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Thursday, December 2, 2010

Innovative Educators: You Got the Job! Now What? Strategies and Tips for Fundraising at Your College

http://www.innovativeeducators.org/retention_p/877.htm

Tuesday, January 18 ~ 3-4:30 EST

$345.00

Overview
The new college development director can move the foundation’s fundraising program forward quickly, but it’s vital to understand your role, develop your skills in working with your board, and conduct an assessment in three key areas in order to ensure soundness and capacity for growth. This session will review the roles and responsibilities of the development director, tips for developing the Board, and tools for assessment in the three key areas of infrastructure, planning, and management systems.

Objectives
Understand the role and responsibilities of the development director
Develop skills in working with the Board of Directors
Assessment tools for infrastructure, planning, and management systems

Who Should Attend?
College Chief Development Officers
Development Directors
VP’s of System Advancement
Foundation Staff Members
Fundraising Staff Members

Speaker
Leah Goss was appointed Executive Director of System Advancement for the Louisiana Community & Technical College System (LCTCS) in November 2007. She is providing leadership, training, and resources to establish and develop the private fundraising capacity of the 16 colleges of the LCTCS. In addition, Leah serves as Executive Director for the newly established LCTCS Foundation. She is building a dynamic state-wide board that is providing critical support for key LCTCS initiatives. Prior to her move to Louisiana, Leah served in the Colorado Community College System for 7 years in administrative as well as development roles. She earned an Associate of Arts from Adirondack Community College, Queensbury, NY, a Bachelor of Arts in Communication and a Master of Business Administration from Regis University in Denver, CO. She is a member of the Association of Fundraising Professionals and serves on the board of the Council for Resource Development, an affiliated council of the American Association of Community Colleges.
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Online Classroom December 2010 Issue

http://www.magnapubs.com/newsletter/issue/1233/

Adding Interactivity to Online Lectures with VoiceThread
If you're looking for a way to add interactivity to your online course, consider using VoiceThread to create multimedia presentations that enable students to post comments or questions directly within the presentation. John Orlando, program director for the online Master of Science in Business Continuity Management and Master of Science in Information Assurance programs at Norwich University, uses VoiceThread in his courses and has found that it encourages students to interact, improves a sense of presence, and helps students understand nuances within subject matter.

Online Teaching Fundamentals: Making Online PowerPoint Content Engaging: Why You Should Add Narration
When you use PowerPoint as a presentation tool (in presentations or when you teach a face-to-face course), your slides support what you, the presenter, are saying. All the guidelines about using PowerPoint in this way explain that text on PowerPoint slides should be minimized and truncated. You want listeners to listen to you rather than read the slides.

Practical Advice for Going from Face to Face to Online
Developing an online course based on an existing face-to-face course requires more than learning how to use the technology and loading the material into the learning management system because, as Catherine Nameth, education outreach coordinator at the University of California-Los Angeles, says, "not everything will transfer directly from the face-to-face environment to the online environment." This transition requires the instructor to rethink and reconfigure the material and anticipate students' needs.

Teaching Online with Errol: Personality DOES Matter in Teaching Online!
Online instructors are hired because they are judged as having the right combination of education, teaching experience, content expertise, and professional accomplishments. But once an instructor is in the classroom, these abilities and achievements can go only so far. There also must be a constant injection of good-natured, passionate-to-teach, "I'm really glad to be here" personality.

Tips from the Pros: Four Questions to Ask when Moving Course Online
Catherine Nameth, education outreach coordinator at the University of California-Los Angeles, recommends asking the following questions to guide the process of taking an existing face-to-face course online.

What Are We Doing This Week? A Case for Weekly Lesson Overviews
One of the biggest issues we face with initial student satisfaction in online courses is course organization and navigability. Students want consistency between course environments within the learning management system. One of my self-inflicted charges as a new director was to foster a climate that embraced structural consistency within online course shells. Balancing student expectations with the desire of many faculty members who want the freedom to structure their courses without being handcuffed by a template can be a challenge. Two early endeavors to address consistency included devising a beginning of semester checklist and training opportunities that emulated the checklist and addressed national standards.

Magna Publications
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support@magnapubs.com

© Copyright 2010 Magna Publications
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TLT Group FridayLive! Teach Students How to Learn: Metacognition is the Key!

FridayLive!

Teach Students How to Learn: Metacognition is the Key!
http://tltgroup.roundtablelive.org/events?eventId=204189&EventViewMode=EventDetails

Saundra McGuire, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Learning and Teaching and Professor, Dept of Chemistry LSA

December 10, 2010 at 2pm EDT - free to all.

