can these still be called books?

Remarkable…

https://ted.com/talks/view/id/1134

useful teaching writing links

Teaching Tools:
General Links:
Bedford St. Martin’s: this site provides textbooks for various disciplines.
Cengage: this site provides “innovative teaching, learning and research solutions.”
Pearson: Resources for Educators

Composition Links:
Princeton Writing Program: this site provides resources for writing instructors. Of particular help is the downloadable Teaching with Writing guide.
Purdue University Online Writing Lab

The Plagiarism Checker

The Plagiarism Checker.

link to very useful resource on collaborative learning

This link has tons of resources on collaborative teaching including how to grade a collaborative assignment: http://cte.umdnj.edu/active_learning/active_group.cfm

experiment – technology and teaching

This semester, I really jumped into incorporating technology into the two Research Methods classes I’m teaching.  I used Google Sites, Groups, Calendar, and Docs extensively throughout the semester.  Since the class is Research Methods, I structured it so the students worked as if they were all part of a research team.  They worked together to come up with a research project, collect data, and even write up their results.  The reality is that a great deal of research is conducted in this manner anyway.  None of us work in isolation (unless of course you happen to be a lowly graduate student (as I am now), in which case, you’re kinda on your own…); we have communities and colleagues to discuss our ideas with, we rely on graduate students or research associates to work on our research projects, our papers are peer reviewed, etc.  I wanted to offer the same type of experience to my students.

The structure of the class required that students work collaboratively on most of their projects.  So they all collaborated on writing a research proposal, an annotated bibliography, a survey, and finally the final report.   All of this work was made possible using Google services.  We used

• Google Groups to create a listserv and discussion forum,
• Google Sites to create a website for them,
• Google Calendar was their default syllabus (and running time frame), and finally,
• Google Docs allowed them to collaboratively create a survey and even administer it using the Forms function in Docs

There were certainly some missteps and some snags, but it was a rich learning experience for me and I strongly believe for the students as well.  I’ll report more on this as the semester winds down, but as a caveat, here are the first lessons learned from this incredible semester:

1. research teams of 30+ students in their 20s is hard to manage
2. students don’t know as much about technology as they think they know…they may be great consumers of technology, but many are still unfamiliar with some of the most recent changes in technological innovations

Along those lines, I also undertook the experiment of incorporating a blog (worth up to 3% of extra credit) into the class to see if the medium could help foster better student engagement with the major themes of sociology such as social inequality, social justice, racism, gender, norms, etc. And while I readily brag that I’ve been thoroughly impressed their posts, I must also admit that I was a bit taken aback by the varying levels of technological skill.  Again, I’ll report more soon, but for now if you’d like to see their work, check out their WordPress blog here.