UP TechTalk Podcast

With shifts in nursing education moving from problem-based learning to concept-based learning, Professor Joanne Olsen was searching for a tool that would give her students a visual representation of the linkage between concepts in one of her courses.  Wanting to work on her iPad, she found a mind mapping tool called iThoughts and developed a mind map for her course syllabus. At the start of the semester, she shared the map with students to show how the course topics related to each other and to get feedback on whether the sequence of topics made sense to them.

She opened each week’s class with the mind map. “Here’s where we are, here’s where we’ve been, and here’s where we’re going.” She said this cut down on the randomness students sometimes feel when they aren’t sure how topics relate to each other.  “In order to have knowledge stick you need to hook it onto a concept,” Joanne said. “It’s important to put all the major concepts out there so students can hook on the lecture or the reading to see where that belongs.”

Her advice for anyone wanting to get started with mind mapping is “just draw it on a piece of paper first. It’s even less complex than a flow chart.  The software is pretty easy to learn and there are many free mind mapping tools out there.”

Full episode transcript available in PDF format

Check out Joanne’s mind map

 

Continue the conversation at the Teaching & Learning Community Blog: https://sites.up.edu/tl

UP TechTalk is a bi-monthly podcast with cohosts Ben Kahn and Maria Erb of Academic Technology Services that explores the use of technology in the classroom one conversation at a time.  Visit the UP TechTalk archives for a plethora of excellent content from our UP faculty guests.  Get a sneak peak at the future with our UP Tech Talk special 5 part series The Future of Learning.

Hala Jadid al Kash is a faculty member with IES Abroad in Granada, Spain, who teaches courses on Arabic language, social media, and Islamic culture to American study abroad students.   In this podcast, she explains how she uses social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, as a tool to develop intercultural awareness by connecting students to authentic voices in the Islamic world.   Students learn how to piece together media accounts, interactions with special guests such as Al Jazeera’s news director, and exchanges with bloggers and other first hand accounts a bigger picture of what is happening in some of the larger events such as the current Syrian refugee crisis.

Continue the conversation at the Teaching & Learning Community Blog: https://sites.up.edu/tl

UP TechTalk is a bi-monthly podcast with cohosts Ben Kahn and Maria Erb of Academic Technology Services that explores the use of technology in the classroom one conversation at a time.  Check out all of the pervious episodes in our special series The Future of Learning here.   New episodes drop on the first Friday of every month during the fall semester.

Reading ancient writings takes practice.  A lot of practice.  Theology Lecturer Rebecca Gaudino wanted to give her students a chance get some serious practice but to do that, she needed to free up time in class traditionally spent on lecture. Culling an archive of lectures, she made visual recordings of the ones she wanted to keep and decided to move quizzes online. This allowed her to treat class sessions as a container of space for group activities, whole class collaborations, presentations, and discussions.  Students had more pathways to engagement with the course content and each other.  Dr. Gaudino’s journey has taken her from a place where she hardly used a computer at all to one where it’s now a central tool in her class.

And her students love it.  “Fun” isn’t always an adjective that pops up along with descriptions of theology classes but Dr. Gaudino has heard from her students that her new class design is indeed “fun.”  And she’s also gotten a lot of thank you’s for making course content relevant to the lives of students.

To get her course ready for this new format, Dr. Gaudino spent a summer school session going back to her office after class to record her lectures when they were fresh in her mind.  It was a very “straight forward process” she said.  For someone who views herself as “computer illiterate,” she learned to navigate a variety of programs that added a lot of variety to ways she could interact with her students.

“I had to be willing to be uncomfortable,” Dr. Gaudino said. “I had to put myself in a space where I was not the expert.  Once I did that, I found I could learn enough to use these things in a meaningful way.”

Full episode transcript available in PDF format

 

Continue the conversation at the Teaching & Learning Community Blog: https://sites.up.edu/tl

UP TechTalk is a bi-monthly podcast with cohosts Ben Kahn and Maria Erb of Academic Technology Services that explores the use of technology in the classroom one conversation at a time.  Check out all of the pervious episodes in our special series The Future of Learning here.   New episodes drop on the first Friday of every month during the fall semester.