Let’s be honest: Most students don’t want to read assignments, let alone for a course such as research methods. Typically, only 20-30% of students will read their assignments [1] See Kerr, M. M., & Frese, K. M. (2017). Reading to learn or learning to read? Engaging college students in course readings. College Teaching, 65(1), 28-31.…
Read More Rethinking reading assignmentsI have to admit this is so brilliant and I wish I had thought of it. But I didn’t. Here’s the idea: hand out your syllabus and have students annotate it. Let them mark up the lessons, ideas, thoughts, assignments that went well and that didn’t go well. Or, an alternate way of doing it:…
Read More A different way of evaluation at the end of the semesterPart 1 of a series about productivity in life and as a department chair… without going too far off the edge! There’s plenty of advice out there on creating the basic to-do list. There are lots of different programs and apps, the bullet journal concept, as well as many different concepts one can buy and/or…
Read More Supercharging the to-do-listI probably subscribe to way too much stuff, but that’s a matter for another post. 🙂 One of my subscriptions is to The Teaching Professor, a publication for college professors designed to get people to reflect upon their teaching. They have a parallel site called “Faculty Focus” which is free, and does have good material…
Read More How do we make students “teachable?”Some of my former teaching assistants would laugh because my desk is relatively clean right now. In addition to the things you would expect (file drawers, tissues), there are a couple of other things I keep on my desk to remind me about various things: Yes, I’ve been known to like the Peanuts cartoon strip…
Read More What’s sitting on my desk now…Today’s winner/loser is US Bank. We have one of those credit cards that allow us to change the cash back that we receive on various categories. Let’s talk about why this screen is so bad. What would have been better? I’ll admit that I haven’t yet run this page through a screenreader to see if…
Read More Time for another accessibility and usability rant…It feels like it’s a one-sided relationship between you two… I’m hoping that you both will work with me here. Parallels really wanted me to install Windows 11. And if you look at the Parallels website, it says that I can. As I mention elsewhere on this site, I have a mid-2015 MacBook Pro. But…
Read More Dear Microsoft and Parallels,Or what happened when I spent an afternoon reviewing all of the classes in my department…. The perfect pre-Christmas nerdy project: if I could reorganize all of our classes with different numbers, how would I do it? And why do it in the first place? The answer to the latter question actually comes from something…
Read More Making course numbers mean somethingI caught this on IM Sagar Shah’s video about Chessbase 17: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf5NC-dmfQ8 If you have old (or even new databases) that were stored in the old .CBH format, you’ll want to upgrade them to the new .CB2 format. Chessbase doesn’t do this automatically for you – you’ll have to do that yourself. At this point,…
Read More A Chessbase 17 tip