In the coming year, Miracosta will invest significant energy and resources in implementing Guided Pathways. Those who wish to learn more about this important initiative have three good options — all of which meet flex obligations.
Monthly Archives: July 2017
Joyful Tidings #4: Some Big Questions About Teaching and Learning
A Conversation Starter
In What the Best College Students Do — a book with a title that unfortunately raises more hackles than interest — Ken Bain offers an intriguing summary of the big questions he believes faculty should consider when they think about their teaching:
“…the best educators thought of teaching as anything they might do to help and encourage students to learn. Teaching is engaging students, engineering an environment in which they learn. Equally important, they thought of the creation of that successful teaching and learning environment as an important and serious intellectual (or artistic) act, perhaps even as a kind of scholarship, that required the attention of the best minds in academia. For our subjects, that scholarship centered around four fundamental inquires:
Joyful Tidings #3: All Things Canvas
Greetings Colleagues:
I imagine that many of you, like me, are working through the transition to Canvas in some way this summer: whether it is moving a course or two, starting a new course, or refining sections you have already experimented with before. This image is of an old scratch sheet I used to think about how I wanted to “bend canvas to my will” by making sure that my pedagogical strategies drove my use of Canvas (rather than the the other way around!).
Lisa’s Dozen Tips for Canvas
Now that I’ve experienced Canvas conversion (including full immersion if not a blinding experience of insight), I offer my tips:
1) Use the calendar, even if just for you
The calendar is drag and drop. You can leave everything without a due date, then set them in the Calendar by opening up the “undated” items menu on the right, and drag them in. Default due time is 11:59 pm, but you can change it.
Joyful Tidings #2: Technology, Community, and Teaching Naked
“Instant access to knowledge and to each other has changed the nature of community and the speed of work, life, and, most importantly, thought. Time for reflection and interaction is a casualty of the digital age, and one of the primary goals of higher education should be to reclaim this time. The paradox is that the same technology that glues us to flat screens can also be the primary tool for reclaiming this lost time for human interaction. The ability to reach our students wherever they are means that we can extend the classroom and hence the conversation; we can recreate the ideal of students discussing Plato in the dining hall, but virtually.”
Jose Antonio Bowen, page 27-28
Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning
Jossey-Bass 2012
A Conversation Starter
I thought it would be fun to share some quotes from books available in our PDP library as a regular feature in our Joyful Tidings emails.
Joyful Tidings #1: Flex Week!
Greetings Friends and Colleagues:
I come to your inbox today bearing tidings of great joy. We are less than 25 days away from flex week and a world of discovery awaits you!
If you have not done so, please take the time to check out the flex week schedule either via the master schedule for the week (a glorious seven page document I need to borrow my nine-year-old’s Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass to read) or in myflex.
Just gettin’ started
Starting to edit this blog…