Week 16, Fall 2017

 

As we make our way through Week 16, and toward a well-deserved, much-needed break for all, we want to take this opportunity to wish you all a happy holiday, in whatever form that takes for you and yours! We hope you get some rest, and enjoy some time with family and friends.

 

 

Engaging Teaching

“How might we better encourage our students to accept feedback not as a static representation through a ‘grade’, but as an evolving conversation between instructor and student about the student’s work and ways in which a student might advance their skills – over time?” ~ Helen Bajorek-MacDonald & Susan Hyndman

This week’s featured patch, The Feedback Loup-de-Loup, is a tag-team effort by Helen Bajorek-MacDonald and Susan Hyndman, both of the School of General Arts & Science here at Fleming. In their patch, they pose an interesting question about feedback for students, and then present the solution they tried in the Pre-Health Sciences program. Give it a read, and let us know what you think: @FlemingLDS on Twitter.

Have you tried anything you’d like to share with others, about feedback or anything else teaching-related? Let us know, and you too can write a patch!

 

Learning Technology

D2L Thing of the Week: Grades Tool

Need to edit your gradebook in D2L to coincide with your post-strike assessment scheme? This tip sheet includes things like deleting grade items (page 13), using Categories to drop students’ lowest score(s) (p. 11), and many other helpful tips to navigate D2L.

Still have questions? Send us an email, call us at extension 1216, or pop into our hallway (C1 203, behind Tutoring & Academic Skills at the Sutherland campus).

 

Non-D2L Thing of the Week: The 12 Apps of Christmas

The Education Technology Users Group from BC Campus, a “grassroots group of BC educators interested in teaching, learning & ed tech in post-secondary education,” is unwrAPPing a new app each day during the #12AppsofChristmas. Each app includes information on “where to get it, how to use it, and some ideas of how it might be used for teaching and learning.”

You can subscribe to receive daily updates, or check out the LDS Twitter account for our retweets.

 

College Departments

Learning Design & Support Team Welcomes New Team Members!

As you may have read in a recent Communications email, the Learning Design & Support Team is welcoming some new members:

• Steve Higgs has joined us as a Learning Technology Specialist, filling in for Terry while he’s on secondment; he can be found in Terry’s office (C1 203.8);
• Alana Callan is changing roles to replace Jennifer Ramsdale (who is currently on leave) as a Teaching & Learning Specialist, and she’s in her same old office – C1 203.9; and
• Wendy Morgan will be joining us as an additional Teaching & Learning Specialist from January to June 2018.

We’re very excited to have these fabulous people joining (and staying on, in Alana’s case) our team; please join us in welcoming them as they transition roles over the next couple of months!

p.s. Don’t worry about who’s doing what now; you can still reach all of us through our team email account: LDSTeam@flemingcollege.ca. We’ll get the right person on the job for you!

 

Policies & Procedures

Appropriate Use Policy

Fleming’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Appropriate Use Policy provides a framework for the appropriate use of ICT services, resources, equipment, and facilities.This includes

• software and systems,
• all of the information stored in systems,computing devices, and associated peripherals,
• VoIP communications network and wireless infrastructure and related equipment,
• facsimile machines, scanners, telephones, wireless devices, digital storage media, video and other multimedia devices.

It would probably also include telegraphs, morse code, and the use of carrier pigeons, but they probably ran out of space.

Anyhow, to find out more about what’s acceptable and what you should definitely not be doing with technology, check out Policy # 6-601 on the College Policies and Procedures page, or access it directly in the myCampus Portal.

 

Services for Students

Student Life Portal

 

The snazzy Student Life tab in the portal is your students’ ticket to finding the right resources when they need them, all in one convenient location.

Clicking on the pretty icons provides a list of available resources, and there’s even a link for staff-only resources, like the CCR. Check it out!

Ontario Extend

Catching Up on The Catch

Looking for some holiday reading on educational technology? Of course you are! Well, Terry Greene has helpfully compiled all of the links to The Catch, eCampus Ontario’s version of The Hub:

https://twitter.com/greeneterry/status/938843140991176704

If you happen upon anything of interest in these posts, please let us know; feel free to also tweet @greeneterry, who would appreciate your feedback on his work!

