Last month I blogged about a new product (then in beta) from Microsoft called Mouse Mischief. This product allows multiple students to interact with a PowerPoint slide projected on the big screen in a classroom. Each student needs his or her own wireless mouse to do so. Each student has a unique cursor on the [...]
Leveraging resources collected for a spring 2010 workshop on engaging students in large lecture courses, the CFT has expanded its teaching guide on lecturing to include advice on the “basics” of effective learning, suggestions for PowerPoint slides and other visual elements of lectures, and strategies for fostering student engagement and interaction during lectures.
Here’s an except:
When [...]
This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education features an article on efforts around the country to improve the course evaluation forms students complete at the end of each semester. Ideas for improvement mentioned in the article inclue:
Mechanisms by which departments and instructors can customized the standard forms used in their schools, such as those provided by [...]
I can’t remember how I stumbled upon this, but back in 2008 three University of California-Berkeley students, Sohyeong Kim, Nathan Gandomi, and Kate Smith, prototyped an interesting kinesthetic classroom response system they called Students on the Move. Instead of clickers (or smart phones, etc.) students were given joysticks. They were told to push their joysticks [...]
On April 1, the CFT held a conversation on teaching titled “Teaching First-Year Students: Cognitive Challenges of the First Year.�  About twenty-five faculty, staff, and graduate students participated in the discussion. Panelists at the session were Doug Christiansen (Dean of Admissions), Susan Kevra (French, American Studies), and [...]
Recently, Sidneyeve Matrix (@sidneyeve) shared a link on Twitter to an Augusta [Georgia] Chronicle article on the contentious issue of students using laptops in the classroom. In her tweet, Sidneyeve includes a quote from the article from Stephanie Myers, a chemistry instructor at Augusta State University. Myers said, “My syllabus says if you use a [...]
I’ve been blogging about clickers and classroom response systems since 2008. When I started, my main site (this one here) was a traditional HTML site, so I started my WordPress-powered blog in a subdirectory of this site, http://derekbruff.com/teachingwithcrs. That’s worked great, but lately I’ve been wanting to blog about topics that aren’t strictly related to [...]
On April 1, the CFT held a conversation on teaching titled “Teaching First-Year Students: Cognitive Challenges of the First Year.�  About twenty-five faculty, staff, and graduate students participated in the discussion. Panelists at the session were Doug Christiansen (Dean of Admissions), Susan Kevra (French, American Studies), and [...]
I’ve often said that those teaching in the social sciences have the most options for using clickers. Both content and opinion questions are typically on-topic in a social science course, giving these instructors the ability to use clickers in just about any way imaginable. Case in point: The video below by Russell James, who teaches [...]
On April 1, the CFT held a conversation on teaching titled “Teaching First-Year Students: Cognitive Challenges of the First Year.”  About twenty-five faculty, staff, and graduate students participated in the discussion. Panelists at the session were Doug Christiansen (Dean of Admissions), Susan Kevra (French, American Studies), and Adam List (Chemistry).
One of [...]
Welcome to my home page. I’m Derek Bruff, author of Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments (Jossey-Bass, 2009). I’m also acting director at the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching and a senior lecturer in the Vanderbilt University Department of Mathematics. The views and opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of Vanderbilt University.
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