by Tara Beecham (Penn State, Flickr Creative Commons, 2017) Commencement has come and gone, but a focus on new beginnings continues. Our TLT Faculty Learning Community Innovative Instructional Technologies in the Classroom centered on connection during a recent meeting, planning to move forward with a return to what should seem like normal again this fall. […]
Learning Community, Being Community
Sharing…we learned how to do this as children, and it should become more natural as we grow. How and how much we share about our lives with our students are lines each of us draw in different ways; some professors may be as open as a One Drive file, while others permit limited sharing based […]
Distance
(We Are…socially distanced!, Benscoter, Flickr, 2020) Distance January is a time for hope, looking forward. And yet reading through Part I of Small Teaching Online by Flower Darby, the book our TLT Faculty Learning Community is reading, there is a call for instructors to ask their students to look back. To guide them forward with […]
A Surprise Guest
Our third fall semester as a TLT Faculty Learning Community called Innovative Instructional Technologies in the Classroom came to a close with a meeting that began with members discussing experiences teaching online in different formats more frequently than ever before. In the second pandemic semester, faculty were presented with new opportunities for course design […]
A Brief Glance at the Longest Spring
(Pixabay, n.d.) Spring is my favorite season with its fresh opportunities, new beginnings, and sheer beauty that cannot be contained in the flower buds and unfurling of leaves. Spring is a chance to begin anew. Each year it seems all too brief. But spring 2020 was so different. In March, educators on campus and […]
Attitude of Gratitude
“No one who achieves success does so without the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.” – Alfred North Whitehead Last weekend, I read a post on Faculty Focus that talked about thank you notes. As the writer, Stacy Greathouse, PhD states “Thank you notes make people happy” and after I read that first sentence […]
Panning for Gold
This week’s discussion again reflected the general group consensus that we had some trouble connecting to and applying the material from the book. This isn’t a surprise: the target audience for the book is K-12 educators, and that’s not who we are. That’s not to say that there isn’t anything there for us. There is, […]
It Takes a Village…
“It Takes a Village” (to raise a child) is from an African proverb, illustrating the importance of everyone in a tribe contributing to the welfare of a child born into a family residing in the tribe. The overarching message is concerned with the well-being of the community. Our PLC community continues to support one another […]
A Meeting of Minds
In his memoir On Writing, Stephen King offers this succinct description of what writing is: “Telepathy, of course.” Then he tells a story. Look — here’s a table covered with a red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with […]
Reflections in Edventures Post #3
As our FLC group reflected on chapters 8 & 9 in Courageous Edventures by Jennie Magiera, we discussed motivation, gamification, student readiness for higher ed, student retention, and feedback. PSU Berks faculty enjoy a wonderful partnership with our CTL/TLT staff and online textbook resources to help with course design. Some of the materials come to […]