- Growth Mindset Playground. This is a Canvas course made public: no log-in of any kind is required!
Here are other posts related to the online courses I teach:
Overall Course Design: These posts provide an overview of my course design strategies.
- 10 Ways to Give Your Students the Gift of Slack. Yep, it's SLACK that matters... not grit. Giving your students slack is a great gift to give.
- Un)Grading. This is a guest blog post for Starr Sackstein's Ed Week blog.
- Grading. I wish I could not give grades at all; this represents my best attempt to reduce my participation in the grading process to zero.
- Grading: What the Students Say. This is a collection of student comments about grading from the end-of-course-evaluations.
- Writing-Feedback-Revision. Providing feedback that students use to revise their writing is how I spend most of my time each and every week.
- Tech Tips. Even though it's just extra credit, teaching students about web-based tools is a fun part of the class for me!
- Randomization Wonderland. This post explains how I use randomization both for course content and for student participation (comments).
- Some Q&A about student choice, challenges, etc. Answers to some questions posed by a reader. :-)
- Traditional Syllabuses. I recently had to prepare traditional syllabuses for my classes, so if you are curious, you can take a look.
Growth Mindset. Starting in Fall 2015, I've made Carol Dweck's "growth mindset" an explicit component of my classes, hoping to promote a growth mindset among my students and in my own work too!
- Growth Mindset: Making Learning a Priority. Dweck's research alerts us about the different ways people process feedback, based on their mindset.
- 10 Reasons Why Growth Mindset Works for Me. After a great semester of growth mindset, these are my observations.
- Revision Challenges: What the Students are Choosing. I redesigned the revision assignments with a growth mindset / challenges approach!
Scheduling and Pacing: One of the most powerful aspects of teaching online is the flexible scheduling..
- Self-Scheduled, Not Self-Paced. This post explains the overall scheduling strategy which I use in my courses.
- Sample Assignment Schedules. These sample schedules can help the students turn this class into a M-W-F class, a T-Th class, or a weekend class — whatever works best!
- Week 8: Review Week. During "humpweek" both classes have some special self-assessment and student-to-student interaction assignments.
- The Grace Period. This post explains the "grace period," a no-questions-asked extension available for all class assignments.
- Spring 2015: Grace Period Reminder Tracking. I am trying to find ways to intervene with students who get grace period reminders every day.
- The Half-Reading Option. The "half-reading option" is another way I am trying to accommodate my students' busy and chaotic schedules.
- Safety Nets. This post provides an overview of the various safety nets to support students with time management and workload management.
Orientation Week: These posts are dedicated to the special activities for the Orientation Week.
- Favorite Places: The First Blog Post. This is the first blog post that students publish during the Orientation Week - a fun way to get used to Blogger and including images in blog posts.
- Proofreading Skills Assessment. One of the Orientation Week activities is an assessment of students' proofreading skills.
Storybooks and Portfolios: These student projects are the heart and soul of my classes!
- Storybooks: The Big Picture. I try to give an overview of the whole Storybook project. Whew! That was not easy to do!
- The Portfolio Option. This explains the Portfolio option, a blog-based alternative to the Storybook website.
- Storybook Schedule and Free Passes. This provides an overview of the weekly Storybook schedule, along with the free-pass system.
- Student-Created Content for Long-Term (Re)Use. Here I explain the many ways in which I reuse student content semester after semester.
- The Shift from Teaching Content to ... Teaching Writers. Follow-up on previous: how student content became the goal of my courses.
- Project Nominations. Each semester the students nominate their favorite projects; this post explains how that process works.
Student Blogging: These posts describe the role of student blogging in my courses.
- 10 Tips for Building a Student Blog Network. These are my thoughts about student blogging as of Spring 2016. Happy blogging, all!
- Student Blog Assignments. This is a listing of the different types of blog posts that my students complete each week.
- Weekly Blog Comments. The students read and comment on each other's posts each week.
- New "Comment Training" Strategy. Starting in Spring 2015, I'm trying to be more proactive in teaching students how to make detailed comments.
- Comment Walls. Student create "Comment Wall" posts at their blogs where other students can leave comments on their Storybook projects.
- Randomizing Blogs. This is a step-by-step tutorial for randomizing blogs using a simple spreadsheet... and it includes a screencast! :-)
Inoreader: I use Inoreader to manage the class blog network.
- Inoreader: Keeping Up With All Those Blogs! This is an overview of how I use Inoreader to manage and organize all the incoming student blog posts.
- Course Hub Pages with Inoreader. I explain here how I run the course hub pages with the Inoreader HTML Clippings view of the blogs.
- Tips for Making Good Use of Inoreader. Some more tips and tricks for using Inoreader to manage massive numbers of blogs.
Communication Strategies: These posts explain the various communication strategies I use in my courses.
- Class Announcements. The daily class announcements are the most important element in my overall communication strategy.
- 10 Reasons Why I Use a Blog for Class Announcements. The announcements are crucial, and I need a real tool to create them.
- Sunday Email Reminder. On Sunday, I contact students about any work pending they still have to complete for the week.
- The Stack (Storybook assignment list). The Stack is how I communicate with students about the assignments they've turned in and my progress in returning comments to them.
- Class Twitter Account. I have a dedicated class Twitter account; this post explains my daily routine for using the account to communicate with students.
- Spring 2016 - First Email: Connecting. This is an email sent out in November 2015 to students enrolled for Spring 2016, letting them know more about the course and what to expect.
Content Development: This explains the various tools I use for content development and sharing that content with my students.
- The UnTextbook: An OER Interview. This post provides an overview of the UnTextbook that I developed for the Myth-Folklore course.
- Student Feedback on the UnTextbook. Each week, the students provide me with incredibly valuable feedback about the reading they did that week!
- LibriVox: Free Audiobooks. One of the things I like best about the UnTextbook is being able to include audiobook versions of some of the readings.
- My Pinterest Class Portfolio Boards. This post explains how I use Pinterest to create portfolios for the two courses I teach and how I share those Boards with my students.
- Indian Epics UnTextbook: Table of Contents Emerging. This is the latest update on my plans for an UnTextbook in the Indian Epics class.
- Indian Epics UnTextbook and BIG Reorganization. Planning the UnTextbook has result in a great idea for reorganizing the semester flow!
Indian Epics Untextbook: This is where I will document the development of an UnTextbook for the Indian Epics class.
- First Brainstorm: An UnTextbook for Indian Epics. This is how I will be spending summer 2015... and what a great summer it is going to be!
- Retooling my Indian Epics Resources Blog. I can expand my existing resources blog to create an interactive curation space for the UnTextbook.
- Indian Epics UnTextbook Report: Timeline. This is Part 1 of my write-up on the big redesign for the 2015-16 school year.
- Part 2: Content Curation and Student Choice. This is Part 2 of the Indian Epics UnTextbook Report write-up.
And now . . . a cat from the Growth Mindset Memes blog:
