There is always more coming soon!
For now, check out my blog posts for ideas.
- Skills vs. Content: How best to teach a “Humanities” Class
- Ditch the Textbook: Now what? An Experiment with StoryMap JS
- To Smarthistory in the Large-Lecture Humanities Class
- Transforming Reacting to the Past Games for Large-Lecture Courses
- The Balancing Act of the Large Lecture Class
- Student-Centered or Teacher-Centered Syllabus?
- Activities for the large lecture class
- Teaching the Large Lecture Course: Some Reflections
Helpful pedagogical tools (in no particular order):
- PollEverywhere: I use PE a lot. Overall, I like its functionality, but it has some quirks. And it is $$$. I do like having my students sign up and being able to track who responds. It is also a nice way to have short in-class quizzes that can be graded/not-graded.
- Kahoot!: Always a fun way to review with students. I give the winner a point of extra credit. And the new team feature works well if you have permanent teams in class. Free, but you can’t track students–they can sign in with whatever name they like. Also, there have been occasions where students use wildly inappropriate names, which you can delete by clicking on them.
- EdPuzzle: I was recently introduced to it (summer 2018), and I’ve started using it in my large-lecture humanities class. I like that I can trim videos to be shorter for students to watch, and I really like that I can insert quiz questions into the video. This helps students master some of the basic information, but also gives them a chance to pause and review.
- Snagit: screen capture software. I have found it immensely helpful to annotate images or PDFs that I assign to students before class. It has nice design features that appeal to students (or so I believe) and it helps me to model how to annotate–and so look and read more closely.
- more soon!
Tried and true in-class activities:
- Annotation exercises: provide students with printout of an image or passage from a text and ask them to annotate it with questions, comments; have them circle key words/terms or symbols/key figures.
- Allowing students to write exam questions. Even if all you have is a few minutes, ask students to write an exam question and provide the answer(s). It helps them to begin reviewing and helps you identify what students think is important to know.
- Asking students to strike the poses of specific artworks to spark conversation
- Requiring specific teams each week to write a series of exam questions–encourages them to be more active participants and listeners in class
- Crowd-sourced notes
- Poster sessions
- more soon!
