3 Simple Ways to Learn Your Students’ Names

Learning the names of your students is often cited as a simple way to create an inclusive environment in your classroom. It shows your students you care and helps to foster a sense of community. Furthermore, researchers have found that students have a more positive attitude about a course if they perceive that the instructor knows their name.

Image of a name tag

I’m the first to admit that I have a terrible memory and have a difficult time remembering the names of people I meet. This means I have to make a concerted effort to quickly learn students’ names when I teach. This can sometimes prove to frustrating and time consuming but it doesn’t have to be. Below are a few quick strategies I use to make learning names a little easier.  

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Imagining the Future with China: A Report of a Study Abroad Course

Riding on a train that whistled 217 miles per hour, sitting in a car that solely relied on solar power, wandering in a bookstore that had no cashiers on site, and viewing a trading system without currency and government involvement. Those were some of the adventures 13 students from DePaul experienced this winter break in a study abroad course called “Imagining the Future with China.”

Pairing “China” with “the Future” is an interesting idea. For a long time, China had been characterized by its ancient history and deeply rooted culture. It is one of the four most ancient civilizations in the world. It has a history of over five thousand years. Its cultural heritage has descended through eleven dynasties. It was not until two decades ago that China started to catch up on economic development. There are plenty of data to show its growth, but as a non-economist and someone who cannot handle numbers, I would use this GDP graph to demonstrate China’s astonishing takeoff:

China GDP Growth
China GDP Growth from 1960 to 2017 (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=CN)

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Page Formatting: Yes You Scan!

Are you reading this?

How about this?

  • This is a little out of the ordinary, but I bet you’re reading.
  • Maybe you aren’t.
  • How can we tell?

Readers scan in very predictable ways and patterns. The basics are pretty simple. We jump to bolded text and don’t expect to see giant, bold statements. We read with a different emphasis when text is italicized. We scan immediately to images  on the page. Big, long paragraphs **like this one** are tiresome to readers and often get skipped while scanning. Formatting text in an unexpected way can throw your reader off, but using page formatting strategically can guide your reader through a page and help keep them engaged. Some of the tactics used in best-practice writing for the web may also be useful for academic writing and assignment construction.

You’re definitely reading this.

Most of the research being done around page scanning patterns is being done so with web content, not academia, in mind. However, some of the research done for web content writing may be helpful as you write or create resources for students.

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3 Questions to Ask Yourself When Designing Your Course

When you work in education, winter break can be a time for reflection and revision. Faculty often use this time to rework their courses and syllabi. Traditionally when one revises a course they:

  1. Find texts and supporting materials
  2. Divide readings and homework throughout the quarter
  3. Determine a method for assessing students’ performance

And, boom! Your course is planned! While this remains the most common way to structure a course, a different approach commonly called Backward Course Design has been steadily gaining in popularity throughout recent years.

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Considering Student Privacy

Your password will expire in 10 days. Your connection is not secure. Would you like to enable two-factor authentication? Do you want to trust this site?

We are frequently reminded that security breaches are not impossible and no captcha is foolproof. Each day our actions impact our digital footprint and as educators, we are doubly tasked with accounting for what we require of students. While all modalities of teaching can take advantage of incredible opportunities provided by exciting and creative digital tools, in the words of the late Stan Lee: “with great power, there must also come great responsibility.”

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The State of Mobile Learning

The use of mobile devices for education has been an interest of mine since 2011. But a lot has changed since the days of the iPhone 4 and the Nexus S: smartphones, which used to be the cutting edge of consumer technology are now ubiquitous to the point of being taken for granted. And technology vendors, who used to think of mobile as an afterthought, are developing apps and services with mobile compatibility as the first priority.

And I’ve seen attitudes shift among faculty too. As recently as 2015, many faculty I interacted with saw using smartphones for learning as so radical as to be frightening. In the last year, many faculty seem to view the notion as so obvious as to be boring.

Given these shifts in technology and attitudes towards the technology, this is a good time to check in on the current state of mobile learning, and it’s trajectory going forward.

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Hear Your Text: Benefits of Text to Speech

What happens when you get stumped while working on a piece of writing? Many writers, students, academics, and others choose to visit writing centers. More often than not, the first thing the writing center will suggest is to read the work aloud, and listen to what has been written. Why? Because your brain processes information differently based on how you receive it. Sometimes the key to writing is actually putting aside your pen (or keyboard) and taking a moment to listen to what you have written.

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Instructional Design Tools to the Rescue

Instructional design is a growing industry because many institutions and corporations are realizing that designing, developing, and delivering online curricula for their employees is extremely beneficial. As a result, employers are researching instructional design tools that would best fit their work environments. Research has shown that no matter what the industry, students and employees learn best when they are engaged and can interact with the content. Therefore, many businesses are seeking e-learning tools that can help their lessons be more interactive and help bring the training to life. The content usually contains animations, quizzes, walkthroughs, games, annotated videos, etc. This blog will give a brief overview of some instructional design software that can be used to create eLearning Content.

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Coordinating and Managing Meaning Across Cultures: Pearce for Global Learning Experiences

In a recent meeting for DePaul’s ongoing series of GLE (Global Learning Experience), professor of Italian Caterina Farina Mongiat suggested facilitators of GLE might gain valuable insights from the field of intercultural communication to prepare for coordinating cross-cultural interactions between student cohorts.

Though conceptualizing what to apply from an entire scholarly field is difficult to do when also planning the logistics and curriculum for a GLE course, we can try to start somewhere with an accessible application. As a student of TESOL studies and now intercultural communication at the Illinois Institute of Technology, I have started by looking at W. Barnett Pearce’s (2005) initial work on the coordinated management of meaning (CMM). The context for Pearce’s work, though now dated, parallels our present challenges in engaging meaningful intercultural discussions, even within an academic space: global nation-state relations, misunderstandings of the cultural and social other, conflicting faith-based and cultural values, among the many complexities that cannot all be accounted for here.  

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Even a Child Could Do It: Basics of Cognitive Load Theory

My son went to Kindergarten this year. He’s doing all the things I figured he would: math, reading, gym, music, art, recess, and the library. Once upon a time, I was a substitute teacher in K-12, and so I had a passing familiarity with kids’ worksheets. But this is the first time I have been a parent of a school-age child. Suddenly those worksheets he brings home are vastly more interesting to me. Looking over the exercises, I am reminded of the importance of the presentation of information; that is, how the instruction is designed for his developing brain to grasp what are sometimes difficult concepts, without making the tasks seemingly too difficult for him. We have all heard someone tell us to “take it slowly” when we are learning something new, or to make “baby steps” toward completing a larger goal. In a nutshell, these are some of the basic concepts in Cognitive Load Theory.

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