 

Information

Visit the LDS Team Website, give us a call at extension 1216, follow us on Twitter, or send us an email!

Week 15, Fall 2017

We know that Week 15 is no longer the end of this Fall Semester, and there’s still lots to be done before anyone takes a break; so, here’s a little inspiration from Dory:

Engaging Teaching

“Roaming around the known” is a phrase used in Reading Recovery to describe the practice of accessing this valued history and scaffolding it into fruitful and novel teaching and learning opportunities. ~Ryan Hill

Our highlighted patch this week is Roam if You Want To by Ryan Hill, a technologist in Fleming’s Salmon ID Hatchery, Aquaculture Program, and Fish & Wildlife Program. Ryan’s patch includes great advice about the benefits of accessing students’ prior knowledge, as well as some clever water wordplay. Give it a read (it’s a nice, short one; no tl;dr required!), and let us know what you think: @FlemingLDS on Twitter.

Interested in creating a patch of your own? Contact us: LDSTeam@flemingcollege.ca.

 

Learning Technology

D2L Thing of the Week: Quiz Tool

 

We’ve had a few requests from faculty since returning regarding using the Quiz tool in D2L to set up and/or modify quizzes. If you’re looking to make changes to your quizzes and can’t quite remember how you set them up way back in the fall, you can access our handy-dandy tip sheets.
You can also give us a call (ext. 1216), email us, or stop in to see us. We’d be glad to help!

Non-D2L Thing of the Week: Visual Course Outlines

This probably isn’t the semester to get all fancy with your course outlines, but for future reference, here’s an idea that we think is pretty cool:

Check out this amazing visual syllabus for my Canadian history course #YorkHIST2500 made by Ken Hui, an incredible graphic designer https://t.co/BlcpM2I0qY #CDNHist pic.twitter.com/05gDW21TAm

— Sean Kheraj (@seankheraj) November 30, 2017

Have you tried anything special to make your course overview documents more helpful or visually appealing for students? Let us know; we’d love to share Fleming examples to inspire others!

 

College Departments

Academic Council

Like many other Fleming committees and working groups, Academic Council is on hiatus until January. Interested in catching up on the great work this group has done over the past year? Check out the Academic Council website for information on membership, meeting dates, and current projects and working groups.

 

Policies & Procedures

Academic Regs No More!

Fleming’s Academic Regulations are becoming extinct. In their place are a series of newly revised policies and procedures, including these three, which came into effect on September 1st:

• Academic Integrity, which also has a new Procedure;
• Grading & Academic Standing, with three associated Procedures; and
• Registration & Withdrawal, and its Procedure.

These, and all other college policies, are available on the HR Website, as well as through the Resources tab on the myCampus portal.

 

Services for Students

Fleming Rideshare

Fleming Student Administrative Council has introduced Fleming Rideshare, a quick, secure, and personal way to find all your commuting options. Using your home and work addresses, you can find a carpool, transit, cycling, or walking pool that matches your commute. You can search for nearby commuters looking for carpool, biking, or walking partners. This Rideshare Portal is a powerful and convenient way to track all of your commuting activity, and it’s free to join. For more information, check out this promotional video, starring a few familiar faces:

 

Ontario Extend

Thankfully, Ontario Extend’s “Daily Extends” have taken a little hiatus to give us all a chance to catch up! Check out the last entry in their challenges, and tweet your response with #oext102 and #FlemingLDS:

Daily Extend: #oext102 Where Would You Hibernate? https://t.co/aS5tKeAhSE #oextend pic.twitter.com/T8sbdpv6BO

— OntarioExtend (@ontarioextend) November 4, 2017

 

Information

Visit the LDS Team Website, give us a call at extension 1216, follow us on Twitter, or send us an email!

The Teaching Hub: Week Zero, Fall 2017

 Engaging Teaching

Each week we’ll feature some writing about teaching. Let’s start with this one. It was written by Jodie Black and Terry Greene for our collaborative textbook on pedagogy, The Open Faculty Patchbook. It says things about embedding Universal Design for Learning principles into your teaching.

We’re Only Making Plans For Learning

 Learning Technology

D2L Thing of the Week

If you don’t know how to work that D2L thing, we used D2L itself to show you how in a two-part series: Faculty D2L Levels 1 and 2. Self-enroll for it on D2L, in the Help & Information Widget (yellow header, right-hand side, scroll ⇓).

