UD prof engages students with Facebook Groups and Google Sites
Phillip Penix-Tadsen, assistant professor of foreign languages and literatures at the University of Delaware, is reaching his students at new levels inside and outside the classroom. The spring 2012 semester was the first time Penix-Tadsen required the use of Facebook Groups by all his students to increase engagement and participation.(more…)
COLLEGE PARK, Md. – New research from the University of Maryland has found that mobile Apps – and even text messages – enhanced learning and produced a richer learning experience for college students.(more…)
Michael Dula recently began his appointment as chief technology officer for the Yale University Library, which is one of the largest university libraries in North America. In this newly created role, he will develop a technology strategy for the University’s 18 different libraries, which house over 12.5 million volumes.
Prior to coming to Yale, Dula worked at Pepperdine University, where he began as a consultant. In 2006, he accepted a full-time position at Pepperdine as director of digital initiatives for the university’s libraries. In addition to managing central library technology systems, he was actively engaged in implementing new tools for research and learning, including digital content collections, scholarly publishing, podcasting, and social computing models. (more…)
Every high school kid has done it: putting off studying for that exam until the last minute, then pulling a caffeine-fueled all-nighter in an attempt to cram as much information into their heads as they can.(more…)
A summer of research at Berkeley Lab gives high school teachers a jump start on science.
High school science teachers face a perennial problem: how to make science real and exciting to their students. But for Berkeley High School teacher Allen Boltz, who spent eight weeks at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory working in a research lab, he will be returning to his classroom this fall a near rock star.
“This experience gives a lot of credibility to the teaching profession,” he said. “To my students, me doing research here would be the equivalent to their PE teacher being a professional athlete.” (more…)
A bonus payment to teachers can improve student academic performance — but only when it is given upfront, on the condition that part of the money must be returned if student performance fails to improve, research at the University of Chicago shows.
The study showed that students gained as much as a 10 percentile increase in their scores compared to students with similar backgrounds — if their teacher received a bonus at the beginning of the year, with conditions attached. There was no gain for students when teachers were offered the bonus at the end of the school year, the research found. (more…)
When Rachel Aronson travels this month to Alaska, she and a local research assistant will interview people who are in danger of being displaced by climate change. She will also send about 100 postcards to her funders.
Aronson is among a growing number of University of Washington students, faculty and staff who are using online campaigns to pay for their research. Crowdsourcing uses the Internet to broadcast a question and pool the answers; crowd funding uses the Internet to post an idea and ask people to pony up money to make it a reality. (more…)
If you were skeptical about the whole Ivy League online education thing catching on when you heard about edX, you may be surprised to learn that Coursera, an online education startup lead by two Stanford professors, just formed partnerships with 12 top universities to provide free online courses to the masses, according to The Huffington Post.
The universities that will now be providing free online courses to Coursera users are: Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, California Institute of Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Rice University, University of Illinois, UC San Francisco, University of Virginia, University of Washington, University of Toronto, University of Edinburgh, and Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. (more…)