Fall 2015 Newsletter

Happy New Year, CTL Style

Ring in the winter semester on January 5 by attending one or more à la carte sessions at the CTL’s Winter Professional Development Day. The fall Professional Development Day has been popular for the last two years, so thought we’d introduce a winter edition. Scheduled sessions include:

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (9:00 a.m. - 9:55 a.m.)
No Wires Required: Projecting with WePresent (10:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.)
Document Cameras for Faculty Presentations and Student Activities (10:30 a.m. - 10:55 a.m.)
Lunch and Learn: Online Course Design with Quality Matters (11:00 a.m. - 12:55 p.m.)
Web Meetings Made Easy - Zoom! (1:00 pm - 1:25 pm)
Creating Online Presence through Video Mini-Lectures (1:30 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.)
The New and Improved EduCat Gradebook (3:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.)

Registration is now open. Pre-registration is required for the Lunch and Learn session and strongly encouraged for all others. After all, we need to be sure to order enough coffee.

The Scholar's Corner

Terry Delpier, The CTL's Teaching and Learning Scholar, is excited to announce two new programs for the Winter semester:

Teaching-Learning Brown Bag Lunch Series
SoTL Faculty Learning Community

New Faculty Focus Video and Premier Party

Students in Dancer's Yoga Pose Join us on Friday, December 4th at 3:00pm in LRC 106 for the premiere of our next Faculty Focus Video – “Embodied Writing: Yoga in a Composition Course.” Movie snacks will be provided.

EduCat to be Upgraded for Winter 2016 Semester

We are upgrading to a new version of EduCat for the winter 2016 semester. The new, responsive, theme will look similar to the current theme. Everything in your courses will carry over to the new version as well. The largest change will be the new and improved gradebook.

i>Clickers for Engagement, Retention, Feedback, and More

Do you ever want to quickly poll your students to get their opinions on a certain topic? Perhaps you would like to provide students with immediate feedback about the accuracy of their understanding of course concepts. Student Response systems allow you to do that and more.

Vericite Plagiarism Checker added to EduCat

VeriCite is a cloud-based service that identifies plagiarism by comparing submitted work against an ever-increasing database of sources. VeriCite compares submissions against a massive database of academic content.

Connecting To Projectors Wirelessly

Many classrooms are now equipped to connect laptops to the installed projector wirelessly. The system is called “WePresent” so look for a logo on the instructor station that looks like this…

CTL Welcomes New Faculty with Panel Discussions, Website

Through our involvement in New Faculty Orientation, the CTL staff is among the first people faculty meet when they join NMU, and we hope that’s just the beginning of a long relationship with each of them. In addition to encouraging them to attend regular CTL programs, last year we rolled out a series of “New Faculty Network” events focusing on topics especially relevant to early career faculty.

CTL Program News

Learning Circles

Now is the time to start thinking about ideas for a Learning Circle for Winter 2016!

Learning Circles icon Learning Circles are small groups of individuals that meet informally over a portion of a semester to explore a new topic of mutual interest (Think one semester book club).

CTL "Tricks & Treats" Wraps Up

Thanks to all who participated in the CTL Tricks & Treats Trivia contest. The winners of the weekly drawings for the 4 GB jump drives were:

Adonna Rometo (Biology)
Valerie Hedges (Biology)
Mollie Freier (Library)
Russ Thorburn (English)

CTL Offers "Road Shows" to Departments

Are you interested in a workshop that the Center for Teaching and Learning conducts? Do you find that you just can’t break away and make it to one of our scheduled workshops here in the Center? We have the perfect solution – we can bring a workshop to you.