Non-D2L Thing of the Week

Let’s start with a simple tool that can really, really help us connect and learn with each other: sign up for Twitter and follow the following: @FlemingLDS, @alanacallan, @greeneterry, @jened101, @mary_overholt, @blackjodie32 and then we’ll follow you back, and then we’ll all share thoughts and ideas that we have and find. See you there!

 College Departments

Fleming College doesn’t just provide its students with people to teach them about the thing they want to become. Oh no, no, no. We also provide a whole suite of supports for those students and faculty members. These things are known as college departments. We here in the college department section of the Teaching Hub believe that it behooves you to know what these various heroes do for you and the students. Each week one department will be the featured team of unsung heros and we will tell you about their exploits. But to start, here are some silly 60-second videos about a few of the departments: Gone in 60 Seconds – Fleming Department Intro Videos.

Policies & Procedures

Apparently playing fast & loose and “just givin’ ‘er” are not acceptably robust policies or procedures for running an institute of higher education. That’s why, when you look at the resources tab in the Fleming Portal, you’ll see a whole section listing a whack of policies. You could read them all right now if you have some kind of time-pausing device. Or, you could come back to this section each week, and we will feature and distill the most timely policy of the week. Next week, we’ll dig in to the Class Absence Operating Procedure.

Services for Students

Remember trickle-down economics? That worked well, right? Anyway we’re trying a similar strategy here in which we tell you something about something for the students and hope you might mention it to some of them.

Next week there will be a bunch of students showing up here at the college. They are a very important part of the college experience. They are so important to us here that many events and supports have been put in place to make sure they have a great start. These events have been dubbed Student Orientation. And what are the details of these events, you may ask? Well, here they are, we may answer.

 Fleming Campsites

Last spring, a number of faculty members here got themselves all set up with their own WordPress domain in order to openly share some of their thoughts and plans for teaching. We called these sites #FlemingCampSites because, well, we’re up here in the woods of Ontario and a campsite is a great place to sit around, chat, and share your experience.

You can see links to these #FlemingCampSites posts in the sidebar of this page. Have a look and think about getting yourself one, too. If you’d like help with that, email us at LDSTeam@flemingcollege.ca

Now we need to drum up some posts for the #FlemingCampSites feed by giving you something to write about. We’ll suggest a writing prompt each week here.

This week’s prompt: What are you most excited about in your teaching and learning plans for the fall?

 Read It And Tweet

Join us in reading something together every week. Something short and sweet and oh-so-pedagogical. Oh, and tweet your thoughts about it as you go! As an example, last January a group of educators joined together to read an article about Open Education called “Fifty Shades of Open” and then tweeted their thoughts together.

.@GoogleGuacamole As an etymology geek, I'm fascinated by how stable the basic meaning of "open" has been. #tjc17 #openlearning17

— Gardner Campbell (@GardnerCampbell) January 27, 2017

We can do it, too! This week, let’s read Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Definition By Jesse Stommel, Executive Director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at University of Mary Washington and share our thoughts. Tweet as you go to: @RIATFleming and #RIATFleming. Those tweets will appear on the right of this page and we will also re-tweet them. See you there!

Information

Visit the LDS Team website, give us a call at extension 1216, follow us on Twitter @FlemingLDS, or send us an email: LDSTeam@flemingcollege.ca!

Teaching Hub: Post Five, Week Four

icons are by piktochart.com

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: It’s Week 4 already! Those assignments are going to be due before you (and your students) know it!

When I dreamed this up I expected to find a million versions online, but I didn't, so I made my own. You're welcome! pic.twitter.com/wRDBPXwO9t

— Ruth Mostern (@RuthMostern) September 10, 2016

 Engaging Teaching

Questions? Good Question!

The comment below got us questioning questions, didn’t it?

“My other take-away from Focus On Learning was not to ask the students, “are there any questions?” but to ask them “what questions do you have?”. Assume there are questions and you get them.” Liz Mathewson, Hub Post 2 Comment Section

And what did it get us thinking? That is an excellent question, isn’t it? We’re thinking that, since questions help lead to answers, better questions may lead to better answers, or even more good questions and more good answers. Whether those questions are in class, for a test, from teachers, or from students, knowing how to form an excellent question will benefit everybody.

