Survey Course is a perfect illustration of how to extend beyond those disciplines and into literature.

Doing something for one of my classes at this exact moment feels out of reach for me, until I become more familiar with the tools and what’s possible. However, I was thinking that I could start small and tackle the sixth suggestion from The Thinking Stick and to:

Create a Map for My Community

They gave an example of creating a map for friends who were visiting China with their favorite restaurants, places to visit, etc.

 

I could see making one for our local community and getting some practice with the tools. My colleague studies homeless populations and I imagine that maps like this could be very useful for his research (even if it started solely as a means for delegating the student researcher observations).

Even book publishers are starting to make use of Google maps in their creations. We ordered The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home from Wonderbly for our son a couple of years ago. When he gets to the pages of the book that mean that he’s almost home, it is a picture of our neighborhood that is shown from Google maps. The book is customized much more than just the maps, but also throughout the book.

But Wait, There’s More

It is hard for me to stop writing at this point, because I have so many more notes I am reflecting back on after having read Teaching the Literature Survey Course. I started to think to myself that I should write ten posts about some of my take-aways, but then I thought I was getting a little ahead of myself with all of that.

Part of our work as educators is discovering new possibilities. But, there’s also the important step of beginning to experiment and increasing our tolerance for (or perhaps even delight with):

Not Yet-ness

As Amy Collier said all the way back on episode #70:

“When you embrace not yet-ness, you are creating space for things to continue to evolve.” – Amy Collier

Thank you to the editors and authors of Teaching the Literature Survey Course. You have given us so many ways to embrace not yet-ness in our teaching and contribute to deeper learning for our students. 

I recently have had the opportunity to revisit my reading of Sarah Rose Cavanagh’s The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion.

The book is part of a series of books:

Teaching and Learning in Higher Education book series from West Virginia University Press, edited by James M. Lang

West Virginia University Press has sponsored the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast transcripts project. As a result, I get the honor of interviewing the series’ authors and the chance to read their books.

Sarah’s book is the first in the series and has much to say about how we can better facilitate learning for our students by considering the element of emotions. In this post, I share some of the ways that her book has stayed with me since reading it more than a year ago. Here are just a couple of practices that are still with me after my first read of The Spark of Learning.

Generate Curiosity

“When you burn to know what comes next, you are feeling curious” (Cavanagh, 2016, p. 121).

Dave (my husband) shared on a prior episode about his chemistry teacher who ended class on the first day by taking the lit candle that had been sitting on his desk, putting it in his mouth, and proceeding to swallow it.

You can bet that the class was wondering what was going to happen next for the rest of the semester. No, we don’t have to put our lives at stake by attempting the eating of a candle in our particular discipline. But, we can work to find ways to create a healthy tension between students’ current knowledge and what might be possible with further learning.

This might be something as simple as a puzzle, an activity more resembling a mystery, or even introducing a debate that explores two different viewpoints or options.

Encourage Mindfulness

We got to hear about some of Sarah’s and her colleagues’ forthcoming research on the effects of teaching students about mindfulness on episode #204. In The Spark of Learning, she reminds us of the detrimental impact of test anxiety and how the practice of transparency can assist our students in reducing stress and enhancing learning.

Sarah describes Brunye’s research on how learners with math anxiety experienced more of a sense of calm and better results on a math exam when engaging in breathing exercises as compared to other variables.

I’ve been finding big benefits when following a simple mindfulness practice introduced by Asao B. Inoue on episode #209 (airs 6/14/18). I’ll let you hear about it straight from him, but I hope this mention of it causes you to listen extra careful to episode 209’s recommendations segment.

Your Turn

What ways are you discovering to leverage The Spark of Learning in your pedagogy?

I have spent most of my week in Louisiana. My primary objective was to facilitate two workshops for Louisiana State University’s Communication Across the Curriculum Summer Institute (#CxCsi). However, I also was able to attend the event as a participant. What a learning opportunity and a wonderful community…

Workshops

My hosts were interested in me sharing in two areas. First, they wanted me to talk about the ever elusive work-life balance. Finally, they asked me to share about educational technologies that support communication across the curriculum.

In this post, I’ll share some resources from my two workshops. I will also give some glimpses into some of my take-aways from the CxC summer institute.

Tips & Tricks

Balancing the work-life load as a teaching professor

You can view my slides from the workshop and also the responses from participants during the session on my CxC Summer Institute workshop resources page.

On part of the experience I really appreciated was how transparent some people were about their struggles and successes. I asked participants how well they would rate their own work-life balance and received responses that almost approximated a bell curve.

I encourage you to visit the section of the resources page for that session to see the ideas that people had around how we can: capture the commitments we have made, plan for how to execute on those plans, surrender to those inevitable times when things won’t go as we had planned, and how to unite with our partners in our lives when we need help.

My favorite part of this session came as a response to the question: What advice do you have about uniting?

Earlier in the session, I had shared about a poet that Maha Bali had recommended on episode 200. She suggested that we read the poems of Najwa Zebian, who also regularly shares her wisdom on Twitter.

I had a screenshot of her Twitter profile on the slide, including her words:

“These mountains that you are carrying, you were only meant to climb.”

One of the participant’s response to the question: What advice do you have about uniting didn’t miss a beat:

“These mountains that you are carrying, you were only supposed to admire from a distance.”

Did I mention that this is a terrific group of people? As of the time of me composing this blog post, we are still trying to discern who the witty poet among us is… 

Tech Tools for Teaching:

Communicating to Learn, Learning to Communicate

One of the areas of emphasis in the institute is that there are activities we can have our students do that will help them learn through their communication efforts (communicating to learn) and there are activities we can have our students do to demonstrate their learning through their communication (learning to communicate).

In the Tech Tools for Teaching session, I shared more tools that provide students with a means for demonstrating their learning, though many of them could be used on either end of the continuum.

The participants' ideas for tools to help support students’ learning in spoken, written, technological, and visual communication are included on the Tech Tools for Teaching section of the CxCsi resources page.

Other CxCsi Fun

I really enjoyed the opportunities to engage with people one-on-one during the institute the most. The planning team for the event put forth such great effort in making our learning environment comfortable and welcoming.

A few times a day, they did a raffle and gave away some of my favorite teaching and learning books and some that I wasn’t familiar with before attending.

A few books I was excited would be getting in the hands of these faculty included:

• Stephen Brookfield’s The Skillful Teacher
• Robert Talbert’s Flipped Learning: A Guide for Higher Education Faculty
• Ken Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do

A couple of books that I hadn’t heard of before the conference and am now interested in reading include:

• John C. Bean’s Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom
• Megan Poore’s Using Social Media in the Classroom: A Best Practice Guide

I have had a wonderful trip and am grateful for the opportunity to facilitate these workshop for LSU's CxC Summer Institute. I am also thankful for such fantastic hosts and getting to be a part of this community.

On the way out to Louisiana, I watched The King's Speech for the first time. If you haven't seen this movie, I highly recommend it. On the way home, I will probably try to restrict myself to reading, as I am a bit behind on the books I'm working on finishing.

My mind is mush. But for all good reasons.

Your Turn

Have you watched any good movies recently? Anything good you're reading? I look forward to hearing from you and adding to my list of things to watch/read.