Workshops 2007

How can we educate students for personal and social responsibility? How can we promote the value of liberal and liberating education? What is a citizen in a diverse democracy? Please come to dialogue on these questions and bring your suggestions for engaging (re-engaging) the campus with these themes.

Dealing with Anonymity, Ennui, and Ambivalence

Please come to participate in a discussion about our institutional culture and how we can help our students and ourselves feel and be more engaged, more a member of a community, more valued, and more clear about who we are and what kind of community we want to be.

This workshop will discuss, in a general way, the "do's and don'ts" of promotion and tenure portfolios. We will discuss the "more work/less work" rule, as well as the value of finding a tenure mentor.

We will explore how meditation and mindfulness can be useful in teaching and learning.

In this session we will discuss the ways in which faculty and administrators can mentor each other and how best to find effective mentors in and outside of your department.

Assessment for Optimal Learning - Formative and Summative Evaluations

What assessment techniques improve student engagement, monitor student learning, and lead to improved results on summative evaluations? Share your ideas and learn of others in this workshop.

Assessment of GEP Courses: Making it Useful and Practical

Michael Hampton will work with individuals or groups to help design assessment plans, plan for data collection, help in data interpretation, and help in the utilization of results to design new plans and course/program improvements.

Assessment of Student Learning: Formative to Summative Methods

Discuss options for assessing student performance throughout the learning process. Bring your syllabus and examples of assessment instruments you currently use.

This workshop focuses on the latest version of the Program Assessment (IE) website and process changes instituted for 2007-2008. We will also provide assistance with individual plans as needed.

What is the best way to evaluate your students' performance? We will explore the many strategies that could be used for assignments and will determine their strengths and challenges.

This workshop will provide ideas for collecting and making sense of program assessment results and for what next steps follow from the results.

What are the key factors in developing test questions and putting them together so that your test is valid and at the appropriate level of rigor? Share your ideas and take away new ones you can use immediately.

Whether your student evaluations are great or not so great, join in the discussion of how to help student understand the items on the form and how to collect feedback on class experiences at times other than the formal survey. Also, bring your ideas for items to be included on the next version of the form.

This workshop focuses on the latest version of the Program Assessment (IE) website and process changes instituted for 2007-2008. We will also provide assistance with individual plans as needed.

Selecting Teaching and Assessment Strategies to Meet Your Course Objectives

After a brief discussion of the process and review of examples, we will customize the remainder of the session to identify strategies appropriate for your course objectives.

This workshop will provide an overview of Academic Learning Compacts: What are they? How are they related to Institutional Effectiveness? Who is responsible for their development? How do they impact individual courses? and anything else you want to know about them.

How do we maintain our standards for excellent teaching and effective learning when teaching large or even very large classes? Come to this workshop to share your ideas and learn new perspectives.

At the Daytona Beach campus, Bldg 150 (room 115), Diana Weidman from Campus Life will give an introduction to accommodating students with disabilities.

As our disciplines are increasingly affected by globalization, instructors may desire to add a global scope to their courses. Come brainstorm teaching strategies to accomplish your goals.

Excellent teaching is, as you have probably heard before, more than just a "recipe" or single method of instruction; it is a repertoire of well-developed methods with which one organizes effective and meaningful learning experiences. This interactive session will help you choose from several proven teaching models and to combine those into your curriculum.

A Theme for Your Course: The Environment-Ideas and Resources

We will discuss several ways to thematize any course with case studies and activities related to the environment and global warming.

Develop your course and/or program cognitive learning outcomes, teaching/learning strategies, and assessment strategies based on Bloom’s Taxonomy. A correlated system improves course organization and strengthens learning, especially with respect to the critical thinking levels.

Together we will walk through a grade book template and customize it to your syllabus. Please bring your syllabus with a breakdown of your scoring policy.

This workshop will guide participants through the process of using PowerPoint to poll or quiz students using CPS (the classroom "clickers").

Looking for new ways to engage your students? Increase student accountability in large classes? Innovate your delivery methods? Capture evidence of student learning? This session will offer you an overview of UCF's newly-standardized classroom response system, a demonstration, and information about ordering it.

Suggestions for communicating with students about CPS, conducting the first class sessions, using the CPS roster, and generating reports.

Learn all about clickers in the classroom. CPS offers numerous benefits, including improved student engagement, enhanced formative feedback, easy quizzing tools, even a means to take attendance. Instructors can employ CPS to gather individual responses from students or to gather anonymous feedback. Reports are exported to Excel for upload to the instructor's grade book.

An overview of the process of creating rubrics to set expectations and assess learning. Bring an assignment and leave with a rubric to assess it.

We will share some interactive strategies that encourage student involvement in class and facilitate active learning.

Gather ideas and best practices for integrating Classroom Response Systems (CRS) into your lectures. We'll investigate not only what kinds of questions work best to quiz students, but also how the clickers can be used to open debate and provoke student interest even before the material is discussed.

Learn some best practices as well as the UCF requirements for syllabus construction.

How do we deal with students who are critical of our teaching, either in public or in private? We will model some scenarios, and provide suggestions and hints for turning confrontations into constructive experiences.

Incorporating Storytelling and Role-Playing into the Classroom

Today's students are quite different from those of previous generations - they crave interaction, not one-way communication. Innovative techniques for enhanced interactive teaching and learning are critical to grabbing and maintaining their attention. Storytelling Role-Play (SRP) accomplishes this by creating a unique learning experience. This workshop will provide an overview of how you can use SRP in your classes and will demonstrate several examples currently in use.

