Below are links to articles, books in the CCP library, and websites with more information about learning activities:
Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy by
Reading the Visual is an essential introduction that focuses on what teachers should know about multimodal literacy and how to teach it. This engaging book provides theoretical, curricular, and pedagogical frameworks for teaching a wide-range of visual and multimodal texts, including historical fiction, picture books, advertisements, websites, comics, graphic novels, news reports, and film. Each unit of study presented contains suggestions for selecting cornerstone texts and visual images and launching the unit, as well as lesson plans, text sets, and analysis guides. These units are designed to be readily adapted to fit the needs of a variety of settings and grade levels.
Interactive Open Educational Resources: A Guide to Finding, Choosing, and Using What's Out There to Transform College Teaching by
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2014! Sponsored by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), this one-of-a-kind book demonstrates the best tools, resources, and techniques for discovering, selecting, and integrating interactive open educational resources (OERs) into the teaching and learning process. The author examines many of the best repositories and digital library websites for finding high quality materials, explaining in depth the best practices for effectively searching these repositories and the various methods for evaluating, selecting, and integrating the resources into the instructor s curriculum and course assignments, as well as the institution s learning management system.
The Complete Guide to Service Learning: Proven, Practical Ways to Engage Students in Civic Responsibility, Academic Curriculum, & Social Action by
The Complete Guide to Service Learning is the go-to resource in the fast-growing field of service learning. It is an award-winning treasury of service activities, community service project ideas, quotes, reflections, and resources that can help teachers and youth workers engage young hearts and minds in reaching out and giving back. Author, and internationally known service learning expert, Cathryn Berger Kaye presents service learning - its importance, steps, essential elements, and challenges - within a curricular context and organized by theme. This new revised and updated second edition maintains the easy-to-use format of the original and is enhanced to reflect the most up-to-date information on service learning programs and pedagogy.
Teaching at Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors by
This third edition of the best-selling handbook offers faculty at all levels an essential toolbox of hundreds of practical teaching techniques, formats, classroom activities, and exercises, all of which can be implemented immediately. This thoroughly revised edition includes the newest portrait of the Millennial student; current research from cognitive psychology; a focus on outcomes maps; the latest legal options on copyright issues; and how to best use new technology including wikis, blogs, podcasts, vodcasts, and clickers. Entirely new chapters include subjects such as matching teaching methods with learning outcomes, inquiry-guided learning, and using visuals to teach, and new sections address Felder and Silverman's Index of Learning Styles, SCALE-UP classrooms, multiple true-false test items, and much more. Praise for the Third Edition of Teaching at Its BestEveryone--veterans as well as novices--will profit from reading Teaching at Its Best, for it provides both theory and practical suggestions for handling all of the problems one encounters in teaching classes varying in size, ability, and motivation."--Wilbert McKeachie, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, and coauthor, McKeachie's Teaching TipsThis new edition of Dr. Nilson's book, with its completely updated material and several new topics, is an even more powerful collection of ideas and tools than the last. What a great resource, especially for beginning teachers but also for us veterans!"--L. Dee Fink, author, Creating Significant Learning ExperiencesThis third edition of Teaching at Its Best is successful at weaving the latest research on teaching and learning into what was already a thorough exploration of each topic. New information on how we learn, how students develop, and innovations in instructional strategies complement the solid foundation established in the first two editions."--Marilla D. Svinicki, Department of Psychology, The University of Texas, Austin, and coauthor, McKeachie's Teaching Tips
Engaging the Online Learner: Activities and Resources for Creative Instruction by
This is a revision of the first title in Jossey-Bass' Online Teaching & Learning series. This series helps higher education professionals improve the practice of online teaching and learning by providing concise, practical resources focused on particular areas or issues they might confront in this new learning environment. This revision includes updated activities and resources for instructors teaching online. Based on changes in technology and best practices learned from the field the revision provides new information for even seasoned online instructors.
Click for larger version (opens in new window).
Shattuck, Susannah. "The Four Different Types of Learners, And What They Mean to Your Presentations." Prezi Blog. Prezi, 29 Apr. 2016. Web. 15 Sept. 2016.
“Continuity and interaction in their active union with each other provide the measure of the educative significance and value of an experience. The immediate and direct concern of an educator is then with the situations in which the interaction takes place.”
--John Dewey, Experience and Education (1938)
As Dewey suggests, part of our role as good educators is to create and curate situations that engage students in (inter)active learning experiences that encourage exploration and independent thinking. Collected here are a list of analog (no tech) and digital activities. Kahoot and Socratic offer educators an exciting and interactive way of organizing class discussion and evaluating student learning, while Storyboard, Easel.ly, and MemeGenerator provide students with templates for organizing ideas visually.
There are dozens of different learning activities that can be incorporated into a classroom. Click on the word cloud to the right for more information about these activities from Educause, along with some citations for further reading.
"Create a fun learning game in minutes (we call these ‘kahoots’), made from a series of multiple choice questions. Add videos, images and diagrams to your questions to amplify engagement [...] Kahoots are best played in a group setting, like a classroom. Players answer on their own devices, while games are displayed on a shared screen to unite the lesson – creating a ‘campfire moment’ – encouraging players to look up."
Comics and storyboards can appeal to a broad range of learners.
"Infographics will force you to extract the most important features of your lesson or course, and similarly, they can encourage students to summarize the information they’ve learned. In addition, infographics are engaging, creative, and are easily shareable. They can be a great tool for students to keep track of your class content or for them to express the knowledge they’ve acquired.
Davis & Quinn (2013) recommend that initially, a carefully selected infographic can serve as an example with which the educator can model reading and interpretation practices. Students can then work in groups to examine and create infographics for practice, which could then become part of their assessment in the course."
Gretter, Sarah. "Using Infographics for Teaching and Learning." Chittenden Commons at the Graduate School. Michigan State University, 23 Aug. 2016. Web. 15 Sept. 2016. http://commons.grd.msu.edu/index.php/2015/11/using-infographics-for-teaching-and-learning/
MemeGenerator | knowyourmeme.com
"Memes, of course, have been around forever. According to Memes in English Language Learning the 'most important point about a meme is that it propagates'. Smithsonian Magazine likens memes to human genes, since 'ideas can replicate, mutate and evolve.' Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel report in New Literacies: Changing Knowledge in the Classroom that geneticist Richard Dawkins even believed that memes cause actual biological changes in our brains. Memes are part of the collective consciousness, part of our vocabulary, and they seem to arise spontaneously and simultaneously, filtering through our email, our Facebook pages, and even on commercial TV shows and advertisements like a contagion.
Memes have also been described as 'the product of every teenager’s desire for self-expression, sarcasm, and humor, combined with the pervasiveness of technology and this generation’s unique, slightly quirky culture, stemming from the fact that geeks are becoming slightly more mainstream'."
Bruder, Patricia. "Ermahgerd – Memes in the Classroom?" NJEA.org. New Jersey Education Association, Feb. 2013. Web. 15 Sept. 2016. https://www.njea.org/news-and-publications/njea-review/february-2013/ermahgerd-memes-in-the-classroom