Want to learn more about questions that work? Dorothy Strachan has asked a lot of questions in her day, and here’s a chapter from her book, Making Questions Work. Scroll down to the section called Reminders on page 26 for a quick table with some question-asking tips and examples.

While we’re on the topic of questions, want a reminder about a question-related Classroom Assessment Technique? Check out the Student-Generated Test Questions CAT, okay?

What are your favourite kinds of questions to use with students? What are some questions that have totally fallen flat? Let us know in the comments section below.

Question mark tally for this section: 11

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 Learning Technology

The Post-It that inspired this section

Did you know that getting involved in Open Educational Practices leads to  happier, longer, wealthier, healthier, more democratic, more organic, less confrontational, more peaceful, less wistful, and more powerful lives for everyone and everything?

And what does Open Educational Practice mean? Very simply put, it means to share what you do and how you do it, in the open. And how can you do that? Well, I’ll tell you one way that we can get started opening up: Get thee on Twitter! Here are some small steps to follow so that we can share and grow our Teaching & Learning community through Twitter:

1. Get an account at Twitter.com.
2. Follow @FlemingLDS.
3. Send a tweet to @FlemingLDS saying “Hey! Everybody! I want in on this sweet learning community!” Then we will follow you, and you will follow us, and y’all will follow each other, and our network will become unstoppable. Include #FlemingLDS in your tweet (this will make our tweets show up on the D2L main page, too!).
4. While you’re at it, follow @alanacallan, @greeneterry, @jarliwin, @blackjodie32, @mary_overholt and @FlemingCollege.
5. For the rest of your days, continue to tweet out things that you are doing with your class or anything that you think will contribute to our learning community. Include #FlemingLDS in your tweets. We’ll retweet you, probably!

You can use the same steps in your class to build your own class or program learning community, too! Need help? Let us know at LDSTeam@flemingcollege.ca

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 Policies & Procedures

October 7th, 2016.  If students are considering dropping a course, they may want to avoid an “F” mark on their transcript! The final date to withdraw from courses less than eight weeks in duration (offered in first seven weeks) and receive a “W” designation on an Academic Record is October 7th. If they miss it, they’ll be saying a different F word! 

There are also lots of other important dates in the Academic Schedule, like the quickly-approaching Independent Learning Week (October 24 – October 28).

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  College Departments

Winner of The Department of The Week Cage Match is the IT Service Desk! Check out this documentary directed by Alana Callan and starring Rick Robinson. Rick tells Alana how they are truly here for everyone.

and check out their website here.

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 Services for Students

Academic and Student Advisement

The Fleming Academic Advising Team has created a website with plenty of helpful information for students, including tips, FAQs, and links to resources. They’re also popping up throughout the semester to help with things like academic preparation, transfer credits, and how to get back up once you’ve taken a seat in one of their bean bag chairs (no promises on it being done with any grace)! So keep an eye out… you never know where they’ll pop up next! Oh wait, yes you do, because there’s a schedule on their website!

click here to see the image in a bigger way

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 Chatter

@FlemingLDS What the heck do ya mean by 'Chatter'? pic.twitter.com/y0rbMw5IXt

— Lonnie Lonnerson (@Pancakes_Lonnie) September 21, 2016

Reports are in that we have been too vague in what we mean by chatter. Have you noticed lately how everyone and their dog is asking you to join the conversation? I’m pretty sure that already today my shampoo bottle and my cereal box have each asked me to join the conversation. What exactly do you want to talk about, Shreddies?

That said, we want the same thing for our Chatter section. We want you to get involved simply by sharing your thoughts by adding a comment to this blog post. We’re also happy to collect thoughts by email, phone, actual face-to-face talking, or Twitter… and we’ll report back here in the Chatter section. Like, have you heard that Angela Pind is using the Apgar Score for Class Meetings idea that we mentioned in a previous post? Angela says it has been an interesting way to get students a little more self-aware of their preparedness for class. Cool beans!

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 More Information

Looking for more information? Visit the LDS Team website, give us a call at extension 1216, follow us on Twitter @FlemingLDS or send us an email: LDSTeam@flemingcollege.ca!