Information Literacy: A Brief Overview With Examples of Practice

In this workshop, we will discuss the basic components of Information Literacy and examine several examples of practical standards-based activities for pedagogical application.

Learn about classroom response systems (clickers), the online grade reporting system myUCF Grades, and Excel grade books.

Learn about Classroom Response Systems (CRS) and the standard chosen by UCF for all classrooms, as well as how to get started.

Intro to myUCF Grades: An Online Grade Reporting Tool

This pagelet in myUCF will automatically synchronize with your official class rosters and allow you to manually input grades, import from Microsoft Excel, or report grades uploaded directly from Test Scoring Services (without the intermediate step of burning results to a disc). Learn how to use this electronic grade posting tool and do away with posting grades outside classrooms and offices!

New Adjunct and Full-Time Faculty Workshop: Tools You Need to Start the Semester

Find out about rosters, grade books, syllabi, course websites, and using any software or campus resources that make your life easier as a UCF instructor.

Learn all about clickers in the classroom. Bring a digital version of your syllabus and a PowerPoint presentation. You will receive an instructor kit, create your CPS account and courses, order clickers for your students, complete your syllabus and build your first presentation.

Come sign up for a Turnitin account, learn how and when to use it, and engage in a discussion about its effectiveness in preventing plagiarism and promoting academic integrity.

More and more of us are using rubrics. What works and what does not work well about them? Can they actually provide the impetus to change the types of assignments you give? Can they limit creativity? Join the discussion and join in creating effective rubrics.

The persistent online world of Second Life offers 3-D virtual interaction through avatars. Come for a roundtable discussion and brainstorming session of how this tool, rapidly gaining in popularity, could be used to augment your classes, whether you are teaching in WebCT or face-to-face.

How can we help students understand the current tool? What would you like to see in the new version being developed? Join in the discussion!

Writing Student Learning Outcomes that are clear, concise, and yet also include everything needed for assessing student performance.

Educators who speak English as a second language face unique linguistic and cultural challenges. We will discuss strategies to ease the transition to working in a non-native language.

In this session, we will explore strategies for hooking student interest at the start of class, as well as strategically (re)engaging students throughout a class period.

Are you ready to try a new teaching strategy? Are there best strategies for teaching particular content? Join us to share your favorite strategies and to engage in several you may never have used previously. Use them this semester or plan for next.

When is team work most effective? How do we organize the teams and the activity to make the most of the team? What do you do when students do not want to work in teams? Share your ideas and experiences and take away new ones you can use immediately.

Learn about WebCT, library databases, student clickers, software in the classroom console computers, rosters, eCommunity, faculty training in HTML or Photoshop, RSS, blogs, wikis, making downloadable videos out of your PowerPoint lectures, myUCF Grades, turnitin.com, podcasting, MS-Excel gradebooks and more. Participants will be shown how to learn more about each of these topics, and representatives from multiple offices on campus will answer your questions

James Hogg and Nan Schultz will lead a discussion on the popular online "game" Second Life, and how it could be integrated into your teaching.

Using Visual Media to Enhance Cultural Awareness and Understanding

This workshop will provide examples of how the use of visual media can promote student awareness, appreciation and understanding of gender, linguistic, and cultural diversity across disciplines.

Wikis, Blogs, Podcasts, Facebook, and RSS: Communicate in New Ways With Your Students

We’ll provide an introduction and overview of emerging technologies that offer new ways to communicate and interact electronically with your students. Learn what blogs, wikis, podcasts, and RSS feeds are, and learn how to use them for your classes. We’ll also touch on “social networking” sites like MySpace and Facebook.

Join us in the Student Union any time from 12:00-3:00 for a keynote speech and a poster session by UCF faculty, displaying their own SoTL projects. Lunch is provided. Please register online: http://www.fctl.ucf.edu/events/sotl/

We will discuss curricular and instructional techniques that add an international dimension to your teaching and student learning.

This workshop will provide an opportunity for faculty to discuss issues of interest in the area of service-learning. Come discuss areas of concern, special problems, new insights, service-learning abroad, or any topics you would like to explore.

Are you interested in incorporating Service-Learning (SL) into your visual or performing arts curriculum, but aren't sure how to start? In this workshop, we will explore ways to incorporate SL projects into your classes, as well as go through the basic steps for SL course approval.

Speaker David Sokoloff: Building a New, More Exciting Mousetrap is Not Enough!

PLACE: Math & Physics (MAP) 318. DATE & TIME: Monday, October 1, 2.30pm. Two exciting, parallel streams of advancement in the last 2-3 decades have significantly changed the introductory physics course at many universities, colleges and high schools. These were (1) expanding interest in Physics Education Research, and (2) development of computer-supported pedagogical tools--MBL, digital video analysis, WWW, clickers, etc. Interest in applying the results of PER and availability of robust tools have resulted in a proliferation of new approaches. Yet true reform of physics teaching requires a five-step approach including (1) research, (2) development, (3) evaluation, (4) refinement and (5) dissemination. This lecture will detail the importance of these steps in the reforms made possible by active learning curricula like RealTime Physics and Interactive Lecture Demonstrations, that were developed by the author and his colleagues, Ronald Thornton of Tufts University and Priscilla Laws of Dickinson College.