Faculty Development for School of Education

This year, I am going to review  new literature in the field related disciplines and apply new ideas from the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) in my work.

For SoTL Publications and Conferences visit http://www.sotl.ilstu.edu

On the bookshelf,  above the printer, in the Faculty Development Center, you can find the book “Enhancing Learning Through the Schoolarship of Teaching and Learning; The challenges and Joys of Juggling” by Kathleen McKinney.

Happy New Year

Elvir Mandzukic

Faculty Development Coordinator for the School of Education

Faculty Development Center at Webster University

Students and Faculty often write. Sometimes it is helpful to know a theme or a word pattern used in those writings.  When we analyze other people’s writings, we can copy and paste those writings into a tag cloud generator to get the visual chart displaying the most used word in the text. This is especially useful if we do qualitative analysis where words matter.

By using a tag cloud, the repetition is prominent by displaying the word in larger font then the rest of the text. To learn more google “tag cloud.” To create a tag cloud generator such as http://www.wordle.net/.

IBM has a product called Many Eyes that creates charts in tag cloud format. It also allows you to import data set and then present it in one of many formats.
To learn more about presenting your’s or students’ writings in a ‘cloud’ format revealing a theme, or pattern, visit website http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/.

For more ideas on how to use tag clouds for your project contact your School Specialist/ Coordinator.

Elvir Mandzukic

Faculty Development Specialist for the School of Education at Webster University

I used the text from the article on page 4; published in eSources Fall 2009

We often use my files on our computers or flash drives these days to store important files (pictures, papers, handouts, forms, reading articles, short video clips, quizzes, research papers, lesson plans, etc.).

The good thing is that we often try to back-up these files to other locations, such as computers, CDs, DVDs, flash drives, or external hard drives.

With WorldClassRoom we can save our files using the “Content Manager” tab also known as “My Files”. As users of WorldClassRoom we may want to preserve our existing work or plan for some work in the near future.  The files will be backed up to the WorldClassRoom server in they are in “My Files.”

My files is another place to store information and have it easily accessible to us when we want to teach another class and we need that syllabus from last term or a PowerPoint presentation.  We can back-up our course materials and have them ready for the next time we plan to teach the same course or use it for another course.

For more information and personal consultation on My files (Content Manager) please contact the Faculty Development Center or sign-up for our one hour workshop on WorldClassRoom Course Content Management.

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Entertaining Students