UVM Blogs

Preparing for Online Teaching

The Dr. Is In will be open between 10:30-3:30 from Monday, May 6th through Friday May 10th. Visit us at Bailey/Howe, Room 303 for help with Blackboard or other academic technologies. Read more about the Dr. Is In here.

As we head down the last stretch of the semester, it’s a good time to recheck our Blackboard course grade centers and make sure everything’s working as it should be. Here are a couple of tips:

First, make […]

Applications are now being accepted for the UVM Hybrid Course Initiative program! Read more about teaching hybrid coures, about the initiative, and the benefits in applying to teach one of these courses.
» Make […]

We’ve recently had fun expanding our Media Resources page. There are new links to image collections, organized by Agriculture and Natural Resources, Art, History, Science, and General Collections. There are more […]

We just read about <a href="http://www.uvm.edu/partnerships/development2/?Page=news&storyID=15223&category=CUPS
http://www.uvm.edu/ctl/apps/ctlcal/">this networking event for early career faculty next week, on Wednesday, Feb. 20th, and wanted to pass on the […]

Did you ever hear a student say, “I wish I understood what the professor wanted with this assignment?”  Have your students ever asked how you came to a specific grade? Have you felt the need to create more […]

It seems like we hear this more and more: “I’ve been crazy busy!” So, in the interest of getting to “sane busy,” I’m listing here what I think are some of the best work tools and techniques for time and task […]

If your list of courses is long and overwhelming, guess what? There are solutions! You can either:

re-sort the list so that your current course spaces show at the top, or
hide older courses from the list […]

For many instructors, the Blackboard (Bb) Assignment Tool is a helpful time saver.  A few of the advantages are:

there are no papers to haul around because they live in Bb
feedback and grades can be […]

This semester I had the privilege of presenting the workshop “Building Your Stress Toolbox: Minimizing the Impact of Stress on Your Life & on You.” I held the workshop twice, once for the Womyn@Noon program […]

On December 19th, UVM’s Blackboard system will be upgraded to version 9.1.9.
What will I have to do?
Aside from the normal end-of-term backups and course management tasks, you won’t have to do anything at all to […]

The recency and primacy effects—long documented phenomena related to the importance of sequence on information recall—evidence that, in short, “Following a single exposure to learning, recall is better for items […]

The iClicker is a version of a student response system and at the University of Vermont we have adopted the iClicker as our preferred version of a student response system. We are in the process of installing […]

For my first post to the CTL blog, I wanted to share some resources with the larger UVM community as a follow-up to my Sound (Teaching) Bite this week that offered a few strategies and tools for educators to help students assess their own learning styles and abilities to read, comprehend, understand, and learn course materials. The focus [...]

In short, one of the principles of Universal Design for Learning is that if you offer students multiple options for exploring content and expressing what they’ve learned, their experience is richer and more meaningful—and this gives their learning “sticking power.” Google Earth is a free, easy to learn tool and absorbingly fun! It’s an exciting…[Read more]

Tip #1: Learn names. Jonathan Leonard (CDAE) makes the effort to learn every student’s name, even in classes with over 150 students! What’s his strategy? On the class roster page he displays the students’ photos and, while studying each face, he speaks their names aloud. Over and over. And over. Occasionally he shifts the page arrangement—by [...]