FridayLive! is pleased to present our good friend, Saundra McGuire, in this session designed to help faculty, learning center professionals, and student affairs personnel develop strategies to help students become independent, self-directed learners. A discussion of the characteristics of today’s students will help participants understand why many students lack effective learning strategies when they enroll in college, and how simple it is to teach them strategies for successful learning.


Reflection and think-pair-share activities will introduce participants to cognitive science research based methods that can be used to improve teaching and learning. The session will provide a variety of strategies that have proven successful in helping students experience meaningful, transferable learning.


Don't forget that you can have a FASTPASS for the whole season's FridayLive! if you are an Individual Member or if your institution is a TLT Group subscriber. A FASTPASS. enables you to be automatically registered for every FridayLive! this fall.


NOTE: Login instructions for the session will be sent in the Registration Confirmation Email. Please check your Junk folder as sometimes these emails get trapped there. We will also send an additional login reminder 24 hours prior to the start of the event.
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The Teaching Professor December 2010 Issue

http://www.magnapubs.com/newsletter/issue/1230/

An Assessment Technique Using Research Articles
In entry-level courses it’s often a struggle to get students to see that the content has larger significance and intriguing aspects. In most science textbooks, for example, only well-established facts are presented, and they are supported by equally well-know research studies. Textbooks don’t usually identify areas of inquiry where the questions have yet to be answered or the findings so far are controversial. And yet often, this is the content most likely to interest students. But can you expect beginning students to read original sources, like research studies? Could you expect them to answer test questions about those articles?

Communication Satisfaction Scale
Some research efforts produce tools that can be used by teachers to generate interesting and useful feedback—we’ve illustrated that in previous issues and have another example to share here. Communication education researchers have developed a communication satisfaction scale that measures how satisfied students are with the communication they have with their instructor.

Embracing Texting during Class
If you want to get your students’ attention, try listing this course policy in your syllabus: “Texting during class is encouraged.” Most of us wouldn’t dare. We know firsthand how distracting cell phones in class can be. But with so many students disengaged and increasing pressure to create more student-centered learning environments, maybe we should stop thinking about texting as a problem and start seeing its potential as a solution.


Enhancing Out-of-Class Communication: Students’ Top 10 Suggestions
Out-of-class communication makes student-teacher relationships more personal and contributes to student learning. It is also the wellspring for continued academic exchange and mentoring. Unfortunately, electronic consultations via email have diminished the use of in-person office hours. Although students and faculty favor email contact because it’s so efficient, interpersonal exchanges still play an important role in the learning process—much research verifies this. As teachers we have a responsibility to encourage, indeed entice, our students to meet with us face-to-face.

From the Last Five Years to the Last Two Semesters: An Update
The last time I wrote about retirement (The Teaching Professor, March 2010), I could count the remaining number of semesters on the fingers of one hand. Now in my last year, I’d like to offer observations about the final lap.

Gateway Criteria: Minimum Standards before an Assignment is Graded
Do you sometimes (maybe regularly) get papers from students filled with spelling, punctuation, proofreading, and other more serious grammatical problems? Yours is not an English class and you have other content to teach, making it difficult to address these writing problems. And yet leaving them unaddressed puts students in jeopardy. They may not believe us, but the fact is we still live in a culture that “sorts out” people based on their use of language. Maybe that won’t be the case in 50 years, but today it is a reality. A student who can’t put together an error-free résumé or cover letter isn’t likely to get many interviews or good jobs.

Of Mice and Men: Using a Book Club to Improve Teaching and Learning
Effective teaching requires continual reflection about teaching techniques, strategies, and materials. This necessary reflection can be prompted by attending teaching conferences, classroom observation, formal and informal assessment, and reading research on teaching and learning. All these activities can be done on your own, but all are more effective when undertaken with a fellow teacher. However, few of us find the time to sit down with colleagues and thoughtfully discuss teaching. Instead, too often we only participate in a once-a-semester teaching in-service activity.

Participation Money
Encouraging students to talk, getting a variety of different students speaking, improving the intellectual caliber of what they contribute, and then fairly assessing those contributions makes participation a more challenging instructional strategy that it might seem at first. The following approach addresses several of these participation problems

Using Reading Prompts to Encourage Critical Thinking
Students can critically read in a variety of ways:
•When they raise vital questions and problems from the text,
•When they gather and assess relevant information and then offer plausible interpretations of that information,
•When they test their interpretations against previous knowledge or experience,
•When they examine their assumptions and the implications of those assumptions, and
•When they use what they have read to communicate effectively with others or to develop potential solutions to complex problems.” (p. 127)
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