Educational Conundrum of the Week – Embracing Analytics to Measure Student Progress

Digital analytics are useful in measuring student performance (2017). Blackboard, for example, offers over 30 reports giving you granular student data to an overview of class progress. Choosing the best report to get the information you need is a question ETS often receives.  What educational analytic do you use, or would like to see, that … Read more

Digital Pedagogy beyond Google & YouTube

A camera is considered a digital tool to enhance learning, so too are audio recorders, DVDs and smartboards to name just a few. When thinking “digital pedagogy” we often focus solely on the Internet (e.g. YouTube, Google & Kahoots). Let’s expand our short list above. What one digital tool do you find most effective in … Read more

Conundrum of the Week: What’s your Story?

Narrative Pedagogy, or storytelling, is an educational tool we can offer students who learn in a variety of ways and who enter the classroom with diverse interests and backgrounds. Some instructors are more comfortable using this tool than others. Have you adopted storytelling into your classroom? If so, share an example and its outcome.

Educational Conundrum of the Week – The Seductive Gold Star

Most instructors have come to the realization that participation wains at a course’s midway point and takes some time to recover. How can we minimize this drop in motivation? A colleague, I won’t mention Carl by name, said that he is motivated by badges (or “achievements” in Blackboard), both in class and online. What are … Read more

Educational Conundrom of the Week – The Best of Both Worlds

Recently I had used Padlet to host a discussion forum. However, I discovered Padlet, being a collaborative PostIt note application, wasn’t an effective tool to use for this activity. Padlet would be a wonderful app to replicate what you see in this picture (a wall of sticky notes created in a brainstorming session). What other … Read more

Educational Conundrum of the Week

Thomas Edison once said, “Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.” What is one technology that you thought you’d never warm up to but have? Have you used it in your classroom? If so, how? If not, why not?