Instructors at UWGB can use Kaltura My Media to create, upload, and share videos in Canvas courses. Join us for a one-hour session where we will cover how to create and share engaging instructional videos with Kaltura’s easy-to-use media tools and unlimited storage space.
Maintaining an accurate gradebook in Canvas benefits students in any class modality. Bring your questions to this session as we explore the ins and outs of using the feature-rich Canvas gradebook.
What language practices do your students bring to our UWGB community? How do you value and sustain those language practices in your classrooms and other interactions with students? This follow-up to the “Language Inclusivity at UWGB” workshop led by Dr. Cory Mathieu, 2022-23 EDI Consultant, on April 14, 2023, includes the session recording, an event summary, key takeaways, and resources for further reading.
Text by Edith Mendez and Cory Mathieu
Language is fundamental to the teaching and learning that occurs in every classroom at UWGB. All academic content is construed by language. However, our students use language to not only communicate academic concepts and ideas, but also as a representation of their identity, their culture, and their sense of belonging. When our students’ language practices – the myriad ways they use language – are not upheld, uplifted, and valued in our classrooms, they can feel that they themselves are unwelcome or unaccepted in our academic spaces.
Standard language ideologies, or beliefs that certain varieties of language are more academic, more intelligent, or, simply, more correct, are deeply ingrained in our society and, especially, in academia. Students who do not speak or write ‘standard English’ are often expected to adjust their language practices to be successful, both in academics and beyond. This causes many issues, not only because their language is deemed inferior but because of the intersectionality of language and identity. Our students’ character, who they are as individuals, is then also linked to these negative connotations. Considerable research has shown that students of color and multilingual students are most frequently affected by these ideologies as their language practices are most regularly deemed to be ‘non-standard’ by those in positions of power.
Through this workshop, we further describe and debunk standard language ideologies while also offering insight as to how this issue is actively affecting UWGB students, not only academically but in terms of their identities and sense of belonging. We do so in order to offer alternative perspectives, policies, practices that are linguistically inclusive, actively welcoming and valuing the language, experiences, knowledge, capabilities, and strengths all students bring to our classrooms.
On January 10, 2023, we gathered virtually for the annual Instructional Development Institute hosted by CATL and the Instructional Development Council. This year included attendance and presentations by educators from UWGB, UW System, K-12 schools, and the private sector for the 2023 Instructional Development Institute: Cultivating Student Success. The conference was a huge success, with over 140 in attendance for our keynote session and strong momentum throughout the rest of the day. In this blog post, we will reflect on the Institute and share teaching resources, materials, and takeaways from this year’s Institute.
This year’s IDI included two keynote speakers, Dr. Stephen L. Chew, 2011 Carnegie Professor of the Year and 2018 recipient of the American Psychological Association’s national award for distinguished teaching, and Dr. Bill Cerbin, the founding director of the Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning at UW-La Crosse and a nationally recognized expert on lesson study and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Dr. Stephen and Dr. Cerbin’s keynote and workshop presentations explore the nine main cognitive challenges of student learning and how we, as educators, can address each of these nine challenges to better support our students.
For those that were enrolled in the 2023 IDI Canvas course, we encourage you to watch the recording of the keynote and both keynote workshops to learn more about the cognitive challenges students experience and ways educators can address these challenges. In addition to the keynote presentations, Dr. Bill Cerbin has created a self-paced, self-directed, ungraded Canvas course, Cognitive Challenges of Lectures, that is available for IDI attendees and those who enrolled in the IDI Canvas course. The Cognitive Challenges of Lectures course expands upon the keynote’s research and presentation and provides instructors with tangible takeaways to improve student learning and success. The 2023 IDI Canvas course is now closed.
The theme this year was centered on “Cultivating Student Success,” and presentations highlighted the many ways all university community members support the success of students. Sessions throughout the day covered topics such as using universal design for learning (UDL), information literacy, fostering growth mindset in high-tech classrooms, best practices for handling hot-button topics in the classroom, and reflections on student internship experiences. Below are some resources from a variety of different IDI presentations for you to explore.
The session, “Teaching Students to Evaluate Website Credibility” led by three members of the UW-Green Bay Libraries’ team, Jodi Pierre, Renee Ettinger, and Carli Reinecke included a demonstration on lateral reading and additional resources for instructors teaching an FYS or a research focused course to help students identify credible websites for their research purposes.
Instructors can use the resources available through the UWGB Libraries FYS Integration Kits which include pre-built learning objects, lesson plans, and simple assignments that can be integrated into their courses to support a variety of information literacy learning outcomes. Additional resources provided are the Civic Online Reasoning website which provides lesson plans, assessments, and videos on evaluating online information as well as the SIFT framework used to evaluate websites. As a reminder, UW-Green Bay libraries offer a wide range of research and information literacy resources, including library instruction for your classes.
The session, “Inner Tracking: A Reflective Practice for Holistic Learning” led by David Voelker included a discussion on implementing written reflective learning practices for students that help students reflect on how their learning is affecting them as a person. An additional resource from this session includes the Inner Tracking exercise which instructors can incorporate into their course.
The IDI hosted a special podcast episode of Psychology & Stuff, “How to Build Community” with co-hosts Ryan Martin and Georjeanna Wilson-Doenges. In this thought-provoking discussion, Ryan and Georjeanna discuss approaches to creating meaningful connections and building community among university staff in higher education. Watch the recording to learn more as Psychology & Stuff hosts apply research and principles from urban planning and environmental psychology to the building of community in our workplaces and learning communities
The session, “Using Universal Design (UDL) to Create Access and Increase Student Success,” led by Lynn Niemi and Alison Gates provided a useful hand-out for instructors to use in their instruction for Further Resources for Universal Access Design for Learning.
This year’s Institute was a huge success, and we thank everyone who attended our teaching and learning conference and supported all our thoughtful presenters. The presentations and conversations throughout the day offered us some important themes, which CATL director Kris Vespia shares in the wrap-up of the day, that we can take into the spring semester. One is the importance of empathy and perspective-taking, as throughout the day we were asked to put ourselves in a student’s shoes and struggle to understand in new learning contexts. Another theme of the day focused on the importance of communities, whether that is in the classroom to create inclusive environments or building communities amongst faculty and staff. The communities we build in higher education will directly affect students’ paths to success in individual courses and in their educational endeavors. We hope to see you at the 2024 Instructional Development Institute!
On Nov. 15, 2022, PlayPosit held a training that focused on how to replicate and repeat content in PlayPosit. These features can help create a more streamlined workflow for users that would like to reuse bulb content or share bulbs with other instructors. Some of the content covered in this training includes:
A recording of this training is embedded below.
As you explore PlayPosit, we encourage you to consult PlayPosit’s extensive knowledgebase of instructor guides, including this guide on building graded bulbs in Canvas. You can contact PlayPosit support directly by clicking the “Contact” link on their support site and filling out their web form. Guides on how to build a bulb, share a bulb with your students, use PlayPosit for peer review, and more, can also be found on the UWGB IT knowledgebase.
As always, we also welcome you to request a CATL consultation if you’d like to see a demo of PlayPosit or talk through how you might use it in your course!